I have converted. Lubuntu > XFCE Mint.....

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badtlc

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I have long been an advocate of Linux Mint. I still am for the most part. It is a nice simple distro that you can install and newbs can just use with no problems.

I hate bloated OSs though, so I was always a bigger fan of XFCE Mint than the other versions. I recently started running Lubuntu (LXDE) on a few machines and I'm sold. What a great DE and zero wasted resources. I setup an old PC i was given (2.8 Ghz Celeron D, 512 MB ram, 40 GB HDD) into a server on my network. It is a brand new machine with Lubuntu on it. I'm running a ad blocking proxy, VPN server, DLNA server, network shares, and a few other items and it never seems to slow down.

Anyone looking for a light distro, I suggest looking into Lubuntu. It is a bare bones distro so you get to install only what you want for the most part with no excess.
 
I had Lubuntu installed on a few of my machines for a while. I agree: it's a great lightweight OS. I tended to prefer the Xfce environment instead of LXDE, so I did swap my Lubuntu installs for Xubuntu installs. Xubuntu is also a lightweight OS without the "heavy" Unity interface that comes with Ubuntu. As you know, Xfce is as customizable as the day is long.

Both are great operating systems. If you like Xfce, I suggest trying Xubuntu as well.
 
Man, I didn't even realize XFCE was still around. I remember long ago how much faster Xubuntu was than the off-the-shelf Ubuntu. I also preferred XFCE as far as general usability.
 
I haven't tried Lubuntu yet, but I've heard it's pretty good. I'll have to give it a try sometime. Right now I'm really happy with Ubuntu and Mint.
 
200 MB is light compared to Android too.
lol.gif

But Windows XP, if you dare to use it
wink.gif
anymore, is even lighter at under 130 MB for SP3. The release before service packs idled at around 60 MB.
 
I'm using Linuxmint 16 KDE as I type this, but I also have Lubuntu on an older system. Great little distro, but it's a little bit too lightweight for me to use for everything.
KDE fills that void perfectly for me.
 
Originally Posted By: badtlc
What a great DE and zero wasted resources.


LXDE is already dead; having now merged with RazorQT to form LXQT - http://lxqt.org/

Ubuntu will still support Lubuntu's LXDE implementation for the next 3 years as promised and then likely transition to LXQT afterward. I'll bet the transition LXDE made from GTK to Qt will be a step forward and will cost little or nothing in the way of resource consumption.
 
Originally Posted By: dparm
Man, I didn't even realize XFCE was still around. I remember long ago how much faster Xubuntu was than the off-the-shelf Ubuntu. I also preferred XFCE as far as general usability.


After the KDE 4.0.0 debacle, then the big Gnome 3.0 fiasco, XFCE is growing enormously in popularity.
 
Originally Posted By: uc50ic4more
Originally Posted By: dparm
Man, I didn't even realize XFCE was still around. I remember long ago how much faster Xubuntu was than the off-the-shelf Ubuntu. I also preferred XFCE as far as general usability.


After the KDE 4.0.0 debacle, then the big Gnome 3.0 fiasco, XFCE is growing enormously in popularity.


What debacles/fiascos are you referring to?

Frankly, I loathe the current Ubuntu window manager.
 
XFCE was much better than gnome or kde, but LXDE is even lighter. Idle memory usage was around 200-250 MB with XFCE. With LXDE, I'm seeing around 120-140 MB usage at idle for most of the machines I have it on.
 
Last edited:
Originally Posted By: BearZDefect
200 MB is light compared to Android too.
lol.gif

But Windows XP, if you dare to use it
wink.gif
anymore, is even lighter at under 130 MB for SP3. The release before service packs idled at around 60 MB.

uh, that's because XP paged most of the kernel and libraries??
 
Originally Posted By: dparm
What debacles/fiascos are you referring to?


The initial release of KDE 4, which was NOT properly publicized as an alpha (read: bug-ridden) release was awful. An alpha for version 4 of something is conventionally versioned as 3.99.x or some such number to qualify it as "not ready". KDE 4.0.0, in addition to being a major overhaul that broke a lot of the code that made KDE 3 (and therefore a **tonne** of KDE3/ Qt3-based applications) work, was an abysmal piece of garbage: It crashed all the time, what few applications that had been ported to the new framework were missing critical features, etc. It took until 4.8 or so for people to stop screaming about what a disaster it was. It was slow, poorly optimized, and generally incomplete.

The Gnome transition to version 3 was a complete overhaul of the desktop computing paradigm. Gone from Gnome 3 were conventional menus, minimize buttons, task bars, etc. and what was in its place was - according to the Gnome developers - a much more efficient way to interact with your computer, that was also ready for touchscreens. Hilarity and rage ensued, and even provoked some projects like Ubuntu to drop the Gnome UI and develop their own. In Ubuntu's case it is Unity. In Mint's case, Cinnamon. There is even a project to keep the old Gnome 2 code base alive called MATE. That is how far Gnome alienated its users with Gnome 3: It spawned 3 major forks, which are BIG projects, just so those projects would not have to use the Gnome UI (Gnome Shell) anymore.

In summary: KDE 4 was a terrible release method - it was buggy and incomplete but gradually became awesome again if you like KDE in the first place. Gnome 3 totally changed the way you use your computer and most folks have fled from it.

This highlights how messy and chaotic the freedom of Linux and open-source can be; and we can extrapolate why, then, Linux-based OS's have been slow to be adopted by large institutions. Freedom is chaotic, anarchic, messy and inefficient; and organizations such as governments, schools, corporations, etc. want stability and accountability.
 
Originally Posted By: uc50ic4more
....
This highlights how messy and chaotic the freedom of Linux and open-source can be; and we can extrapolate why, then, Linux-based OS's have been slow to be adopted by large institutions. Freedom is chaotic, anarchic, messy and inefficient; and organizations such as governments, schools, corporations, etc. want stability and accountability.


That is just ignorance and fear of the unknown on their end. Many large companies and even governments have went all linux with wonderful results and massive savings. You just got to do it right and that means having your own developers/software folks on your IT staff. You need to develop your own custom distribution.
 
Perhaps this messiness is in desktop distributions, but not so in commercially supported server distributions, such as Redhat and Oracle Linux. Linux is the de facto platform of choice where I work; if it works on linux or Windows, it gets deployed on linux. No need for "linux programmers" as there is an entire commercially supported software stack such as Oracle RDBMS / Weblogic / Websphere etc that happily screams on linux. When stuff doesn't work, we call in a ticket.

Where uc50 is correct is that due to the nature of the development, there can be wild fluctuations in the technology from version to version; I support 3 versions of linux, packaged by two separate vendors, employing 2 different virtualization technologies. There is no GUI to do anything; an admin must jump into the machine, evaluate the version he/she is using to do a task, and then proceed accordingly, often, the task is accomplished by different procedures, just based on the OS version or file system type for example. This necessitates "sharp admins with keen skills" which finding is extremely difficult.

We have hundreds of linux servers supported by 5 primary admins, who also do backup and storage.
 
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Originally Posted By: badtlc
You just got to do it right and that means having your own developers/software folks on your IT staff. You need to develop your own custom distribution.


Not everyone has the facilities to do that. The city of Munich and FermiLab/ CERN have done exactly that, in addition to hundreds of school boards, regional governments and other institutions. Even Google uses a modded Ubuntu in-house they call Goobuntu.
 
Originally Posted By: simple_gifts
Perhaps this messiness is in desktop distributions,


That's all I was referring to. Can you imagine Adobe trying to port Photoshop to "Linux"?! They'd need Ubuntu/ Mint/ Debian .deb installers in 32 and 64 bit, RHEL/ CentOS/ Fedora, SuSE .rpm in 32 and 64 bit and they'd need to stay on top of rapid kernel development AND the modded kernels used in some distros. Some are taking the step of only supporting Ubuntu; but my example highlights the utter (and HIGHLY unprofitable) nightmare of supporting an OS that 1) no one who uses it tends to support closed-source, for-pay software anyhow, and 2) users tend to modify extensively (I know lots of folks who've compiled their own kernels - What if you made audio production software and some wing nut compiled their kernel without the IEEE 1394 driver module?) and therefore may run desktop environments (AND their underlying session managers!) that are disparate in both technology and version (think of how far apart a single piece of software would be in development from bleeding-edge Arch or Fedora compared with Debian Stable!)

I am no supporter of closed-source software; but I never fault (desktop application) proprietary vendors for not supporting Linux. It'd be a nightmare.
 
Originally Posted By: uc50ic4more
Originally Posted By: simple_gifts
Perhaps this messiness is in desktop distributions,


That's all I was referring to. Can you imagine Adobe trying to port Photoshop to "Linux"?! They'd need Ubuntu/ Mint/ Debian .deb installers in 32 and 64 bit, RHEL/ CentOS/ Fedora, SuSE .rpm in 32 and 64 bit and they'd need to stay on top of rapid kernel development AND the modded kernels used in some distros. Some are taking the step of only supporting Ubuntu; but my example highlights the utter (and HIGHLY unprofitable) nightmare of supporting an OS that 1) no one who uses it tends to support closed-source, for-pay software anyhow, and 2) users tend to modify extensively (I know lots of folks who've compiled their own kernels - What if you made audio production software and some wing nut compiled their kernel without the IEEE 1394 driver module?) and therefore may run desktop environments (AND their underlying session managers!) that are disparate in both technology and version (think of how far apart a single piece of software would be in development from bleeding-edge Arch or Fedora compared with Debian Stable!)

I am no supporter of closed-source software; but I never fault (desktop application) proprietary vendors for not supporting Linux. It'd be a nightmare.

If you are compiling your own kernel you can compile your own software from source with only the features you need.
Gentoo 4 ever.
 
Originally Posted By: Colt45ws
Gentoo 4 ever.


Gentoo, (still compiling) 4 ever.
lol.gif


Gentoo, for those unaware, is a unique Linux distro. Rather than a team of developers compiling source code into installable "packages" for you, YOU compile the source code on your own machine for *every* *application*, kernel included. To say this is a considerable undertaking is an understatement. It is time-consuming and requires some deep study into the differing ways one can compile source code: enabling and disabling features and optimizing the compilation for certain tasks, etc.

Arch Linux offers the user the ability to casually compile their own applications as well; but a lot of that, for most users, is done using pre-formatted scripts (provided either by Arch developers or by a member of the user community) that automagically download and compile the application(s)' source code and their dependencies. Hardly as "involved" a process as you doing it all yourself.

Gentoo users can usually walk into a bar full of nerds and not have to buy themselves a beer. Colt45ws, if you are a Gentoo user,
cheers3.gif
 
Supporting linux on the desktop for a corporate environment wouldn't be that bad. Users can't install their own software or determine what UI they are going to use. The big problem is what you target to deploy on; you are correct is pointing out that tons of choices is a nightmare; any given "required configuration" is probably a small % of the user community
 
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