Choice of distro and multilingual setup

[Martin Sorensen]

Hello,

After looking at the monitor we have and the size of the available desk we decided to revive an old Dell Latitude E4300 from 2010 by giving it a new 120GB SSD; as far as I remember the machine has 4GB ram (not less).

The use will be light office work, and the user (I think) has been working mainly with Windows.

1) Distribution. Ubuntu, Mint, which desktop(s) should I consider for this spec?

2) Language setup. I will be admin and prefer English; the daily user would probably rather have Portuguese. Is this possible, different language for each login?

All advise welcome!

 

[atanere]

Hi Martin,

You may get various opinions about OS'es. Between Ubuntu and Mint, I like Mint better, and I prefer the MATE desktop. But really it all boils down to what works best on your older hardware, and what is most comfortable for you and your employee to interact with. I've never worked with multiple languages, but the link below describes setting up an arrangement like that with Mint (although the link is quite outdated, I would guess it still works):
https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?t=141703

4 GB of RAM should be plenty. I'm also not very familiar with SSD's, but there is also various opinions on how to best care for them when using Linux. You might want to look through this page (and Google around for other opinions) and see if you want to take any proactive actions that it describes to prolong the life of your SSD.
https://sites.google.com/site/easylinuxtipsproject/ssd

Good luck!

 

[Martin Sorensen]

Thank you very much for your advice. The Dell was one of the more powerful models back then, and as my son is having a MacBook Pro of similar age running (last) OS X just fine I am not terribly worried - there should not be magnitudes in difference I hope.

 

[Darren Hale]

XFCE for me personally anyway enjoy your linux journey.

 

[Martin Sorensen]

Thanks to all - I have now got the machine installed with Cinnamon and two languages, looks just fine.

It would be a nice touch to have a couple of default options in the installer to avoid the fiddling with files to take care of your SDD. Could be "Server", "Desktop Workstation", "Laptop workstation with SDD", "I want to fiddle with details myself".

Otherwise quite painless, this afternoon the World will gain a new Linux user