BTW, has anyone seen this:
Yes. They said it was accidental and the block was lifted today. I think it was just links to Distrowatch.
Today I carried out some unscientific benchmarking on my pile of recycle-bin laptops. Up to now I’ve only looked at ease of installation, upgrading and features. So I’d like to figure out which Linux distros run well on old hardware from the pov of an end user.
Having booted up a bunch of different machines, run the latest updates on each and rebooted, I then timed how long it took to load LibreOffice Writer with a new, blank document.
Of course given the variety of hardware, most of the comparisons are pretty much apples and oranges, but the following pairs were reasonably comparable.
A Dell Vostro with an Intel Core Duo 1.3 GHz, 2 GB DDR3 and a HDD that dual boots:
a) Zorin OS 17.2 Education (Ubuntu kernel 6.8) - nearly 2 minutes.
b) LMDE Cinnamon 6 Faye (Debian / kernel 6.1) - 25 seconds.
Then there’s the 2 Macbook Pro Retinas, each with an SSD and 8 GB DDR3.
a) 2014 with 2.6 GHz CPU running Mint Cinnamon 22.1 Xia (Ubuntu 24 / kernel 6.8) - 8 seconds.
b) 2012 with 2.5 GHz CPU running Deepin (Debian 5.15 kernel, modified) - 1 second, albeit in a window the size of a postage stamp.
Across 4 other machines running Mint Cinnamon 22.1 the load times varied greatly, the main difference being the amount of RAM, with 4 GB min required to get anywhere near a satisfactory load time. The HP i3 2.4GHz with an M.2 and 8GB DDR4 won this round with a 3s load time.
Shout out to Antix at 7 seconds with only 2 GB DDR3 and Solus Budgie at 16 seconds with 4 GB DDR3 but on a Celeron.
So much for loading an empty doc, now need to find out if Writer is actually useable with these specs!
5 Likes
Worth also mentioning that the touchscreen on an HP X360 is working out-of-the-box with Mint Cinnamon 22.1. Apparently it should work with LMDE too.
Thanks for this @Monique!
1 Like
Love it!
So much for loading an empty doc, now need to find out if Writer is actually useable with these specs!
Phoronix has a test suite for LibreOffice you could run? (though an odd operation - converting documents to PDF)
1 Like
Interesting. But how many resources will the test runner use, probably more than my dinky devices can spare! 
Reckon I’ll just do something very normal like type some pre-defined text into a document, insert an image, do a bit of formatting, save the doc… that sort of thing.
Other benchmarks to do include testing the webcam, playing some audio/video, taking screenshots, and seeing how much hassle it is to send something to my printer. Maybe a game or two.
1 Like