Comments on: Accepting things as they are

By: Its beauty is in its potential « Motho ke motho ka botho

Its beauty is in its potential « Motho ke motho ka botho — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 00:50:14 +0000

[...] back all the things that make it slow and unwieldy, but these days I have a different philosophy. Ubuntu is slow because Ubuntu is slow, and me wasting my time trying to perk it up is just that: me wasting my time. There are dozens [...]

By: What’s to like? « Motho ke motho ka botho

What’s to like? « Motho ke motho ka botho — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 13:43:48 +0000

[...] without losing a sliver of function, made my system far more reliable, and taught me a thing or two for use on still older [...]

By: Flabbergasted « Motho ke motho ka botho

Flabbergasted « Motho ke motho ka botho — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 22:56:12 +0000

[...] just what I’ve learned as life has gone on, and what I’ve come to expect. No harm in that. No danger in having [...]

By: Guitar John

Guitar John — Sun, 12 Apr 2009 03:06:55 +0000

When I started reading your blog, I was interested in the whole idea of a simpler, light weight Ubuntu. But my slowest machine is my wife’s Dell 2200 with a 1.4 GHz Celeron M and 500 MB RAM. And it runs a default Ubuntu just fine, although Open Office is very slow, even with the speed-up tricks.

I’m switching all three computers to Xubuntu with the release of 9.04 just to lighten the load a bit, but I lack the time to spend much time tweaking things these days.

By: Luca

Luca — Sat, 11 Apr 2009 19:07:53 +0000

You have also got to take into account how much time getting the speedups is costing you. I used to use Gentoo, but it required so much effort on my part to maintain it, that I have moved away. Although my current system (Fedora 10) is slower, it requires minimal effort on my part.

By: ing

ing — Sat, 11 Apr 2009 11:30:48 +0000

If I didn’t know better I’d almost say that was Gnome viewpoint; “configuration is a chore so lets just set some sane defaults and use that”

By: K.Mandla

K.Mandla — Sat, 11 Apr 2009 10:53:35 +0000

You’re right, and I try to respect everyone’s interpretation of what is a feature, and what is bloat. I think if I worked with machines that were newer, or had more external “things” that needed more versatility, I would probably have a higher tolerance for some of the flexibility of Arch or Ubuntu.

But unfortunately yes, with so many old machines, my threshold for additives is rather low.

I hadn’t seen that fast-boot page; thanks. I’ll have to tinker with that.

I think those misformed links are being added at some point by one of the blog clients I’m using. I think maybe ScribeFire is adding them when I use the link insertion tool. If I see them, I’ll trim them out.

By: K.Mandla

K.Mandla — Sat, 11 Apr 2009 10:47:28 +0000

Not a bad idea, Walter. I’ll look into that. I used to do that a very long time ago with my early Ubuntu systems (and even earlier with some Windows systems) but shied away from it after a while. Thanks for reminding me.

By: Dieter_be

Dieter_be — Sat, 11 Apr 2009 09:52:53 +0000

I agree with your ‘building is better then tearing down’ attitude, however I think everyone has a personal preference for a “default balance point” between “features by default” and “bloat by default”.

Indeed with your interest in older platforms and stuff I can understand you want a system that does less then Arch by default. Just like many people like the features of *ntu/fedora/.. even with it’s bloat.

I for one like those few things that Arch adds (udev, initcpio hooks etc), it could be more lightweight but I rather keep those few features.

I don’t know if you have seen http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?pid=528709 . By replacing /etc/rc.sysinit some people seem to be able to cut their boot time almost in half.

PS: you still have invalid links ( .. ) which renders this post very ugly in my feed reader. (liferea).

By: Walter

Walter — Sat, 11 Apr 2009 06:59:21 +0000

Hi, I’ve been following this blog with interest, despite my very basic knowledge of Linux does not let me fully appreciate all of your posts.
This lats one though did trigger a question: since you can do so much optimization in any of the distribution, why don’t you make an image of the disk after installation/optimization, so that “next time” you can just flush the image instead of doing a re-install? That would be faster and will leave all the tweaks in place for you to enjoy.
Just a thought.
Regards, and thanks for such interesting blog.