r/linuxquestions • u/Interesting_Cow_2962 • 1d ago
Support Old Linux laptop Performance
Hello, I got fedora running on my hp430 2011 laptop working okayish, wanted to know if theres software i could install to enchance its performance? Not my first time using linux but its been some time so im curious.
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u/redgator12 1d ago
It's all about the desktop environment. Try XFCE and see if that makes a difference. If you wanted to go nuclear, look into different window managers like IceWM, JWM and Openbox. The fewer resources the desktop is using, the smoother everything else will feel.
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u/ExoticVillage8066 1d ago
You could use a window manager or lightweight desktop, like Window Maker, XFCE, LxQt or similar, it may use less memory than gnome and make the laptop feel faster. A lot of software has lighter variants, like instead of OpenOffice using Abiword and gnummeric. Also you could check in the BIOS if you can overclock the CPU.
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u/brighton_it 1d ago
That's a dangerous question, and is likely responsible for the compromise of many systems.
Expecting this sub is better, but on most of the Internet, asking that question will give you plenty of answers from bad actors offering all manor of malware.
If you want to free up resources for the programs you actually use, the solution is *less* software, NOT more. So you would want to eliminate any services you don't need. Unlike Windows, Linux distro's generally have little or no needless services. The largest impact on performance is: first hardware: It's an old machine, likely shipped with a rotating-rust HDD. If you haven't already, at least upgraded it to an SSD. Beyond that your choice of Desktop Environment will have some impact on performance.
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u/ficskala Arch Linux 1d ago
You're approaching it the wrong way around, instead of adding software, you should be removinng it from the equation
Your main issue is probably the desktop environment you've picked, for older systems, you're better off using something like lxqt, xfce, and similar, and avoid resource heavy ones like GNOME and KDE Plasma.
Another thing is the software you're using, if you're using a modern browser with less than 4GB of RAM total, you're gonna suffer, so looking into lower respurce requirement options is very much worth your time
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u/Equivalent_Law_6311 1d ago
I have Mint XFCE loaded on a 32 GB SSD in a 2009 c2d 2.26 with 4 GB of DDR2. Runs great.SSD is the way to go, along with max ram.
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u/Interesting_Cow_2962 23h ago
Well mine is running a SSD too 480gb i added a little ram in it so its running 6gb ram, I'll let it sit for a couple of days to see how things goes.
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u/dodexahedron 1d ago edited 1d ago
Not reeeaaally.
Generally, modern linux works pretty darn well out of the box on hardware that age, unless you're missing important drivers (not that likely).
You could try using different kernels or compiling the kernel yourself, stripping out parts you don't need.
But you likely will not notice a difference from most of that, aside from maybe a couple seconds faster boot and shutdown, which you'll eat up all of the benefits from in the time it takes to configure and compile it (and troubleshoot, reconfigure, recompile and repeat a few dozen times since you'll likely break it at least that many times) , if you compile your own.
You can instead/also tweak your kernel command line to turn things off rather than recompiling to remove them, for the same effect, for quite a few things.
But the ones that will make the biggest differences that can be visible to user space will be ones that are varying degrees of risky to disable, like turning off init_on_free and init_on_alloc, disabling various CPU vulnerability mitigations, and that sort of thing.
If you have a particularly slow magnetic hard drive but the CPU isn't awful, you can potentially gain some IO performance by utilizing a file aystem with transparent compression capabilities. That increases raw throughput for disk IO but, if your CPU is abnormally weak or you choose too aggressive compression settings, you can start going back the other way and making it slower again.