How fast is Plasma on old hardware?

I have a very cool Core 2 Duo laptop here that runs Linux Mint.

And it is pretty aweful. Would love to put Fedora Kinoite (Atomic KDE) on there, manual upgrades on shutdown, minimal set of apps.

But I dont know how well Plasma works on such old hardware. It is pretty bloated and messy sometimes, Dolphin and plasmashell are my biggest worries (the whole panel and widget stuff is sooo complex).

Has anyone tried Plasma?

An alternative would be LXQt with KWin once 6.1 comes out and it has full Wayland support.

sorrybookbroke ,
@sorrybookbroke@sh.itjust.works avatar

I've had bad experiances. Started the pc on mint with cinimon, but that had some issues so I installed xfce and plasma to see if another environment may work. Xfce worked like a dream but plasma was quite laggy.

I'd say plasma has similar or possibly mildly better performance than win10. Any time I put it on older hardware it seems to bog it down quite a bit

boredsquirrel OP ,

Plasma is quite a bit more resource efficient than Win11, but yes Win10 is likely pretty similar.

I somehow can just feel the bulk, it somehow feels heavy. The panel and desktop are so modular and just feel bloated and messy.

minecraftchest1 ,
@minecraftchest1@social.opendesktop.org avatar

@boredsquirrel
I have had it run great on my Framework 13 11th Gen.

boredsquirrel OP ,

Okay that doesnt matter XD

optimization for new Hardware is also important but very different from low spec compatibility.

11th Gen Intel is x86_64-v4

And you know what discussion came up when Ubuntu wanted to switch to v3 (my 2012 Thinkpad has v3)?

dan ,
@dan@upvote.au avatar

11th gen is just a few years old. Very different to trying to run something on a Core 2 Duo which is probably close to 20 years old.

GravelPieceOfSword , (edited )

Why not try it for yourself on Linux mint first by installing plasma? Plasma 5 is available on mint - I believe Fedora has plasma 6.

I use plasma 6 on my Opensuse Slowroll laptop and plasma 5 on my LMDE desktop.

Overall, I've found plasma 6 to run slightly better (I was on plasma 5 on Slowroll too for a long time).

Once you install and try plasma 5 on your current install, that will be a much less disruptive way to see how well it works for you.

After ricing, both plasma 5 and 6 are pretty similar on my setup. The cube desktop effect isn't there by default on plasma 5 of course.

Eldritch ,
@Eldritch@lemmy.world avatar

I have KDE installed on a Core 2 Duo Tower. It runs fine most of the time. About the biggest thing you can get to make that generation of machine Snappy and more livable is an SSD. If you are still running on spinning rust there's no way any machine is going to be considered usable by today's standards.

boredsquirrel OP ,

True. But that old laptop has a 1,8TB HDD (no idea that was a thing back then) and is not really used anymore

Eldritch ,
@Eldritch@lemmy.world avatar

I don't believe during the core 2 Duo days terabyte hard drives were a thing or at least all that common. I know I was upgrading with 128 and 256 GB drives. So that is very possibly and upgrade itself. But unless your laptop is your main system where all your data has to reside. Or you're going to be using it for mobile video editing? Which would be pretty sketchy with a core 2 Duo. I'd honestly recommend getting a 256 GB cheap SATA SSD toss the two terabyte drive in a computer on the network to share it with the laptop if you need the storage. That's what I've done with the laptop I use. Though it's new enough to have nvme storage. But all my other data is shared over my local network via NFS

boredsquirrel OP ,

Hahaha no way I will overcomplicate this random old laptop. It is also not in my home but my families.

But it does have 2 drives and replacing the main small one with the OS on it would already improve things a lot.

Eldritch ,
@Eldritch@lemmy.world avatar

Yes. Look up the upgrade process for the laptop. 9 times out of 10 its just pop the bottom off. The other 1 is like the old dell laptop I upgraded. The laptop had to be nearly 100% disassembled outside the screen. The HD was sandwiched between 3 different PCB at the center of the lower half. Bit of a nightmare. The HP, Lenovo, Acer laptops I've worked on we're simple. And the ssd swap made them almost like new. I had a core 2 duo mackbook I upgraded the drive too. Made it very usable.

boredsquirrel OP ,

I have a Clevo NV41 which is hillariously easy to disassemble. Worlds bettet than my Thinkpad T430 or the better T495. Not as modular though.

minecraftchest1 ,
@minecraftchest1@social.opendesktop.org avatar

@Eldritch
Both my Dell Latitude XT, and my Latityde e6440 had ewsy to swap storage. The latter literly had the hard drive slide in in the side, with a standard sata interface.
@boredsquirrel

Eldritch ,
@Eldritch@lemmy.world avatar

Good. It was a 2012is model laptop. So hopefully they learned better. That was a rediculous difficult upgraded.

produnis ,
@produnis@discuss.tchncs.de avatar

I observed that the first boot of a new plasma install is quite slow, so that you wonder if it was a good idea to install plasma.
But once everything is up, it will be surprisingly fast from that on, and it stays that fast after reboot. So, be patient you fire it up the first time ....

Mint_Raccoon ,
@Mint_Raccoon@kbin.social avatar

I've used KDE on a Thinkpad T60, it's about 17 years old, has 3GB of RAM, and a Core Duo. It ran surprisingly well. Replacing the HDD with a SSD can also make a noticeable difference, so you should consider that if you haven't already. I also turned off a lot of the animations and effects for better performance.

boredsquirrel OP ,

Interesting. SSD is not an option as this is not really used and has a huge 1,8TB HDD.

And it runs very fine for its job.

I wish plasma had a "energy saving mode" where all this fancy stuff is disabled. Transparency, blur, animations etc.

minecraftchest1 ,
@minecraftchest1@social.opendesktop.org avatar

@boredsquirrel
While tedious, those effects can all be turned off in *"Workspace Effects" or whatever it's called. Not at my laptop to check.
@Mint_Raccoon

boredsquirrel OP ,

I know. But as you said it is rather tedious.

Is there a CLI interface for these settings like gsettings on GNOME?

Zamundaaa ,

The only effects relevant for performance are blur and background contrast. Turn those off if you feel the system is slow, maybe increase the animation speed and you're done

boredsquirrel OP ,

You cannot disable animations right? Setting the speed to max seems equivalent, but do you know if it actually turns something off?

Zamundaaa ,

Setting the speed to the max does turn them off

boredsquirrel OP ,

Nice, thanks!

minecraftchest1 ,
@minecraftchest1@social.opendesktop.org avatar

@boredsquirrel
You can edit the config files that live in XDG_CONFIG_DIR/kde

Xeroxchasechase ,

I've got a 15 years old dell laptop and KDE neon is smooth and seemless. Booting takes less than a minute.

boredsquirrel OP ,

Nice!

turtlepower ,
@turtlepower@lemm.ee avatar

I use Fedora KDE Plasma and it's wonderful, but my machine is pretty new compared to what you've got there. As for widgets and panels, what do you mean complex? I've had no issues with them.

boredsquirrel OP ,

I have tons of issues on Plasma 6 with the whole thing, several bugs reported. Compared to something like cosmic panel widgets, or GNOME or anything else it just seems overcomplex and fragile. I can also imagine this results in lag and performance issues, but idk.

I mainly use an 11th gen i7 laptop :D

penquin ,

Plasma is actually pretty light. It's right in line with XFCE.

boredsquirrel OP ,

Yes I also heard that.

FQQD ,
@FQQD@lemmy.ohaa.xyz avatar

I tried it on a real old vista laptop once and it ran terrible, but so did everything that wasnt XFCE. But a core 2 duo might be able to run it acceptably. I say give it a try :)

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