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
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.