Eugenia

Just use Linux Mint, cinnamon edition, and then edit the startup app list to not load some of the stuff that take too much ram, like the reports, nvidia, etc. Also remove fwupd if you updated your laptop’s firmware already via windows. I personally also stop bt (frees overall 30 mb of ram). Make sure during installation that you create a 4 GB swap partition too. At the end, I have a system that starts up at 750 MB of RAM (htop reading, 980 MB with gnome-system-monitor). As long as I use only 2-3 Chrome tabs, I’m ok to not swap. Firefox uses more ram i’m afraid, especially with youtube.

I have 4 laptops here run linux mint with 4 gb of ram. They run fine, my husband even does development in one of these.

The n3060 cpu is slow at 660 PassMark points, just enough for Mint to function. XFce is a tad faster indeed, and uses about 60 MB less RAM, however, it’s missing some desktop options that I find useful (e.g. disabling tap and drag).

As I said, I used it last year. I didn’t like it. I WANT gui tools, like yast, but not ones that were designed in the '90s. Linux Mint has the best user experience.

Yast is a must to configure it without headaches. It’s an eyesore. I also don’t like rpm in general. I tried OpenSuse last year, and I didn’t like the experience of it. Then again, I don’t like Fedora either. And I find Arch unstable. For me, Debian is where it’s at.

Τοο bad I don’t like it as a distro… I find it ugly, e.g. the ancient yast gui it has. I’d prefer Debian myself, or a fork of it (if politically necessary).

Fedora is too much into RedHat, and that’s an American company, it depends on it. You’ll have to go at least Arch, or Debian (which are more community-driven), or Ubuntu or Mint (that are European). But I wouldn’t use anything Redhat-produced for an EU OS.

Yes of course. It doesn’t do what I need. Gimp is better for what I need

Thankfully for me, I don’t work anymore, so it’s easier to move to Linux. But my hobby (painting), it’s done in a less optimal degree with Gimp, yes. And that’s ok with me.

I don’t think desktop Linux works for you. That’s the truth. You know, I was like you, and so was my husband. These individual projects that never felt that they fit together to create a cohesive product, always bothered me. So what you’re asking, will never get fixed, to be honest with you.

But speaking about myself, I decided to use Linux because it’s the right thing to do. As a painter myself, who needs some of the features Photoshop has but Gimp 3 doesn’t, I feel you. But still, I use Gimp now, 100% of the time. I settled for less, because again, it’s the right thing to do. I have no interest to use Windows and its spyware. I have a macbook air with macos for occasional browsing (I like the hardware), but again, I use OSS software on it (including gimp). The rest of my 5 laptops and 3 desktops, all run desktop Linux. I’m more often on an old Macbook Air from 2015 running Linux Mint, than I am on the new Mac running MacOS. My main desktop is Debian-Testing. Is it as cohesive as Windows? No, and it will never be. But again, it’s the right choice.

Which version of Mint did you install? The new version has zfs modules disabled by default, because they were creating long booting problems on people who were not even using zfs. I stumbled on the problem too, I had mint installed on a usb stick (full install) and on SOME computers, when booted, it would try to load zfs stuff, taking 1.30 minutes of trying to do some systemd job for it.I removed all zfs stuff and nothing got broken.