So I have a old notebook gathering dust with a broken fan. And though I had been postponing this for quite a while, I am thinking of fixing it and installing a linux on it. I have previously tinkered with live distros an bit and used Debian as my primary os for a year or so.

So this time I thought of seeking advice from you awsome GOGlins, as I have seen a lot of you have interest in Linux.

To sum up my experience with linux the last time I used Debian :
1. I used Gnome as DE, though I installed KDE for applications as I found Gnome apps to be barebones compared to their KDE counterparts. Now I don't know was this somehow because of this, some elements in KDE (e.g. themes) seemed not to work properly. Also this somehow prevented me from uninstalling (as far as I remember) any Gnome apps, as any attempt to do that tried to wipe the entire KDE suite.
2. Another problem I had was with media backends (?) where media players had trouble with playing .wma files, with there being a secondlong gaps at the beginning of tracks. I somehow solved that, but don't remember how.

Apart from these problems, it was pretty much a smooth sailing. It was fast, efficient and fun to use.

Now this this time I am thinking of changing the setup a bit. I am considering OpenSUSE, preferably the KDE flavour.
My notebook is an old dell with 1st gen i3 and 3gigs of ram and intel graphics, so a pretty modest one.
I would like to have a fast and fluid workflow while still being goodlooking. So your observations and suggestions would be of great help.

Also can someone comment on how good is OpenSUSE's repository?

KDE is not really lowend friendly, I would not recommend it on your system, especially with 3GB of RAM.

Maybe you could look into XFCE, or LXDE (which is even more lowend, but has some annoying bugs). XFCE is way to go, I have it also on my main system and everything works just fine and more importantly, fast.

I tried OpenSUSE once, but the repository was not so good as for *buntu. It was years ago, so it might be different now. If you want to minimize problems during installation and not care much about configuration and tinkering, Ubuntu and derivates (Xubuntu for XFCE, Lubuntu for LXDE, Kubuntu for KDE) is way to go. Mint is also popular derivate of Ubuntu (but I don't know why).

Thanks for your response. :) Though I forgot to mention Ubuntu is not on my list for it's spying modules (even if they are disabled by default now). It is not something I expect from a Linux distro.

Would KDE be too much on the system? I won't be using it for gaming and such that much. It will be mainly used for light browsing, document and presentation editing etc.


EDIT: added emoji. :)

I understand you. It's bad. However, Ubuntu derivates never had the spying module at all. This was just in the Unity package. I still understand if you don't want to use it. Frankly, I tried to find evidence, but seems like KDE is not bloated as it was before! (few years back, it was really noticeable). Also, looks like Debian distro has much lower RAM usage than *buntu's.