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  "path": "/t/which-distro-de-would-be-right-for-an-older-laptop-used-to-play-older-games/35657#post_3",
  "publishedAt": "2026-02-21T06:50:19.000Z",
  "site": "https://discuss.privacyguides.net",
  "tags": [
    "[1]",
    "↩︎"
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  "textContent": "thelittleguy:\n\n> but just feels a little unresponsive and the CPU gets used up quite often\n\nFirst step would be to find out why this happens, benchmark before and after to not leave space for “feels” but have actual numbers (temperature, CPU usage, amount of RAM available etc).\n\nthelittleguy:\n\n> This has been making me think about switching to a more stable distro like Mint XFCE or MX Linux\n\nNot sure if the problem is the distro itself here or the launcher/way you launch your games.\nAlso, if you’re on a HDD (probably 5.4k RPM), games might need to take some time to spin up/etc, double-check that it’s not just buffering the assets or something alike.\n\nthelittleguy:\n\n> KDE Plasma vs XFCE vs LXQT\n\nCan definitely add some overhead, not sure if it’s critical. Mostly depends on the rest and if you have use of fancy transparency, border shadows etc.\n\nthelittleguy:\n\n> would Wayland even work properly with an older laptop like this\n\nWayland is just a piece of software to draw things on your screen, it doesn’t require any specific hardware[1], subscription or nonsense AI to run properly because it’s based on standards and better-written software.\n\nthelittleguy:\n\n> I definitely don’t want to use Gnome because I dislike their view of how a DE should be\n\nSubjective haha. Why not just installing some SteamOS or alike?\nI mean, it depends of the games but you could maybe use a retro gaming distro (like the ones for the Pi) where you don’t even have the overhead of the desktop fanciness, just enough UI to launch the games.\n\n* * *\n\nTDLR: the DE doesn’t matter neither does the rest since the games you want to play can probably run just fine on 512 MB of RAM.\nI played DOOM on a Raspberry Pi 2, like 10 years ago just fine.\n\n* * *\n\n  1. as far as I know at least ↩︎\n\n\n",
  "title": "Which distro/DE would be right for an older laptop used to play older games?"
}