I have used Solus since it first came out first as the Budgie and Mate editions and then later the Plasma edition right from its beta testing days. One thing I have noticed with Solus is how it uses less resources than many of its competitors. Using the Plasma version with most of the effects turned off I find it much better than Kubuntu or KDE neon set up in a similar manner, snappy and not using swap as much as the others even on an old HP Pro microtower with only 4GB ram and 2 AMD Athlon processors. My question is that I have a couple of old laptops that still work well but having only 2GB of ram I tend to install AntiX on these as its so light on resources. Trying the old mate versions of Solus on these laptops I found they could cope but not really well. I was wondering if the new XFCE version when it finally comes out will also be set up to be as efficient as the other Solus versions now available as I would rather run Solus if possible. I notice that Solus uses Zram by default now. Will that make a difference on these old Laptops? The only thing that has always put me off using XFCE editions of Linux is its tendency to be really bad on screen tearing issues.

    DJSupertel I run mate on two machines laptop and dell allinone with only 2gram
    cant upgrade either one the dell handles ram alittle better than the laptop.
    (Its the little things that steal ram sometimes they add up)
    And depending how old you are talking about. (Mine are 2015 vintage)

    If you are just going do basic stuff and surf the web I do it all the time any more demanding prob
    wont fly. (I still use winders mac for diehard stuff at this point)
    (just info)

      DJSupertel My question is that I have a couple of old laptops that still work well but having only 2GB of ram I tend to install AntiX on these as its so light on resources.

      I would suggest that you give Plasma a try on those laptops. It surprised me with how well it runs on my little ACER travel laptop. It's powered by a Celeron CPU with 2 cores. at 1.60 Ghz. It does have 4 GB of memory.

      I'm not saying it performs like my big laptops, but I didn't expect it to perform nearly as well as it does. I used to believe that it required a lot of resources to use the Plasma DE, until I tried it on this machine, that is. And it's pretty much configured as-is out-of-the-box, I haven't done anything special to make it lighter.

        8 days later

        Still using my old 2013 MacBook Air (A1466) since 2020 using the Budgie desktop. It's so smooth I wonder why Mac users don't insta switch to it... X )

        DJSupertel I think the light-on-resource and built-for-older-rigs things are both a bunch of Linux conventional wisdom, oft-repeated gobblety-gook.
        Axios said Mate (good choice on paper).
        Wetgeek said Plasma might be besr suited.
        They are both right and so am I.
        I ran Budgie on 2GB of RAM on a usb stick for almost three years on an Olde ThinkCentre.
        Is 2 GB ideal for any distro? No, very few.
        Is it passable if I'm not gaming? Oh yes.
        So my 2 cents is Budgie.
        (It doesn't matter what you do, but save your money for 2 more GB no matter what distro or DE....)

        PS EDIT---XFCE is fine too just don't let that mouse in the center of the screen drive you crazy🙁

            brent XFCE is fine too just don't let that mouse in the center of the screen drive you crazy

            😊 It's as easy to change the background in Xfce as it is in Budgie. My Xfce VM's background is actually very pretty, although I don't usually ever see much of it.