.>see someone describe their PC as a busted toaster
.>it’s around the same specs as your pc

No, unfortunately your clock speed is too slow for Citra and most modern emulators. Emulators are heavily dependent on CPU and you won’t be able to overcome that with software changes. More info on required specs per emulator

The computer would absolutely feel more snappy and responsive with Linux in productivity tasks, but I don’t think it would improve emulator gaming performance by a lot.

yeah I don’t know about proper gaming but I Linuxed my toaster laptop and gave it an SSD instead of an HDD, and it just about runs all the classic Valve games on low settings. Anything new would probably explode it.

IMO the difference would be marginal. If you have a flash drive you can try running a linux live USB to see if the performance is any better

No. Linux doesn’t make your CPU go faster.

The main thing where Linux helps on old hardware is that you can run it on less RAM, meaning you have more RAM for applications. And running out of RAM is very bad and slows everything down massively. If low memory is not your problem, it won’t be faster, or at least not significantly.

The Linux GPU drivers for AMD and Intel are completely different from the Windows ones, and that can in theory make some difference (not necessarily for the better), but not a massive one unless there’s something fucked going on.

There’s a bunch of other specific or minor stuff, for example file operations can be faster on Linux, but you’d only notice that if you’re doing some specific workload involving lots of small files, like switching branches on git or something like that.

Busted toaster but has the same specs as my main laptop 😭😅

If you have a second DIMM slot, running your RAM in dual-channel mode might give a slight performance increase (and more RAM will give Win10 a bit more breathing room), but that thing is basically on par with an old desktop Core 2 Duo from 2011. You can probably get it to run Dolphin, but it will be dicey. Pretty good rig for 8- and 16-bit era emulators, though.

Also how is linux for emulation and gaming in general?

everyone’s already told you that cpu is slow so i’ll answer this one. i game exclusively on linux. it’s gotten very good in general. valve basing their products off of linux and developing proton to support wine (and wine improving greatly over the years) have made linux a viable platform except for certain games that require particularly aggressive anticheat. valorant is an esport game that comes to mind. the anticheat in that game touches the Windows kernel. protondb.com generally catalogs people’s per-game experience on linux.

I have some complications for you. So your specific cpu (at least according to intel’s spec sheet) can be overclocked to 3.2 GHz although I would double check by running the following if/when you do try linux: lscpu |egrep "Model name|MHz"

If you do decide to overclock it I would highly recommend installing a cpu handler so you dont have to worry about overheating. Also the hotter your cpu is the worse its performance is going to be so be aware of that as well.

As others have said, Linux can’t make your cpu faster but it is generally more efficient about background tasks compared to windows. So it wont be faster for a single process but since there will be less proprietary spyware background processes it should be slightly faster overall. Additionally adding more ram (bumping it up to 16) would help a lot as modern applications are extremely ram hungry nowadays due to lazy and/or overworked programmers who don’t pay attention to performance for unknown reasons. But 8gb is generally fine for most use cases.

For gaming emulation on linux I would recommend retroarch.

The best way I have found to move to linux is try in a VM --> try out the live environment --> install so you can dual boot --> delete windows partition. Also dont be afraid to move back to windows if it doesnt work out for you. Linux is probably the best its ever been but it might not be ready for every user yet (but also I can say that in the near future it undoubtedly will).

There are some distros that target older hardware like antiX (which I have tried out in the past and it is quite good), but dont worry too much about one distro over the other, they are pretty much the same. I would recommend trying out more popular ones like linux mint or debian just because there will be more support for them over other ones. Using a desktop environment that uses less resources should help as well, usually people will point to xfce and lxde. There are a lot of linux users here and on other lemmy instances so if you do need help there should be plenty of people to answer questions.

linux can make the desktop faster and more usable, it can slightly speed up some tasks/games, but it can’t do miracles.

your machine is ok for daily use and games until 2018ish, but emulating modern consoles is actually a relatively heavy task.

you can try it directly on an usb drive and maybe linux will be better, but i doubt it will make it significantly more playable. some light overclocking might help a bit more.

I thought of something else you can do with this PC. WINE has better backwards compatibility with old programs than windows itself.

You can jump on sites like MyAbandonWare and download all the old games from there.

Tell WINE which version of windows you want it to imitate and they should run alright.

That way you can get the experience of emulating old games without the resource draw

I have a computer with a 2nd gen intel i5 cpu, integrated graphics only, and I believe a SATA II drive, and it runs KDE Plasma. It’s meant to be just a media pc to watch movies, but it can probably run low graphics games.

In the past, the laptop struggled running PS2 emulation (single digit FPS, lol), but it could run Civilization V, Minecraft, StarMade, Garry’s Mod, and even Empyrion Galactic Survival when it was in early alpha as long I put it in a very low resolution and the lowest graphics. This was on Windows 10.

Hey no one said anything about this so here goes: I got a laptop with a 3xxx cpu like that and the thermal paste is old and crusty so it gets hot and throttles down (or sometimes shuts down).

The cpu can reduce its clock rate when it’s too hot in an effort to keep running but not overheat and shut off.

New thermal paste will make it cool more efficiently and not throttle down during cpu-heavy tasks.

Everybody already said that an ssd and more ram will help you out a bunch. Post your model number and I’ll look up some cheap compatible parts and a guide to replacing the thermal paste.

Will Linux make it run better?

On the one hand, it won’t make the emulator you’re trying to run any faster. On the other, it will boot, run and respond faster in general. Set up dual boot and give it a shot.