Guys i have been using windows since the start of my life and I decided to give my old laptop a new life but my daily driving laptop (AMD Ryzen 9 5900HS with Radeon Graphics and 16 gigs and a rtx 3060) is running windows 11 and the old one (dell Inspiron with 8 gigs and an old harddrive and 8 gigs of ram and a i3-6006u)) I replaced windows 10 on it with manjaro cutefish beta DE and after research and testing the cutefish DE i found it lacks some stuff and it lags a lot and i am looking for a new DE of manjaro or a whole new linux that would suit my laptop and me and that can be well rounded so i can switch to it later on my main laptop, any suggestions?
you can try out xfce as it is one of the offcial versions of manjaro and also the lightest of the three (kde and gnome)
here’s a very nice tutorial → Making an old laptop useful again FOR FREE by installing Manjaro Linux - YouTube
(found this on manjaro’s twitter handle 
)
Hello @abd900,
I would suggest to try the xfce version of manjaro. It is lightweighter than KDE or Gnome but you get everything you need I guess.
On older devices this is mostly the thing that slows down the machine. 
Put some XFCE based distro on it, though I do not see Gnome having any trouble running on it. If you have all the time to constantly tinker go with Manjaro. Or, stick with a Ubuntu LTS (long term support) or its spin off like Xubuntu.
Just saying…
1 Like
bro I just finished studying for my physics HL exam and my brain can barely function
I’m running manjaro cutefish on a really old dell with 4gig ram and a pentium P6200 (basically a potato) and it runs surprisingly well. Not going to get anywhere near my main rig but it’s certainly useaable.
That being said if you want something lightweight with a traditional desktop then look at lxde or lxqt, both are community editions
On the download page of the official Manjaro editions you can find videos of the three official editions. They will give you a good first impression. Just sit back, watch and enjoy. 
From my own experience, I can recommend Manjaro Xfce (certainly for an older laptop).
I drive XFCE, Cinnamon and KDE on some 12 year old Lenovo laptops here. XFCE runs well, Cinnamon hardly worse, but KDE is the absolute horror here. Not only that it snores slowly - after every update problems, problems, problems. But it`s your decision…