this post was submitted on 19 Nov 2025
840 points (97.4% liked)
Technology
76918 readers
3409 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
It's thinkpad T420. Is it powerful enough for Cinnamon?
Note that I'm not that knowledgable. That's an decent laptop from 2011. You could run cinnamon, but I think you want MATE or even XFCE. You can install cinnamon and if you want more performance then switch to MATE. Cinnamon to MATE is a big improvement, MATE to XFCE a little more. Swithcing again may sound insane but most of the work is in backing everything up and then setting up programs, so you can try cinnamon for a week or two (without perfecting everything) and see if you want a lighter OS. Don't worry it's really easy the second time once you know how to do it (and mint has all the verification stuff built in).
(PS The other guys celeron is actually better.)
I'm running Fedora Cinnamon with Celeron N95, 8 gigs of shared memory, and Intel HD graphics with a little mini desktop. Runs fine. You have a better processor and if you have 8gigs of memory, you should be more than fine for office needs, web browsing, and light gaming to get your feet wet. Heavy coding or gaming might be a bit of a stretch with your ThinkPad though. I find heavier CAD sessions can be a heavy chore if the renderings get hard, like modeling threads or even moderate assemblies.
His thinkpad is 4GB ram and processesor is less than half as good as yours. https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/Intel-i5-2520M-vs-Intel-N95
It'll just be used for browsing office work so sounds like it'll be fine.
Looking at the specs, I would guess it is
You can setup a Ventoy USB stick if you want to try multiple options