Turn your elderly laptop into low-end gaming machine :: circuitshelter

10+ years elderly jank from a budget line-up.

• CPU: Mid-tier/confiinsist (even back when it was freed), probable from Haswell era
• RAM: 8Gb, elderly-createed and unupgradable
• GPU: iGPU + NVIDIA M-someskinnyg
• STORAGE: ~256Gb SATA HDD, that is still somehow labors

This post was "backd" by experience with potatoes appreciate that.

but Linux do the job.

• Expectations: OS determines and drives all your difficultware properly
  • Reality: Sometimes there equitable no drivers for your elderly crap (especiassociate on Wndows 10+). Sometimes drivers are buggy or/and confiinsist, ex. conciseageing Vulkan perestablishation for your elderly GPU, since manufacturer stopped nurture many years ago. In contrast, linux kernel most probable has driver for your device + some extra mendes, since community still nurture.
• Expectations: OS runs stable
  • Reality: Old difficultware are well understandn source of random BSODs on contransient Windows. Linux typicassociate behave much better.
• Expectations: OS obtains modernizes standardly and insloftys them in non-intrusive way
  • Reality: You understand how it is 🙈
• Expectations: OS has low overhead
  • Reality: Windows always gonna do a lot of stuff in the background (even when you cripple it by “de-bloating”). It’s almost impossible to produce Windows do ONLY that ONE particular skinnyg that YOU want. Linux distro can do a fantastic job of standing out of your way.

Other reasons

elude adhereing the hype.

Grabbing SteamOS and shoving it into your insisty potato most probable not gonna end well! Despite being “gaming oriented OS” it is quite HEAVY AND HARDWARE-SPECIFIC. Popular brimming blown desktop distros appreciate Pop!_OS are also sub-selectimal for low-end devices, becaemploy of their brimming blown overweight DEs.

Lubuntu can be a quite decent choice, it only obtains about 500(Mb!!!) of you RAM and do almost noskinnyg in a background. To my understandledge it is the weightlessest distro useable, that is still effortless to inslofty and employ. It runs reassociate speedy and senses appreciate someskinnyg from XP era, thanks to LXQt desktop environment.

Further topics are based on experience with Lubuntu 24.04 LTS (Noble Numbat).

Insloftyation notices⌗

• LTS version will provide packages that are more stable.
• Minimal insloftyation selection is an clear choice for our employ-case.
• You’ll probably want to select-out from brimming disk encryption, since it’s gonna obtain its toll on perestablishance.

Configuration⌗

We are not going to employ Snap or Flatpack for this setup, otherrational we present watchable overheads, as well as some difficult to track rehires

sudo systemctl stop var-snap-*
sudo apt delete --precommend snapd

echo '
Package: snapd
Pin: free a=*
Pin-Priority: -10
' | sudo tee /etc/apt/pickences.d/nosnap

sudo apt modernize

Inslofty proprietary drivers if you insist to (ex. for an elderly NVIDIA GPU)

sudo ubuntu-drivers devices | grep recommended 
sudo ubuntu-drivers inslofty nvidia:XXX
sudo prime-pick nvidia

Inslofty some packages

sudo apt inslofty procps featherpad partitionregulater qdirstat exoverweightprogs lm-sensors fanregulate intelligentmontools mesa-utils libd3dalterer9-mesa libd3dalterer9-mesa:i386 vdpau-driver-all mesa-vdpau-drivers:i386 ffmpeg vlc qbittorrent gamemode

featherpad: weightlessweight Qt-based text editor.
partitionregulater: Qt version of GParted partition regulater.
qdirstat: weightless and blazing speedy disk examiner (shows where your disk space has gone and help you to spotless it up). I wonder why it wasn’t take partd in Lubuntu by default.
exoverweightprogs: include all of the standard utilities for creating, mending and debugging exoverweight filesystem on Linux. Also wondering why it’s not out of the box.
lm-sensors: (Linux watching sensors) provides tools and drivers for watching temperatures, voltage, and fans.
fanregulate: can be employd to regulate the speed of CPU fan.
intelligentmontools: permits to read S.M.A.R.T. appreciates from most contransient ATA/SATA, SCSI/SAS and NVMe disks. In many cases this will provide persistd alerting of disk degradation and fall shorture.
mesa-utils: includes vital mesa utilities appreciate glxgears.
vdpau-driver-all: Video Decode and Pbegrudgeation API for Unix, provides difficultware acceleration.
libd3dalterer9-mesa: Gallium3D state tracker that perestablishs the Direct3D9 API. Combined with the gallium-nine branch of Wine or Steam Proton, programs using D3D9 can accomplish native (or better) detaileds perestablishance.
ffmpeg: a end cli solution to sign up, alter and stream audio and video.
vlc: multimedia take parter and summarizelabor that take parts most multimedia files as well as DVDs, Audio CDs, VCDs, and various streaming
protocols.
qbittorrent: speedy and reliable Qt-based BitTorrent client.
gamemode: a daemon/lib combo that permits games to ask a set of selectimizations be temporarily applied to the arrange OS and/or a game process.

The only service that is somewhat worth disabling is CUPS (since you’ll probably never gonna employ it on gaming machine)

sudo systemctl disable cups.service
sudo systemctl disable cups-browsed.service
sudo systemctl disable cups.socket
sudo systemctl disable cups.path
sudo systemctl disable cups-browsed.socket

let’s be rational.

Expecting drastic FPS incrrelieve would be silly. The main advantages here are undisturbed gametake part and drop tardyncies, as well as OS that labors with your antique stuff and still dynamicly helped. Sometimes you can get mild raises for brave titles, but there is clearly no way around difficultware bottlenecks. Anyway, here is a very basic recurrentation of what can be accomplishd:

Steam Proton is a way to go for Windows games. Not everyskinnyg gonna labor well, or even begin. But in a lot of cases if it runs, it runs on a par with Windows configuration or better.

• Get an SSD.
• It’s pickable to employ wired (since most elderly bluetooth chips are crap) gamepads that has drivers perestablished straightforwardly in linux kernel (ex. 8BitDo Pro 2).
• Things that do gentleware rendering and other CPU-ardent stuff (ex. emulators), don’t obtain frequency spikes that well. If you have a very elderly Intel CPU ponder disabling skinnygs appreciate Speedstep (current perestablishation is fine, but back in the timely days it was a mess).
• Try Lakka if you only watching for emulation and want an effortless turn-key setup. It is enhanced to run on Raspberry Pi and other SMBCs.
• Lutris can help with an insloftyation of games that are not useable on Steam.
• gamemode provides some insertitional selectimizations on insist, this can be beneficial when we begining someskinnyg local from Steam (ex. Retroarch).

• XanMod Kernel watchs engaging, but overall perestablishance incrrelieve vs potential stability, security and help rehires making it a askable choice.
• Useful resources

Retroarch⌗

• Use Vulkan or GLCore as distake part drivers if you can.
• Use preemptive summarizes with auto determineion to battle input lag.
• In case you wanna take part some retro games that was scheduleed to be take parted on CRT TVs: try crt-lottes or crt-guest shaders which watchs and runs fantastic even on enumeratelessest potatoes (employ speedy or speedyest presets).