Hi gamers :-)

I have my old business laptop, and i had an idea to set him up for my 11 yrs old daughter to have fun. It has no OS since it was a requrement from my employee to be left with that laptop back in the days.

It is Fujitsu LIFEBOOK e744 with I5-4300M, Intel HD 4600 integrated GPU, 8 GB of ram and 256 GB SSD drive and i want to have a linux distro on it, i’m not deiciving myslef, it will be used mostly for YT, VODs and some simple gaming.

My daughter is a fan of Minecraft, Roblox and SIMS 4, after scanning the web i found out that those games can be played on that machine with not so bad experience, so i did download Debian KDE iso…and the story begins :-)

I’m not a very experienced Linux user, i tried Mandrake/Mandriva Linux back in the days, used Windows for almost 30 years, now i’m using Pop OS as daily driver since COVID lockdown, and have a miniPC with linux Mint Cinnamon on it, with a little help of web search i can do stuff my self around those distros.

Going back to story - Quick and easy install, so far so good, desktop snappy, OS is working very well, i’m happy.

Let’s update - suddenly my user is not within “sudoers” group, took a while but i was able to join that club eventually, had some fun time installing via apt some stuff for fun such as htop, neofech and so on.

OK, let’s try to prepare this laptop for simple gaming - installed steam…at least i though so…it was steam-devices, then i found out that flatpak is not a thing in Debian 12 :-)

But thaths ok, got steam working some time later, since SIMS4 is currently free to play on steam - i went to install it, lokks good so far, let’s try to lauch…ah, yes…shader compilation…

in meantime i was actually able to install and run Minecraft (prism launcher) and Roblox (through “adding a game” to steam feature), shaders compiled, time for SIMS4…oh, man, i don’t know…maybe 2 or 3 FPS? Barely able to even stop the game…not fun :(

Used Proton 7 btw.

Ok, so, this is a problem as actually SIMS4 was the top priority here, i have a ventoy with variety of linux distro isos (i’m updating them from time to time), so i said to myself - F… it, i’m gonna try LM since i have it on microPC and it works well.

Installed LM Mate, this time i was in elite sudoers group so skip to first run of SIMS4…the same steps, so different result, suddenly the game has 28-35 FPS, i can live with that, but then i was kinda not happy with Mate desktop, it was strange, no idea how to discribe it but it kinda felt like knockoff OS, my mouse has a micro stutter/lag, overall - something was off.

Alright…Kubuntu then, same procedure, performance was similiar to LM but desktop was again snapy and nice.

In all cases Minecraft and Roblox was presented with similiar persformance, difference was only on SIMS4 - terrible on D12 and as good as it can be on LM and Kubuntu.

TLDR - giving the machine specs on top of that long story - should i go and thy another distros (with DE as close to windows style as posiible) or Kubuntu is the one i should stick with?

If another distro - which one would be well suited for that laptop?

And second question, just out of curiosity - what could be the cause of D12 had such an awfull performance with SIMS4?

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Greets, not a native speaker so sorry for wording and mistakes.