SLAX 7.0 "Green Horn" Released: ~200MB KDE Linux OS

[schmidtbag]

Totally agree. However, to 'filter it all out' is a onetime occurance now that I put Ubuntu + XFCE on my parents PC.

The hassle of Updating the OS, Updating the Antivirus etc etc are now all minimized to a bare minimum. Every week or so I run:

aptitude -y -R full-upgrade

And I'm done. Windows Updates was a nightmare. Windows XP doesn't receive any new browser and multimedia support from Microsoft. Using third party tools didn't resolve the problem.

I have to confess, the start was rather troublesome especially since my parents have to get used to Linux after using Windows for years. But in the long run, I believe the benefits outweight the drawbacks. The machine is capable of handling the tasks it users demand. Linux provides this facility at a (somewhat small) startup 'price'. But once it runs... . And besides, I wait on how Windows 8 turns out. If it becomes another fiasco like Vista (which came on my laptop), you are left in the dark way earlier!

I agree that buying a 'new one' might be better. But I'm still waiting for stuff like Secure Boot and GPU drivers to become better.

If you like to microoptimize, you should use LXDE. xfce isn't anywhere near as lightweight as it claims to be, and with LXDE you only get what you really need.

[Rexilion]

If you like to microoptimize, you should use LXDE. xfce isn't anywhere near as lightweight as it claims to be, and with LXDE you only get what you really need.

That was the configuration for the first attempt. However, it's core component, PCManFM crashed every once in a while and we found it overall to be somewhat unreliable and unstable. This was also the case for lxdesktop if I recall correctly. That was a little more severe as it could take down the entire X session and 'deliver' my parents a scary looking TTY. Yes, this was on a 12.04 release of Ubuntu, where version 0.9 is used. Quantal uses 1.0 and Raring is using 1.1 as it seems.

Upgrading would not take much time since I have a ridicilously sophisticated configuration back-up and management system, but who knows what other snags I will hit. I already have to keep the kernel pinned to v3.4 otherwise nouveau regresses while hibernating. I bisected the commit, but since it was part of the huge nouveau rewrite (read: breakage everywhere for anything before nv50) it's hard to pin down.

XFCE takes 40MB (tops!) more than LXDE, and that is not much for a 512MB machine. Even the DE is 'slimmed', so conventional benchmarks probably don't apply to this specific situation. I.e. there is no gconfd or networkmanager running anywhere.

[speculatrix]

there is definitely a place for small lightweight linux distros which have simplified window managers and a set of core graphical libraries.

think tomtom, maemo, even android itself (though now Arm performance is very good and memory is cheap it's not so lightweight)!