Mate is working really well for me and I probably have one of the oldest
computers anyone is still trying to use (bought in 2010):
https://www.coactivate.org/projects/disintermedia/bishop
I doubled the RAM to 2GB about a year ago. Just before that I replaced the
HDD with an SSD and as I've mentioned before, this improved the laptop's
performance much more than doubling the RAM. As SSDs become more mainstream
and the price drops, it's not a particularly expensive upgrade, and it's not
a difficult one either. When you consider that a magnetic drive is at
increasing risk of becoming unreliable the longer it's in use, replacing it
with an SDD as soon as one can afford it is a pretty good investment.
I suspect Mate would have been usable even without my hardware upgrades,
although obviously it wouldn't have been nearly as smooth. So Trisquel-Mini
probably isn't strictly necessary just for supporting older hardware. But
Chaosmonk makes a good point about the default apps, which probably would
have improved the UX on my laptop pre-upgrade. Also, sometimes folks might
want a more minimal DE because they want to dedicate more of their computer's
resources to the apps they're running (eg games, or audio and video
production). Trisquel-Mini could be useful for these kinds of situations too.
Yes, folks can just install a lighter DE themselves (I always install Openbox
for playing games or just for a less distracting writing space), so the
potential benefits have to be weighed against the extra work involved in
maintaining a Mini version.
In my ideal world there would be three versions of Trisquel:
* Trisquel default - with Mate, works out-of-the-box for just about everyone
* Trisquel-Mini - with a more lightweight set of default apps, and a lighter
DE that's still somewhat noob-friendly, if anyone can think of a good one
* Trisquel-Maxi - with a more heavyweight DE that shows off all the bells and
whistle GNU/Linux is capable of on recent hardware
There would also be a very simple graphical tool for switching from Maxi to
default and from default to Mini, as the hardware requirements of each DE
gradually creep up over the years. I've written about my frustrations with
this here:
https://www.coactivate.org/projects/disintermedia/blog/2018/04/16/choosing-which-desktop-environment-to-use-with-gnu-linux/
It might also be worth giving some thought to a Trisquel-Touch at some point,
although I guess we will be able to use the version of PureOS developed for
the Librem 5 for touchscreen devices. Again, the cost in extra work would
have to be balanced against the potential benefits.
