Re: [Hampshire] A nice distro please

On Saturday 10 Apr 2010, Benjamin Ashton wrote:
> Hi,
>
> My wife's laptop, currently running XP, has got a bit silly as of late,
> which has given me the excuse/permission to put Linux on it. It only has
> 512 RAM. Could anyone suggest a distro that doesn't keep using the hard
> disk for swap but would also make an easy transition from XP. Would Gnome
> or Xfce be better? It would also have to have a word-processor that could
> open Word files (so, I presume, must have Open Office - does Xfce allow
> for Open Office?), photos and music.

Most distros should be okay, it's more an art of how you tune them that
matters.

Out of the box *buntu is slower than Debian, but that's because the default
installs more nice features - slowing the box down. However if you tune a
*buntu box or bloat up Debian you can easily swap the performance metrics
round.

Personally I find GNOME and XFce both slow beyond description and KDE faster
than both - but everyone has an opinion and they are all different. You may
find that a slow but friendly desktop is a better compromise than a fast but
unfriendly one... That you know.

I think you'll find that applications like OpenOffice, Gimp, Firefox, work
most places, and most distros have them in.

There are two approaches:

1) Install a pre-tuned distro. Examples of that are Puppy, AntiX, or ZenWalk

2) Install a general distro (of your choice) and tune it.

I have Debian (stable) running on a Viglen MPC-L with a KDE desktop for my
dad. It's NOT fast, but it's fast enough for him.

--
Adam Trickett
Overton, HANTS, UK

I guess that, if you're in Microsoft's shoes, it makes sense. If you
can't write software or protocols that can stably walk and chew gum,
program in a limit that prevents the user from telling it to do so.
-- Jonathan Patschke, on limitations in Active Directory