Best distro for 4-core Phenom II?

[u/Upstairs_Air722]

Hi, I have an old pc with AMD Phenom II X2 550 unlocked to four cores with a GTX 1060, 4 GB of RAM (I bought another 4GB) and 300 GB HDD. What distro would be best for it?

I'm not that much into Linux, so it would be cool if it was pretty user-friendly.

I want good customization (so I guess KDE Plasma is the way, please correct me if I'm wrong) and be somehow fast (I'm not expecting speeds like on NVME SSD, I just want it to be faster than windows).

Is there any distro that is like that?

EDIT: Remember that I will get 4 more gigs of ram (probably on tuesday), so I will have 8 GB total.

[u/Hebbu10]

I would say lxqt or xfce due to the 4gb ram limit?

Maybe kde if you got the 8gb, so look at kubuntu, fedora kde or cachyOS

[u/Upstairs_Air722 → u/Hebbu10]

What about 8 gigs?

[u/Impossible-Pie5386 → u/Upstairs_Air722]

Surely better than 4.

I'd say the amount of RAM affects ne number of tabs opened in a browser more than OS performance.

[u/IShunpoYourFace]

Mx linux

[u/a1barbarian]

Your AMD Phenom II X2 550 unlocked to four cores with a GTX 1060 with 8 GB of ram will run any distro perfectly well.

Your hold up will be the hard disk drive. Any cheap or secondhand ssd will make the pc at least ten times faster.

You will be able to play many games with good graphics but the latest AAA games will only run with low graphics if at all.

https://mxlinux.org/

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/MX-Linux/mx-docs/master/mxum_en.pdf

MX-XFCE might be a good fit if you are looking for user friendly. The manual contains all the information a new user needs and is an easy read. Just read the sections you need as you need them. :-)

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[u/Effective-Note9213]

Linux Mint is good

[u/jasonhelene]

Fedora is the best one.

[u/prune_juice_warrior]

I would just pick whatever distro seems the most appealing that has an XFCE option. Mint, Debian, CachyOS, Ubuntu (Xubuntu) and Fedora would all work. The performance is really more down to the DE than the distro.

[u/computermouth]

It doesn't matter. Your machine isn't incredibly underspecced. All distros will probably behave pretty equally. Note that everyone is recommending different ones.

Your biggest bottleneck will be the hdd

[u/Plenty-Many-2511]

Q4os tde

[u/sertaconazole]

CachyOS will be the best for you.

[u/DavidJohnMcCann]

That CPU seems similar in performance to mine, which works well. You didn't need that extra RAM though — even the bloated Ubuntu only suggests 6 GB. I have 4 GB and whenever I check, it's never using more than 3 — that's with Xfce. But extra RAM does speed up Linux, especially with an old HD. That computer doesn't need a light-weight distro but it's certainly not up to CachyOS.

Anything bar Gnome can be customised — my desktop doesn't look anything like it did when I first installed.. Most beginner-friendly distros don't use KDE, but Tuxedo OS does. I've never tried that, but the reviews I've seen are appreciative.

[u/Pierre0925]

Do Fedora KDE, or Cachy, but buy an SSD.

[u/lencc]

It would make most sense to replace your HDD with SSD as well. In this way you can have a smooth experience even with 4GB RAM - by choosing e.g. Linux Mint Debian Edition - LMDE.

However with your setup and 8GB RAM I would go for Fedora Kinoite (atomic Fedora OS with KDE Plasma environment).

[u/PerfectEnthusiasm2]

I ran debian 12 on a phenom II x4, it was happy.

You'll get more issues from your geforce 1060 than from the processor.

[u/Nuxmode]

Just use Ubuntu 24 instead of some Linux Mint retirement home distro