Eugenia

These are the instructions at the mint forum.

Yes, I have 2 computers running off of USB with Mint, with persistence. And I’ve set up that for my father in law and a friend too. You boot with one drive, you insert the other one, you UNMOUNT it, and then you load the installer. Please note though, that the bootloader will be installed into the internal drive instead of the usb one. To go around this problem, would be best to disable the internal drive temporarily during installation (either in the bios, or just remove its cable). Then the installer will be forced to write the bootloader on to the usb stick.

I usually set up the partitions as such: 1 GB of fat32 boot partition with the boot flag set, a 4 GB swap partition, and the rest / (root).

Yes, it’s a true install, not a live cd.

You can install Mint on a usb drive, or external ssd. I personally run it on two of my machines where the internal drive died, on a usb stick. These wear out, but hey, for now, it works. So get a second usb, and install it there, or nuke Windows to get it to run well.

I suggest Linux Mint. It has GUIs for almost everything and it’s very stable. With a little bit of tinkering of the services at startup, you can get Mint to run at 700 MB of RAM (as read via htop), instead of its default ~1 GB of RAM. That could be important to fit it better at 4 GB of ram with some demanding browsing.

I disagree with anyone who might suggest Fedora or Ubuntu with 4 GB of RAM. These distros require about 2+ GB of RAM to boot up, double than that of Mint.

Then there are the distros meant for older machines that use less ram, but it’s a shame to use these when your laptop is fast-enough with an 8th gen cpu (comparatively to very old machines, that is). Your CPU scores 3500 points on the passmark cpu benchmark which is enough for any kind of distro. 15 years ago, the average laptop cpu was 600 points (and Linux still runs fine on these with something like Debian/Xfce).

The lowest ram usage I’ve seen with a full-fledge modern distro/DE, is XFce with endeavourOS. I load it at 490 MB of RAM (it takes 630 MB on Mint for the same layout/apps).

Basically, your challenge is the RAM, not the CPU or the drive. Use an appropriate distro for the RAM and the difficulty you want, and always be mindful to not have too many tabs/apps open at the same time.

I think XFce supports quite a few themes for the window manager that completely changes how the window borders look like.

The truth is that none will allow you what you have in your mind exactly, unless you get down dirty and start programming it. However, some DEs are more customizable than others, e.g. KDE is more customizable than Gnome, for example.

Not nearly as low in memory usage. Xubuntu requires 1.1 GB of RAM on a clean boot for example. Lubuntu close to 700 I think.

No, that thing is unusable. It has no niceties to help a user do basic things. The best OS I’ve found that has enough GUI tools to do stuff, is Q4OS. Uses 350 MB of RAM, but it has enough stuff to get you going. I looked more into FunOS btw, and it requires quite some terminal work to even get tap-to-click to work. It’s missing some GUI tools for basic things. It doesn’t even save screen resolution changes without editing X11 files. If they get these things implemented, then sure. Same goes for all the other lite OSes, like AntiX, DSL, etc. Lightweight, yes. But not really usable by an ordinary user. They are missing GUI tools, of if they have them (like in the case of antix and puppy), they are a complete and utter MESS. I’ve used all of them, and they have left me very, very underwhelmed. Until then, Q4OS is the best of the lightweight distros. It’s well put together.

If it’s true that it uses only 250 MB of RAM as it claims, then it had advantages on old computers over Mint which uses 950 MB (htop). My mom’s computer only has 2 GB of RAM for example (an old, converted-to-linux Chromebook), so we need a distro that really doesn’t use much ram. Thankfully she only uses 1 tab at a time on the browser (she doesn’t know how to open more), so that makes it just enough with something heavy like YT or FB, so she doesn’t hit the swap and slow things down.

For home folder encryption it’s easiest to install encryption during install time. There’s an option for that when you create your partitions (might be hidden under an “advanced” button or something). I’d also go with vanilla Mint and not LMDE due to being newer, and with more support for hw (ubuntu base has better support than debian base imho). So yeah, I’d say, re-install to have it easier.

For mass-renaming, install Thunar: sudo apt install thunar

…and renice.

If you prefer non-kde apps, then consider Vala. It’s a young-ish language and it’s well suited for Gtk apps.

With 8 GB of RAM and 5500 CPU passmark points, that’s a good laptop for Linux Mint. Download their “edge” version of Mint, so you get the latest kernel (so it has more chances of supporting 100% that laptop).

Android does have lots of games, and some apps that aren’t as easy to use, or as good as in native linux. For example, some painting apps (krita is powerful, but can also overwhelm someone), video editors like capcut or lumafusion, audio apps. For most of everything else, there is a web browser on linux that can do the job better probably, and native apps. But overall, I’d say that Android apps aren’t really that useful on linux, because they’re mostly geared towards apps that you use on the go, while you usually sitting on a chair at home or work when you’re using linux. To be honest, most native apps now have been replaced by a web browser, so either native linux or native android apps are only useful for high end professional usages (e.g. blender, video editing, etc) rather than everyday use.