timppu: Oh well, luckily for me Linux is a viable option for pretty much everything besides gaming (which I still mainly do on Windows, but not completely). I prefer selecting the most bare-boned and light GUIs like XFCE because, after all, for me the GUI is merely a place where to start (graphical) programs. The simpler it is, the better. Takes less memory then as well.
patrikc: Funny thing, I found KDE to be lighter than XFCE, well, on some distributions. Granted, it also depends on how many packages there are out of the box, let's say.
Yeah I mainly went on how it goes on Linux Mint, where XFCE is touted as the most lightweight option of the three main versions that is offered (Cinnamon, MATE, XFCE).
Of those three, XFCE does everything I want so I don't see any real reason why I'd want to use a more complicated and flashier GUI, even if I do have 16GB RAM. I think I tried both Cinnamon and MATE in the past briefly and didn't see what the big deal was. The only drawback of Linux Mint XFCE is that when a new Mint release comes out, the XFCE version seems to come out a bit later than the other two, so little more waiting there.
Overall, I really like how the user can select and adapt different Linux distros based on how light or "heavy" one wants it to be. Naturally one could even go without a GUI if it is a server etc., but in desktop use a GUI is pretty much a must (for web browsing etc.).
For instance, I recently gave an ancient Dell Latitute D610 laptop a new life:
- 1-core 32bit Pentium M CPU
- 1 GB of RAM
- a broken 2.5" PATA HDD (so I can't replace it easily as there naturally it is harder to find at least new PATA HDDs nowadays...)
My colleague just needed some simple computer to act as a local FTP server and to be able to run some tests from it (ping etc.), when updating firmwares for routers at our work. He can't use his own work laptop for it because for some reason his tests need a real network card/eth-port, while he has only an USB-Eth adapter which doesn't work for those tests for some reason (The D610 has an eth port, naturally).
Not sure if he needs a GUI at all or not, but I googled for the most lightweight (32bit, as the system has only a 32bit CPU mind you) Linux distros, and ended up with Q4OS (Q4OS Centaurus, Trinity 32bit):
https://q4os.org/
Also, since the laptop has no HDD, I just connected a 8GB USB flash drive to it and it can act as its mass media "hard drive". So I installed Q4OS to that machine (the Q4OS runs from the USB flash drive), installed and set up the vsftp server on it, and it runs surprisingly well. I even switched off the swap file/partition because I didn't want to cause extra writing to that USB flash drive and wanted to maximize the available "HDD" space on it, and 1GB RAM still seemed plenty (well, I didn't try to go to
https://www.gog.com with its web browser, though...).
The laptop is like 16 years old. Can modern Windows, which still receives security fixes, be installed on such an old low spec computer and expected to run ok on it, even from an external USB flash drive? I bet it wouldn't even have suitable drivers. Mind you, many Linux distos have stopped or will stop offering 32bit releases, but Q4Os (based on Debian apparently) still does, and apparently still offers security fixes too for several years.
The funny thing is that the GUI in Q4OS seems to try to resemble Windows (like Windows XP or 7). It seems to have Control Panel etc., first I wondered if it is Linux at all LOL.