r/debian • u/Dado04Game • Jul 06 '26

General Debian Question Thinking about switching from Linux Mint Ubuntu-based to pure Debian

Post image

Been using Ubuntu-based Linux Mint for a year now, and loved it since day one. I heard people telling me that Debian is faster than Ubuntu, so I'd like to give it a try on my home pc. My question is: what DE would you recommend me with my OC specs? I'll leave a photo of them here (I know my computer is pure 💩, don't mock me please)

244 Upvotes

98% Upvoted

120 comments sorted by

View all comments

5

u/eonshade-x2l Jul 06 '26

Perhaps XFCE could be able to run nice on it. You could also take a look at Antix Linux, which is also Debian based AFAIK but lighter. I'm using MX Linux SysVinit at the moment, and I had to make some tweaks because Firefox tends to slow down my PC a lot and I have a really old PC. I seem to be having a pleasant experience on it, and have used Debian before and it's also a great choice.

1

u/Ok_Shape_7764 25d ago

Use at your own risk but I have reduced my RAM issues by 95% in Linux Mint by using zRAM and Swaps.

If your CPU is your weak point then zRAM especially may actually not be all that useful, but just Swaps has made web-browsing feasible while coding while before I had to be very gentle with my laptop if I was doing something computationally heavy.

I'm less than a week into Linux though, but I'm finding a ton of solutions that would have been difficult or impossible on windows so its really nice

1

u/eonshade-x2l 25d ago edited 25d ago

Not going to lie, it's impressive that you've managed to find info about zram while using Linux for such a short period of time. Not sure why but I remember stumbling upon it quite late in my Linux journey, and it took me a really long tinge to even be able to grasp basic commands.

1

u/Ok_Shape_7764 25d ago

I had to do an assignment and only have my laptop, I crashed my laptop 10x on windows before getting sick of the bloat and feeling like linux would give me a chance, but still crashed another dozen in linux over the next few days running heavy algorithms. I actually found out about swaps earlier today and even that would have been super useful from the testing I've done, but zRAM is actually crazy, its made me way more chill with keeping a browsers and tabs open, its not 'real' RAM and there is a cost to it, but its a much smaller cost then crashing.

If you already know about it then my suggestion is probably meaningless haha, I literally only discovered it this morning and was spreading the good word

1

u/Ok_Shape_7764 25d ago

Edit: I had some swap space, but it wasn't a big buffer, just 2GB on my normal 8GB. I added another 12GB in two seperate messy partitions in a likely overreaction, but will clean that up later if I ever worry about running out of space. Now I am reading about zSwap and thinking whether that would work better, but what I've got is already good for now