You may be right. I just installed Peppermint 10. It uses about 430mb memory. When I compared distros last April (Peppermint 9), it used about 250mb. (It used 4.8gb disk, now it’s 6.8gb).
Peppermint uses Xfce to some extent (and some things from LXDE). I know that the latest release of Xfce added support for GTK3. Maybe that’s what did it.
Last April I installed to VirtualBox or QEMU. This time I’m installing to a brand-spanking new laptop.[1] I don’t guess that would make a difference in the results. I’m assuming it has something to do with Xfce implementing GTK3 support.
I’m going to install all the distros I did last April and see how they compare again. (I should do that again after April when the 20.4 distros are released.).
[1] Acer Aspire 5 model: A515-43-R19L.
- AMD Ryzen 3 3200u CPU.
- 4 gig of single-channel ram. Expandable to 32g dual-channel. For $20 I could buy another 4g and have 8g dual channel.
- 128g SSD drive.
- AMD Radeon Vega 3 graphics.
It’s really pretty impressive for $320 USD on Amazon. It couldn’t install Linux until I pressed F2 before the Acer splash screen appeared. Go into the bios and:
-
Arrow-right to “Main”
Enable “F12 Boot Menu”
Disable “Fast Boot” (I re-enabled this after install and it worked fine. Not sure to what extent disabling this is required/desirable. I gathered from googling that being enabled is a common install problem.). -
Arrow-right to “Security”
Set “Supervisor Password” to something you’ll remember. You have to do this for the “Secure Boot” to be editable. (I didn’t set the “User Password.”). Note: after install, I cleared the password in the bios (enter existing password ; then past the “new” and “confirm” fields. That clears the password.). It seems to boot ok. Secure boot remains disabled. -
Arrow-right to “Boot”
Disable “Secure Boot” (you can’t edit this field without first setting the Supervisor password. It appears that you can remove that password after disabling secure boot. Secure boot remains disabled.).
Lubuntu installed fine. Very fast compared to the budget Toshiba Satellite C55-B I had. I think I spent $200 USD on that one. So, this one’s fairly “budget” too. But, massively faster. It just needs another 4g ram for dual-channel performance. I’m going to wait and buy two 8g.
Sorry, I’m going off-topic. I just wanted to document this stuff in case someone googles about that particular Acer model, wondering if it will run Linux.