Hi guys.
My mom has pretty old and shitty home HP notebook and I was thinking that since she mainly uses it for browsing Facebook and watching Youtube that I would upgrade it for her to Linux instead of Win 11. The only thing is that I want some lightweight desktop like XFCE or maybe Mate and to make it as painless as possible for her I would like to install Windows 10 looking theme on that machine.
Do you guys know of any good themes that are updated at least on semi-regular?
Thanks. ;)
First of all, I apologize for not answering your specific question about themes but.
To be honest, instead of struggling with themes on XFCE or MATE, you should consider that there isn’t much difference in performance right now between those and Cinnamon or KDE Plasma. Both have a workflow very similar to Windows 10 out of the box, which would make the transition much more painless for your mom.
I highly recommend Linux Mint (Cinnamon Edition); it’s the gold standard for ‘it just works’ and feels like Windows 10 without needing extra themes. If you prefer Plasma, Kubuntu or Tuxedo OS are excellent, stable, and beginner-friendly options that run great on older hardware without being ‘bleeding edge’ or unstable.
KDE has an insane footprint, from my testing. easily 2-4 minutes top from booting up Mint or Void Xfce, and GL getting KDE (tested using Chimera and Fedora) to fully load up in under 15 minutes. Of course, this is all live booting, but still…
What hardware are you running this on? I’ve got Ubuntu with KDE running on some ancient Pentium dual core systems from like 2009 or 2010, and it boots to desktop in ~30 seconds or so.
Intel Celeron N3060, 4 GB DDR3 RAM, and I live boot from a PNY USB pen
So I checked the specs, I misremembered. The CPU in the systems I’m using is a Pentium G630 @2.7 GHz with 4gb of ddr3. Benchmarks put that at about double the Celeron N3060 in performance. I’m also booting from an internal SATA SSD.
I think the most limiting factor for you is the live boot, it is pretty much always slower to boot from a live image than from an install.
yeah any boot from USB will be slow
Yes, but it does show a bottleneck from KDE’s side, there. It means you’ll need fast storage.
Fast storage is relative. It works flawlessly on a budget SATA SSD from like 10 years ago. It would probably have a 1-2 minute load time on a SATA spinning disk, but I have not used a system with a spinning disk boot drive in years.
KDE? Lightweight? Even cinnamon is incredibly heavy next to xfce and lxde. Have you ever used a sub-4GB of memory machine?
I do second mint (LMDE) for a non gamer and non tech savy windows 10 refugee though, it’s debian so, stable, and cinnamon is an okay-ish middle ground between KDE usability and xfce weight.
Cinnamon, maybe… But KDE plasma? You must be joking. How do you get KDE plasma down to 300 to 500 mb memory use?
There’s a good reason xfce is the de of choice for low-resource systems like raspberry pi.
Linux Mint “Debian” edition. There, fixed it for you 😉
No KDE for new users, it’s way too convoluted and bloated ui-wise. It also uses lots of ram, more than cinnamon. XFce is indeed much lighter than either, but it doesn’t have enough desktop preference panels like Cinnamon does (e.g. printer panel).
KDE is incredibly “windows like”, the “bloat” you might be refering to are options. The only criticism I agree with here is the footprint, KDE is indeed heavy and not recommanded for old machines.
Honestly I installed Kubuntu when I started trying Linux a couple of months ago and it’s the system that I stuck with and wasn’t completely confused, compared to the standard Ubuntu or Linux Mint which I tried beforehand and decided to uninstall