Hello! My old laptops hard drive packed it in, so I got a new one and now need to flash drive an operating system on it. I think this is my time to give Linux a proper go. I tried it before for my gaming PC but switched for a cracked Windows key because I was young and not bothered to learn.
Well, now is my chance to give it another go. I'm looking for a Linux optimised for performance on an HP 255 G7. Threadbare, but not so bare that it'll require me to do a load of complicated stuff to do the basics. I'll just be using it for YouTube and Google docs really. Any help/advice/orders are appreciated.
Thanks!
That isn't an old laptop, it shouldn't have any bearing on which distro you pick. Ubuntu is solid, I've been mostly happy with KDE Neon. Web experience is going to the same across the board. Will you be gaming?
I have it too. It's just bottlenecked with 5,400RPM SMR HDD, in other words, as slow as it gets.
That should be an easy fix though, you can get a 512GB SSD for $25-35. In fact OP said they were doing this because the original drive failed. You'd notice a huge difference going to flash.
Yep, that's what I did. Super fast now.
512GB wouldn't be enough for me, and larger SSDs are too expensive. Also opening this laptop seems like a pain in the ass trying not to break display cables from teardown video I've seen.
And yeah, I know. I switched back from SSD after my secondary laptop failed. Going from 8-10 second boot-up to multi-minute boot-up can really be felt. That was a 16 year old laptop with such speed, by the way. SSD seems like a magic.
But surely one for lower end/older machines will be as barebones as possible?
No gaming, hopefully. Perhaps hearthstone if I succumb to it.
"Barebones" usually just refers to a machine that is not complete, missing CPU, memory, storage, for customization. I assume you mean it's a basic/low-end configuration. Still, it seems to be a fairly recent generation of hardware. If you have a spinning disk, you'll see a huge performance increase by upgrading to an SSD. You can get a 512GB SSD for $25-35.
If you look at minimum/suggested requirements for almost any distro, I think you'll be comfortably above that. I looked up the laptop and it seems to have an AMD APU (similar to what's in a Steam Deck), optional NVMe drive, 8-16GB DDR4, WiFi 5… I'm running Ubuntu 23.04 on a 2015 laptop and it's fine, no difference at all from a current gen in Google Workspace.
Ah, yeah. I don't know the terminology. I'll change it to threadbare My level of tech awareness is like… my friends think I know stuff but actually I'm just great at taking a punt and watching tutorials.
Anyway, yeah, I changed the old one to a nifty NVME and now it runs like a dream.
Currently I'm using Zorin OS Alite - do you really think I should go to mint or Ubuntu before I start settling in? My initial reaction to Zorin is that I'm satisfied with it, but if it's not as reliable as mint then maybe I should just start again?
Most tech people are just better than average at looking stuff up :)
I have never used Zorin, but it looks good - it's based on Ubuntu but tweaked to be more friendly to Windows/macOS users. If it's working for you, that's what counts. There's a lot of documentation around Ubuntu which should apply to your system.