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After everything else failed, Fedora Xfce saved my aging laptop
Who doesn't like to keep older hardware alive longer? I know I do. On many older or low-end machines, the constant operating system releases make hardware seem slower over time. The laptop in question, which launched around 2018, features an Intel Celeron N4000 @ 2x 2.6GHz, Mesa Intel(R) UHD Graphics 600, 4GB RAM, and it's relying on a 2.5 SATA hard drive, rather than a faster SSD.
In my case, I have been running Fedora Silverblue on my underpowered laptop since 2024, with the latest install taking place around July.
To put it mildly, the experience of running Silverblue was frustrating. As soon as the laptop booted, Fedora would be trying to install the latest updates, which take much longer on the atomic versions of Fedora, making programs lag extra hard.
Even after the computer had spent half an hour "warming up", programs would still routinely throw an error message asking if I'd like to force quit the app or continue to wait until the program unfroze. After about five months of trying to put up with this (it got worse over time), I decided to try Fedora Kinoite, the KDE atomic version.