Question Linux on an old laptop

[Old School Noob]

I have always been a windows user but recently have become interested in trying Linux.

I have an old laptop I have not used in years and I figured it would try it on that. I installed Linux Mint Cinnamon on it and it doesn't seem to run very well. It's a Toshiba Satellite with a 2.0 GHZ processor, 4GB of ram and a 750 GB HDD. I was thinking of upgrading it to 8GB of ram and a 500 GB SSD.

Would that help / be worth it on such an old laptop ? I just wanted to try Linux and wasn't comfortable trying it on one of my gaming PC's. I will not be gaming on this. I basically just want to use it to surf the web, use Spotify and just familiarize myself with Linux.

Thanks

 

[USAFRet]

A SATA III SSD will help immensely.
RAM as well.

 

[BFG-9000]

Mint Cinnamon is every bit as full-featured and resource-intensive as Windows 10 or 11.

If you want something like it but more lightweight, try the Debian/systemd version of Peppermint OS.

On Distrowatch the most popular linux distro has for some time been MX Linux (I suppose Ubuntu getting rid of 32-bit CPU compatibility hurt the popularity of Ubuntu-based distros such as Mint) which has a related minimalist version called antiX if you are primarily interested in speed (both are descended from MEPIS). Neither enable systemd so are smaller and faster (there is also a variant of Peppermint that lacks that too--it's the one based on Devuan instead of Debian).

Be aware that Debian 12 (and thus Peppermint, MX-Linux 23 or AntiX 23) uses Mesa 22 which dropped driver support for IGP like i915 or i965, so if you have one of those it may be easier to just use MX-Linux 21 or AntiX 22 which use the old Mesa 21 and are supported until 2026. Installing Mesa-amber drivers is probably not for beginners who want a distro that "just works."

 

[BrickStation]

A reasonable SSD upgrade is what I would do. I installed Ubuntu 24 on a spare 320GB HDD I had for my old Thinkpad SL-510, performance was a little slow but had a very long boot time. When I switched out the SSD from my main PC I reinstalled Ubuntu 24 on it for my laptop, it was a very clear night and day difference. That laptop also has 6GB but I didn't see much of a difference between 4 and 6 for just browsing the web.

If it's still not performing well after an SSD upgrade, consider a more lightweight distro as previously mentioned.