I'm looking for advice. I recently "inherited" an HP Pavilion dv9500 laptop which was only lightly used by its former elderly owner, and is in immaculate condition. I thought it would be an upgrade for my wife's beat up old Dell E6500. I installed "patience" KDE on it, and everything works correctly, but it is a slow boot and fairly doggy to use. I already ordered a 4 GB memory upgrade to replace the 2 GB that it has, and I'm thinking one of the cheaper SSDs might be worthwhile as well.
Today I made a bootable Cinnamon USB stick (Nice Job, btw!), and tried it on the HP, and as a Live session it seems fairly nimble. But before I spend another bunch of time configuring it with Cinnamon, I thought I would ask the forum members whether anyone has compared Cinnamon to KDE on the same hardware platform. Could you see a real difference?
Thanks for whatever you can share. Specs below, from the Cinnamon session:
System: Host: siduction Kernel: 4.10.1-towo.1-siduction-amd64 x86_64 (64 bit)
Desktop: Cinnamon 3.2.7
Distro: siduction 17.1.0 Patience - cinnamon - (201703051734)
Machine: Device: laptop System: Hewlett-Packard product: HP Pavilion dv9500 Notebook PC v: Rev 1
Mobo: Quanta model: 30D1 v: 85.24
BIOS: Hewlett-Packard v: F.2A date: 02/22/2008
Battery BAT0: charge: 17.9 Wh 94.9% condition: 18.9/60.0 Wh (31%)
CPU: Dual core AMD Turion 64 X2 Mobile TL-58 (-MCP-) cache: 1024 KB
clock speeds: max: 1900 MHz 1: 800 MHz 2: 800 MHz
Graphics: Card: NVIDIA C67 [GeForce 7150M / nForce 630M]
Display Server: X.Org 1.19.2 drivers: nouveau (unloaded: modesetting,fbdev,vesa)
Resolution: 1440x900@59.90hz
GLX Renderer: Gallium 0.4 on NV67 GLX Version: 2.1 Mesa 13.0.5
Audio: Card NVIDIA MCP67 High Definition Audio driver: snd_hda_intel
Sound: ALSA v: k4.10.1-towo.1-siduction-amd64
Network: Card-1: NVIDIA MCP67 Ethernet driver: forcedeth
IF: enp0s10 state: down mac: xxx
Card-2: Broadcom Limited BCM4311 802.11a/b/g
driver: b43-pci-bridge
IF: wlan0 state: up mac: xxx
Drives: HDD Total Size: NA (-)
ID-1: /dev/sda model: ST9120822AS size: 120.0GB
ID-2: /dev/sdb model: ST9120822AS size: 120.0GB
ID-3: USB /dev/sdc model: U3_Cruzer_Micro size: 2.0GB
Partition: ID-1: / size: 1.8G used: 28M (2%) fs: overlay dev: N/A
RAID: No RAID devices: /proc/mdstat, md_mod kernel module present
Sensors: System Temperatures: cpu: 34.0C mobo: N/A gpu: 47.0
Fan Speeds (in rpm): cpu: N/A
Info: Processes: 177 Uptime: 1 min Memory: 412.4/1941.9MB
Client: Shell (bash) inxi: 2.3.5