Manjaro XFCE candidate for kind-of-old tv/media pc?

Hey everyone,

I’m using a pc connected to my TV for my daily media needs. Currently it has nixos with xfce, which I like because it’s (as far as I can tell as a linux noob) fairly minimal and snappy. However the nix tools can be a bit slow sometimes and it’s annoying to maintain, so I was thinking of installing manjaro xfce. Are there any performance tradeoffs I should be aware of when using manjaro xfce, compared to a fairly vanilla distro and vanilla xfce? Or am I even better off using a different version of manjaro/arch? I’m asking because I use manjaro xfce on my laptop, and it looks quite slick, so I’m worried it might be slower on an older pc (my day-to-day laptop is somewhat beefy for a laptop).

Also, in case it does to matter, is it possible to make manjaro xfce as vanilla as possible in terms of visual settings? Since I primarily use the tv pc for streaming I don’t mind if its very ugly but I do want it to be hands-off maintenance wise (which in my experience is the sweet spot that manjaro hits).

Thanks for any input!

LXDE has an even lower footprint than XfCE and as you didn’t specify any specs, that’s what I would recommend: just try it out in dual boot with your existing system and then wipe the other one if you’re satisfied.

Please also read the below and skip whatever you know already as Manjaro uses a rolling release model, so LTS kernels and kernel management becomes a thing!

:crossed_fingers:

I personally recommend using linux-aarhus’ LXQt build

I use his Openbox & LXQt builds and absolutely love them. Both of them will have lower RAM usage than XFCE.

That being said, you can just try Manjaro XFCE on that computer to see how well it runs.

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If I’m correct, LXDE is abandonware since developers moved into LXQt now.

Last post on their blog is from 2021-02-25…

:thinking:

Wikipedia news :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes:. Just check on their forum and got the answer LXDE forum

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You can install the minimal version of Manjaro XFCE (or your preferred DE), and later install the packages you would need. That would keep it “more vanilla”.

Manjaro XFCE runs quite fast on my 2009 computer with Pentium dual core processor an 3 GB memory.

Just because something is mature and works well - it does not mean it is abandonware.

LXDE and LXQT builds upon Openbox - the most well known and reputed an stable as a rock window manager.

Just because a software is stable - fullfill it’s purpose without errors - it doesn’t mean it is obsolete.

Old but not obsolete - Terminator

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Or Lxqt which has a more modern look than LXDE and there’s been a new release just 3 hours ago from the time of this writing!

:grin:

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To each their own, but I personally prefer linux-aarhus’ version more, which was release 3 days ago :slight_smile:

Their ISOs used to always be on the official Manjaro page, but now needs a maintainer to help out.

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