Felix Miata writes:
Miroslav Skoric composed on 2020-11-12 23:01 (UTC+0100): > At this stage (Debian 8) I do that in MATE + Thunderbird. It's slow but > works. What is not known is whether that would work in Debian 9.Possibly you could boot live media 9 to find out, or if you have enough disk space available, install a minimal 9 alongside 8.
The problem with a live system on limited hardware is often the amount of RAM.
I am impressed to read that Debian 8 + Mate + Thunderbird works anything near acceptable on the hardware. I am curious about a `free -h` output from that Pentium II-style Celeron machine :)
Just for comparison, on my old Acer Travelmate laptop (Debian 10), for GUI tasks, I run the i3 window manager. It performs acceptably. Starting urxvt also works. But whenever I run a "larger" GUI application like the zathura PDF viewer (which is pretty minimalistic compared to a full-blown Thunderbird), it gets very slow and uses swap. While I have occasionally run it this way, I would not consider it really "working" because basic features like scrolling become "unusably" slow.
On the other hand, if you are using Mate now and can consider switching to something lighter (Icewm and FVWM were good suggestions I saw in the thread), chances are it will continue to run slowly "as it used to" - the RAM and CPU saved from the DE may just be enough to compensate for the higher resource usage of newer software...
PS/OT: My previous message missed the important signature characters: öö. Thus its PGP-signature is unfortunately incorrect :(
HTH Linux-Fan öö
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