I just installed XFCE Mint on my HP Chromebook 11 G4, which mainly served as a YouTube machine since my graduation. My plan was to upgrade it with external storage for a Plex media server alongside its usual YouTube tasks. Initially, I expected some slowness, but today it's really struggling. While browsing with Firefox, it has difficulty loading entire webpages and freezes during YouTube videos after about a minute, accompanied by a buzzing sound from the speakers. I noticed the CPU usage hovers around 40% but spikes into the 90s intermittently, especially with Firefox running. I wonder if it will struggle even more with Plex. Should I revert to ChromeOS, or are there ways to improve performance? Also, I can't shut down using the start menu anymore, as I get an error message stating that the session manager must be idle. I'm new to this, so explanations in simple terms would be really appreciated!
2 Answers
XFCE is a decent desktop environment for lightweight use. You might want to try out other distros like MX Linux or AntiX, which are also known to work well on low-resource machines.
I've been using Ubuntu on an older Chromebook, and it runs just fine! Mint is built on Ubuntu, so you might see similar results, but a switch could bring some performance improvements. It’s worth a try!
Do you think switching would really help my situation? I thought Mint was better for low-end devices.