A friend of mine has a laptop from 2018. Windows has decided to cause problems and he has asked me on advice for a distribution.
I suggested Knoppix to him for testing, and Linux Mint or Solus Linux for installing on his system. Were these wise suggestions?
I suggested Mint because it’s Ubuntu base, and Solus because they have a more recent kernel.
That makes sense to me.
The laptop is neither very old nor very recent, so I would not expect problems with any Linux.
I assume it is 64 bit?
If you friend is new to Linux, Mint is probably easiest.
Knoppix will boot on just about anything.
Based on the age only I would not recommend anything.
It could be an 8th gen i7, or a Celeron N…
Of course the latter performs well below the former.
I’d look at some specification, CPU, RAM, storage.
It’s a Lenovo Y520.
It’s then most probably based on 7th gen i7 or i5.
This is a gamingvseries, tuned for performance.
Anything you choose from Linuxes will run buttersmooth.
According to Lenovo documentation, the laptop has either an i5-7300 or an i7-7700 CPU and has DDR4 Ram installed.
This is a nice laptop and you should be able to run any OS on it that you want to.
I agree with Howard Lenovo Laptops work really well with Linux. I have a Yoga originally with Windows 8 on it. Got rid of that and to this day still got Peppermint 10 on it. I do not use it, just that it is the only computer I have with Peppermint 10 on. Now that Peppermint 10 is end of life, as it was based on Ubuntu 18.04, still nice to boot once in a while. As much as I like Linux, the changes that have happened over the past five years, nice to see Peppermint 10 for the memories. Anyway yes Lenovo Yoga Laptops are brilliant with Linux on.
Another recommendation for switching to Linux is Ubuntu based ZORIN OS (latest version is 16.3)
I use it on 2 very old 64bit laptops (a HP Pavilion dv6 from 2011 and a Dell Latitude E6330 from 2013 both with 4GB RAM but now with a 256GB SSD) Very pleased with both machines.
Frank in County Wicklow Ireland