[GRLUG] Linux desktop marketshare

[Michael Mol]

On Dec 11, 2007 1:30 PM, Ben Rousch <brousch at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Dec 11, 2007 1:17 PM, Don Wood <dond at standalelumber.com> wrote:
> > I agree with the author about the adoption of desktop Linux is going to
> > probably begin with low-end pcs. Or as we discussed in the last lug
> > meeting that companies that are being forced by the economy to look at
> > their current practices and find lower cost substitutes. His
> > generalization of Internet access is superfluous to the topic imho.
>
> Speaking of low-end PCs, I have been an Ubuntu user since Warty, and I have
> noticed that it gets a little more bloated with each new version. Gutsy is
> very pretty, but I am swapping a lot more often than I used to on the same
> hardware (Thinkpad T20 with 512 and Thinkpad T30 with 512MB). I have tried a
> few of the ultra-stripped down distros (DSL and Puppy), but they tend to be
> ugly and lack a lot of functionality I have come to expect such as
> fully-functional Firefox/Flash/Java. I have also tried Xubuntu, but you lose
> a lot of the Gnome polish that makes Ubuntu so user-friendly. Are there any
> polished distros that target computers with 1-2GHz procs and 512MB of RAM?
> Computers - especially laptops - with those specs are very cheap these days
> and it would be nice to have something pretty and functional to install on
> them.

If you want Ubuntu software in a form that won't choke your machine,
try XUbuntu.  XUbuntu runs fine on my 500MHz laptop with 128MB of RAM.

I use regular Ubuntu, but I swapped out the GNOME desktop for the wmii
window manager. (Someone at the LUG pointed me to ratpoison, which I
still need to look into.)

-- 
:wq