Aspire E 15 E5-573G-52G3 compatibility with HDD

solus-user-bird

Hello!
I thought I'd ask the community about their thoughts on compatibility for a relative's laptop.
The laptop in question is an Aspire E 15 E5-573G-52G3 with a i5-5200U, GeForce 940M, 8 GB DDR3 L Memory, and 1TB HDD.
If they were willing to just buy a SSD I wouldn't even bother asking but they don't want to.
The question is basically: is Solus recommended for the above or should I flash something else?
In the long run, I might get them a SSD or something.
Thanks for reading.

alfisya

My only concern is the GPU, I am not quite sure if 940M is still supported by our nvidia-glx-driver-* or nvidia-470-glx-driver-*. Looking through online it seems that it is not supported anymore and your relative will stuck using the open source/noveau driver. That's not necessarilly a bad thing because some people says the experience is fine with noveau driver, but for gaming (or any other GPU intensive task) it is not ideal.

solus-user-bird

alfisya That completely slipped my mind, thank you for mentioning it.
As far as I'm aware, the only game they play is either version of Minecraft - java or bedrock - but they rarely play.
I could be mistaken but I think the primary usage is web browsing and YouTube with the very rare Minecraft session.

SilverBird775

Yes, nvidia GPU is the only concern for this notebook, but thankfully, those notebooks are doing really well in Linux, (Solus as well) thanks to integrated intel GPU, that pony is good enough to pull the main workload. In any case, Windows or not, outdated nvidia GPU stress them way too much due to the high temperature.
Short-life battery to note about this notebooks too.

Sebastian

Using a SSD instead of a HDD makes a huge difference and the system far more responsive. I personally would never go back to a HDD.

solus-user-bird

Sebastian Apparently they were convinced to buy a Crucial P5 Plus for $30 back when NAND was in excess and they refuse to spend more for a 2.5" SSD. They would rather spend the money on another laptop but they're not looking to buy one at the moment, but their birthday is coming up or so they said.
Maybe I'll donate an old one or something.

BuzzPCSOS

solus-user-bird It is probably worth a quick audit of hard drive usage on the existing system. Unless there is a massive store of pictures, videos and music then 1TB drives tend to remain mostly empty especially if the computer is primarily used just for browsing. Solus has a smaller installed footprint than Windows so a smaller SSD hard drive can be used without fear of running out of space.
A smaller 128 or 256GB drive should be cheap and adequate for the task. The old 1TB rusty disk should be checked for bad sectors and then wiped and fitted into a portable usb caddy case so it can be used for backups and long term storage.