I agree. I looked at DSL, TinyCore, Puppy, and then decided to try a “regular modern distribution”. I have an 11-year-old, early 2015 MacBook Air with an i5, 4gb of ram, and a weak battery, and have turned it into a nicely usable “couch terminal” with Fedora Sway Atomic. It was a good excuse to jump into a tiling wm, and I chose Fedora Atomic out of curiosity and a desire to have a stable base OS even if my battery died in the middle of an update.
But I could have gone with XFCE or Cinnamon or any of the other lighter-weight desktop environments and had a great experience, because it runs great. I have the cpu power pinned low while on battery, but on AC it’s quite fast. I could replace the battery for around $30, but it’s a different kind of project to try to make it work as well as possible for as long as possible.
But I could have gone with XFCE or Cinnamon or any of the other lighter-weight desktop environments and had a great experience, because it runs great. I have the cpu power pinned low while on battery, but on AC it’s quite fast. I could replace the battery for around $30, but it’s a different kind of project to try to make it work as well as possible for as long as possible.