Hi,
since I am the one in my family that knows his way around a PC I am currently being tasked of building a PC for my niece that will start school this year. In the beginning it will only be used for Office and Internet. The hardware is not a problem, I have enough of that. Since I am using Ubuntu on my main machine, I was wondering, if I could get away with some older hardware that I still have laying around. The question that I now have is which distro to use an try to teach her. The hardware is an AMD A4-6300, 16GB (4x4) DDR3-1600 CL9, an ASUS A88X motherboard and a 250GB 2.5" SATA SSD.
Just for my own curiosity I would like to test as many distros as possible on this hardware to see, which ones are the best, both for ease of use and for minimum system requirements. The latter not according to the website but actually tested on this hardware.
My question now is, how should I go about testing this? All of the benchmarks I have found so far only test for maximum performance but I kind of need the opposite. I was thinking about looking at boot times, how long does opening a browser, file explorer, libre office, etc. take, how much CPU and RAM does the system need just booted into the system and then doing normal everyday tasks like browsing, watching youtube, etc. Doing all of this manually would be quite the work. Is there an easy way to automate at least part of that?
I would gladly post all of that data here on the forum once I finished testing it.
16gb ram and an a4-6300 should be fine for any distro.
If just browsing / light app use, and on an SSD, should be no problem.
Each distro should use less than like 30-40gb of space, so might be able to install a bunch.
and just choose from grub at boot time? (install prolly only like 10gb, and files later another few)
Just make sure to do the non-easy-mode setup / install, so you manually create a partition for each install?
It costs literally nothing but time to install and have a go
The RAM is pretty much the limiting factor. If you think the system is too slow and maybe uses an onboard graphics, Lubuntu should be a good alternative.
As for the test methodology, it shouldnt matter much since whatever result spits out and the objective is just to oreserve hardware there really isnt much to do and the actual list of older hard focused distro isnt that of a big list.
I don’t know which country you are in but have you considered trying ChromeOS
In many countries Chromebooks are becoming the defacto “school computer” and your niece will likely be using it on machines as school. It would help her get up to speed quickly and be simple to maintain. Worth testing at least.
Otherwise just give her the hardware and a copy of arch on a USB pen and wait 6 months for her to build her crypto empire.
The only good test in your case imho will be a personal comparison of the feel of using it. No test will tell you whether the browser’s launch time is long or acceptable to the user.
Install the distro and check what interests you and note your impressions of use, and the next distro install and test the same.
I am able to use the Internet on a core2duo with 4GB RAM, but many would say that such equipment is unusable in 2023, regardless of what OS it is.
Almost any of the typical popular distros will work on such hardware. A matter of individual approach to responsiveness, but do not expect differences between distributions of the order of 10-50%.
Start with Debian 11 + xfce should be fairly lightweight, MATE if you want it more Windows style. Overall, and Windows 10/11 should work tolerably on this.
Yes, there are extreme distributions designed for really old PCs, but I’m afraid that this person will not be happy with it.
I still use core2duo + 4GB + ssd and with very subdued expectations, it can handle Windows 10 and youtube 720p without dropping frames.
I also have Debian 11+xfce on AMD E-450 + 8GB + ssd and it lags like crazy over xrdp(firefox), but it’s a micro server, so it’s enough.
More important than distribution is the software and the needs of the person who will be using it, what if that person’s friends are using a specific Windows-only application? And you focus on linux…
PS Somewhere I still have unused Debian 9/10 on P4+512MB+HDD but here X was a joke, as long as the desktop itself was still in the “usability” area and it was possible to navigate the menu, then launching some normal application was the death of the machine.
More than the distro, look at the desktop environment. Using something like mate or xfce will cut a lot of overhead over something like modern gnome or plasma.
Other than that, it’s more down to the website and browser, and that’s just a cluster of really odd and inconsistent performance disparaties that you basically can’t count on and should disregard as another case of web APIs being terrible.
It’s pretty much what you want and need. I can boot arch with openbox or xfce with ~200MB RAM if I want to. In practice my system boots with 3.2ish GB. I don’t care because RAM isn’t a problem today. We’re not trying to run Win95 with 4MB of memory today.
And if I don’t do stuff, system load in htop is 0.1ish while running a plasma session with daemons left right and center.
Linux just doesn’t burn ressources just by existing.
Test it with her. She’s the one who will be using it. Spin up 10 VMs or so for demonstration and install the favorite/s on bare-metal. Hardware will perform equally on pretty much all distros. And she probably wouldn’t see a difference even if there was one. I certainly didn’t care at this age. colorful with animations, bright taskbar/panel/dock, and being able to be creative wins over anything tech-related or functional things.
And even if there is too little memory… Dealing with swap certainly taught me to never go cheap on RAM later in my life. So thanks Dad for this valuable lesson!
Wobbly windows, animated dock, mouse trail, oversized desktop icons, horse wallpaper pack. My niece loves all the stuff I fundamentally reject for productivity and aesthetic reasons. But it’s her’s and she likes it this way. You may need to create a new user account for her dolls, so they can login and play while she’s sleeping. This is pretty much what tech support is for children.
Op stated 16 gb ram.
I don’t see how that is particularly limiting?
Yeah, it’s slow ram, but still?
I mean, I have 16 gig in my day-to-day not gaming machine, and it works fine for dual monitor browsing / light gaming?
Even has like 8gb in use for ARC/ cache, so really only using 8gb…
The only thing about RAM that matters to a 6 year old girl is whether you can paint and apply glitter on those boring dies or if it has RGB you can turn on and off.
Nerd standards != normal people != children. It’s fine.
16GB is the optimal amount and it is fully enough for typical tasks, regardless of whether linux or windows.
I still use machines with 4GB ddr2 and 8GB ddr3 and they manage, 16GB is a significant amount and if someone thinks that it is not enough, it is exaggerating.
The problem is not the RAM in general, but the performance of the CPU, because unfortunately with each version of the software they are becoming heavier and less optimized.
My W10 + some stuff starts around 1.9GB, Debian 11+xfce with firefox running sits at 1.75GB.
16GB is perfectly fine, we obviously have to take into account what such a PC will do, video editing, games, heavy software… for office work and the Internet imho 16GB is enough for a child.
You just have to take care of the system and not run 50 things at once.
Some good advice overall, but I would go one step further and just say to live boot in a single VM each ISO, instead of installing it in 10 VMs. Saves space and time. Unless you go for something that doesn’t have a desktop live boot.
Ubuntu may be out of the question, but you can place her on Mint or Pop!_OS.
One thing to note. I remember back in day, I had a FX4100 with an integrated Radeon HD 3000 and Ubuntu 12.04 worked fine, but when I upgraded to 12.10 and 13.04, I got error messages popping up that “your GPU is EOL and there are no more drivers included for it in the next version, are you sure you want to upgrade?” or something like that. I did it anyway, since I got a radeon hd 6670 later (although I wasn’t sure what I was doing, I was dual booting and stayed mostly on windows 8.0 back then).
Given the age of the A4-6300, you might encounter a similar issue with the GPU drivers. Especially because it might be using some old proprietary driver (that thing is based around around the same architecture as the 6670 IIRC), although there should be a FOSS version for it too (unknown if it’s still included in modern kernels).
I haven’t touched it in more than a decade, but I wonder how LMDE would run on this. Mint comes with its own repo GUI, so it should be making it easier to use for your niece. Pop!_OS and ubuntu-based Mint might work too, but curious if their kernels will support your GPU. I believe my 6670 hasn’t been supported since Ubuntu 16.04 or something (I think amdgpu started getting support around the 7000 series, I remember getting salty about that). You can probably grab an extra cheap (in the pennies) used r7 250 and slap it on that system and it should still rock, in case your gpu drivers won’t support the fancy desktop animations that I’m certain your niece would want (like wobbly windows and desktop bubbles).
Interesting things for desktop use are perhaps, whether or not you need/care about AES-NI (which you have in your CPU), and whether or not you care about GPU accelerated h.264/h.265 in your browser. (No, it’s pre gcn terrascale 3 richland / it’s pre GCN … fuuu you’ll be lucky to get basic desktop/browser 3d going)
Maybe just put it together and blacklist amdgpu on whatever distro you try, you might get lucky and get something from old Radeon drivers.
In your situation, I would recommend using Ventoy along with whichever distros you suspect will make good candidates for the machine, and use the live environment for each to see how it runs. This way you’re not wasting time and writes partitioning the drive over and over when your use case sounds like it will mostly be browser-based tasks.
The hardware is good enough for pretty much any Linux, so I wouldn’t worry about “benchmarking” for performance: any mobile phone is faster, but it will do for 2D, perhaps struggle with video at 1080p.
Of course you could just update the A4 to an A10 for a few pennies and double the fun at near zero cost (actually I got one still lying around here which I’d never bother shipping because I get paid more than its value just to stand up from my chair).
The only meaningful benchmarking would be around usability and there you may just do some testing using VMs on your own bigger box: nothing faster than just running through some installations and usabiilty testing than virtual machines, you can even afford to do some side-by-side demos with your nice to help her pick the one she likes best.
Then you put that on the physical system and hope for the best.
I think with a machine wich accepts 16GB DDR3 RAM you will be fine. I think most people don’t realize how capable even old PCs still are. What I would be concerned with how reliable the old hardware still is.
I have used a i5 3570 till 2019 as daily driver. My parents used a Core2 quad with 8GB till recently and only lightening storm put it out of commission. I use a Athlon XP PC with a current version of Debian and 512MB RAM with xfce as Audio > Bluetooth sink for another retro machine.
Have some live usbs and let her fumble about, between the distros and interface(s)
Maybe craft up a comparative list, to distinguish the inherent differences
imo- I find xfce not being too busy, of an interface [can alway fluff it up afterwards]
+Maybe look at a cheep simpler PCIe powered GPU, to not overwhelm the iGPU [ex. W5000]
The lack of AES-NI would suggest not using full disk encryption. It will make IO significantly slower, but it’s still usable (I’ve run it on similar systems).
I heard boot times, and so now I will knee jerk post clearlinux. It is the fastest booting distro ive seen yet*(yes, it works on amd).
That out of the way, if you are going to benchmark distro perf., I say, do it in a virtual machine as its faster to start and close a virtual machine than a real machine.
Also, remember that kids have a limited atention span, time yourself. This may just be me projecting but I tend to loose track of time when messing about with computers/linux.
As people have said its mainly the Desktop Enviroment that bottlenecks perf. But in my own experience kernel and PID 1 have impact too.
so its definitely worth setting up a boot&shutdown script for testing the distros you are intrested in.
On the topic of scripts I surprised no one mentioned time in the terminal. With that tool you could automate browser boot time testing(or file explorer), for example.
Some people menioned making the system look pretty, and sure, but also tell/show that you can change that a la unixporn.