I’m trying to decide on a distro for my n100 mini pc. It’ll be for watching content, browsing the web, using discord And playing music. I have Garuda running in it right now just as a tester to see how it did at emulation and honestly it ran 3DS games pretty swell lol. But it feels very bogged down overall. Anything really light weight that will feel a bit snappier?
Assuming you mean the Beelink S12 (which is the first thing that comes up in a search for “n100 mini pc”), that’s quite similar to my own computer specs, which can run just about any distro, with enough resources to spare for a VM or two. I don’t think it’s necessary to go really lightweight or pick something special. If there’s a distro you’re already familiar with and know you can do all of those things on, install that.
If you like Garuda, you could always try a different Arch spin which is lighter out of the box, like CachyOS or EndeavourOS.
It’s about as fast as a Haswell desktop, but a fraction of the power usage. It will run any modern OS.
It does have significantly faster hardware video encoding/decoding
Trying out EndeavourOS for now. Everything seems much smoother for now. It was probably just discord ruining the CPUs life lol