I’m sitting here in 2026 runnin Fedora 43 on a laptop from 2016, and honestly? It’s smoother than it has any right to be. My entire workflow lives in Brave and Obsidian, and this "old" i5 handles it like a champ. There is something deeply satisfying about taking a "boring" enterprise machine, slapping GNOME on it, and watching it run circles around modern hardware,It’s actually fuckin depressing that a 10-year-old laptop has better utility than 99% of the "pro" hardware being sold today.have a native Ethernet port and a full SD slot. Imagine that shit No $60 Amazon adapters dangling off the side like life support just to get a stable connection 🙄that's what I call good hardware built to last.#r/Linuxmasterrace
My daily driver is a 2014 i5 machine with 4GB RAM, running Fedora 43 Sway (riced but no animations).
It can simultaneously run Emacs, Librewolf 6-8 tabs (research), Helium 2-3 tabs (for email, calendar & cloud drive) and 1-2 desktop chat apps. If I flick on Freetube at this point, it'll freeze up.
I've got a pretty minimalist approach to work so I don't have too many things running most of the time. I use mostly system packages and Flatpaks sparingly. I can keep running this thing as my daily driver for a few more years.
Also stick a 27" display and a pair of 5" powered studio speakers into it in the evenings to enjoy some movie streaming.
ps: I've recently configured another 12GB of virtual memory (?) on the SSD to support the 4GB RAM on the machine and that has significantly helped with multitasking.
ps2: Sharing the above to encourage to try Linux out. I came to this with zero knowledge amd experience. Really amazing what's possible.
ps3: May be also good to mention that if first ran Linux Mint (with no optimisations or modifications) on this machine and only moved to Fedora a year later. Both distros worked flawlessly. If anybody is keen to know why I moved from Linux Mint to Fedora, please ask and I will share my experience.
Why did you move away from Mint?
In the beginning it was that I wanted to try Gnome and Fedora. I was new to Linux then and experimenting was exciting.
But I guess the important point here (for me at least) is why I stayed on. Fedora
I realised the system packages for LibreOffice and some other apps were newer on Fedora.
Being able to run this laptop mostly on fairly current system packages meant more compatibility (eg. formatting cnsistency on LibreOffice) and not incurring resource overheads from running the same software on Flatpaks. I've not scientifically tested this but it does "feel" a lot snappier running system packaged apps.
I made the decision to move to Sway when Fedora 43 came out and that freed even more resources from not having to run Gnome.
Gnome was a good introduction to a keyboard driven workflow and moving to Sway was a lot easier because if my experience navigating via the keyboard on Gnome.
None of this was premeditated. Its just how things turned out for me. And with Linux, I'd probably optimise more as I go along.
My system just grew to adapt to my needs, preferences and limitations every step of the way. And I think that journey will continue to adapt as I go.
Will I recommend LinixMint to anyone? 100%!!! I cannot find any fault with it. Its super reliable, beautiful UI, decent customisations, etc. I've set up LMDE (the Debian variant of LinuxMint) for a few Windows-refugee friends of mine and they've been having a great time.
Will I go back to Mint? If I could run Sway on it, then perhaps. But I dont have a need to at this moment.
That sound good. If you do want to go back, you can easily install Swap if you want to, and Ubuntu Server if you install Flatpak and remove Snap and some other Ubuntu bloat is basically Mint without a preinstalled desktop environment, so you can install Sway wuth no Cinnamon stuff.
Ha. Learnt something today. Thank you for the share. You are kind.
note: the term "virtual memory" I used in my response above refers to swap memory. I was having trouble recalling.