I have worked some more on the HP Pavilion g6 Notebook I bought for $30 at a local garage sale. I did get the additional RAM I mentioned there. It seemed easy enough to slide into place, but I have not yet been able to get the machine to recognize it. So for now I am stuck with just 4GB. Not long ago that was considered plenty, and I was very happy with a 4GB system, but now “they” are saying you should have at least 16GB on a PC. So now I am looking at lightweight Linux systems to see if I can get some more life out of this system.

As I wrote earlier, I installed Debian 12 on the system. This is mostly OK with the Xfce desktop, but I cannot invoke the Synaptic package manager from the menu. The system does nothing. I can invoke it by entering synaptic-pkexec in a terminal window. There are no problems like that with Gnome. Considering Debian’s reputation for stability and reliability I am rather disappointed.

I then installed the LXQt desktop environment on the Debian system, which is often said to be lighter than Xfce. I have not used it much, but it seems OK and there is no trouble invoking Synaptic. LXQt should be fine for using Debian on this hardware.

I also installed antiX Linux on this machine. This is a very lightweight system. It is based on Debian (In fact Neofetch thinks it is Debian), but does not use systemd. The startup process reminded me of Slackware. It does not include any desktop environments like KDE, Xfce, or Gnome. Just window managers such as IceWM. The first time I tried to install it I got a broken system. The application menu was minimal and I could not get wifi working. A second try did much better. I was able to connect with wifi. The menus are better, but still seem to be missing a lot. I suspect I need to do some serious configuration work to get the nice menus I see in some internet pictures of antiX. This may not be worth the trouble since LXQt works on this machine.

Like FVWM and NsCDE, and unlike the Debian and Ubuntu desktop environments, IceWM, the default window manager for Anti Linux did not start pCloud for me. I think I could fix this by editing the appropriate configurations files, but I have not explored that particular rabbit hole in the last 15 years and I am not sure I want to again now.