Re: [Hampshire] A nice distro please

On Saturday 10 April 2010 14:35:27 Dr A. J. Trickett wrote:
> 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.

That is what I have for my husband. He had been running PCLOS 2008, but,
after Libranet 3, found it too slow booting up. So I gave him Lenny with
IceWM, specially tuned to boot fast and run only those things that I knew he
wanted. He asked to go back to KDE.

My husband has used Linux ever since he started using a computer. But my
experience of converting Windows users, suggests that KDE, anyhow 3.x.x, is
Doze-refugee, as well as newbie, friendly.

That combination - Lenny and KDE (which is 3.5.10) - runs fine on 512 MB. My
husband and I have that in our boxen. His is more than enough for his
ordinary usage. It wasn't enough to run a resource-hungry application in a
VM - but neither was the processor! I, who have recently been working in a
very RAM consuming manner, after years of working well within the limits of
my box, now occasionally have to shut a window or two down, and am trying to
decide whether a machine of this vintage warrants spending £30 on another 1GB
RAM.

Had you thought of Abiword for the word processor? It makes a good job of
opening Word files, including .docx, and is faster and lighter than
OpenOffice.org.

We do not run any shiny, moving, flashing or spinning eye-candy, but then nor
does XP. Having never tried, I cannot say whether that would challenge 512
MB.

HTH
Lisi