this post was submitted on 19 Jul 2025
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Need help saving an old laptop (lemmy.world)
submitted 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) by DaddleDew@lemmy.world to c/linux@lemmy.world
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I have an old Laptop (MSI MS1721) that I want to repurpose as a media player on my TV. I have installed an old SSD on with Linux Mint XFCE.

Almost everything works well, with only one exception. The laptop's graphics card (ATI HD3850) requires proprietary drivers that haven't been supported since Kernel 3.4. The replacement open-source drivers cause stuttering while playing videos, which makes it useless for my purposes.

Are there Linux distribution options out there that would fit my needs?

Edit After trying a wide array of distros including Ubuntu 14.04, Linux Lite, Linux MX, Bohdi, Linux Mint Debian Edition, Nobara, Debian XFCE and CachyOS, I was pleasantly surprised to see that CachyOS performed very well and still feels like a modern OS and runs surprisingly smoothly with KDE. It looks like the open source drivers do work decently after all depending on the distro you're running and how well optimized they are for your CPU.

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[–] glitching@lemmy.ml 0 points 3 weeks ago

off to recycling with that thing, that SSD is worth more than the whole machine. get a skylake or newer laptop with busted screen or malfunctioning keyboard or whatever that's not a hindrance for your use case and it'll have full hardware acceleration and consume WAY less power and be future proof.

if you're adamant about running it, try mpv without DE/WM by way of framebuffer. I think Arch has some mpv build that enables that.