Comments on: The other *buntus

By: linuxbakkie

linuxbakkie — Tue, 19 Apr 2011 05:17:17 +0000

I’m using Ubuntu a few years now, but the truth is that I don’t like the upcoming ‘cellphone edition’ (Unity) or KDE. The resource-hunger bothers me too. A bit eyecandy won’t hurt, but when your talking about 290MB? Reason enough (for me) to do a simple netinstall and put openbox, lxpanel, conky, wbar and gtk stuff on it. Eyecandy enough and it uses 40,1MB with a cold boot.

By: lorne greene

lorne greene — Tue, 19 Apr 2011 00:33:45 +0000

I use various KDEs, most usually PCLinuxOS, Mandriva and Gentoo.

I have Kubuntu installed on my Dell mini 9 with full cube effects and all. Just used it tonight at judo: other parents LOVED the cube and other effects… people love eye candy.

I am now at my folks place using their spare laptop which also runs Kubuntu (dad read about Shuttleworth and wanted Ubuntu. He tried it and said it looked like WIndows 95 and said no thanks. Luckily, we have choice and he found Kubuntu to his taste), its an old Acer laptop-tank and its running a Celeron chip and I bumped it up to a whole 1gb of ram and the shared SIS video card isnt made for 3D effects.
Works nicely.

Atom with igb ram and 7-8yr old Acer with 1gb ram dont fly like my 64bit system with 4gb ram but they are very usable.
If it wasnt, I would change.
I try about 6-7 distros a month so its not like I cant change it.

By: Kubuntu, for better or worse « Motho ke motho ka botho

Kubuntu, for better or worse « Motho ke motho ka botho — Tue, 19 Apr 2011 00:00:16 +0000

[...] K.Mandla’s blog of Linux experiences BlogAboutHowtosHardwareSoftwareProjects « The other *buntus [...]

By: mrreality13

mrreality13 — Mon, 18 Apr 2011 14:29:58 +0000

Ive played with lubuntu and mints version of lxde both kind nice and light for my usage
for my older lappy i use puppy

By: Duke

Duke — Mon, 18 Apr 2011 13:52:54 +0000

I use Ubuntu in my laptop simply because I do not have time to work on carefully configuring the hardware.

But then… I install fluxbox and make it the default window manager from GDM. In the end, I get an installation that may be a little bit heavier than others, but it works just fine even with 512M of RAM.

Even when I first installed Linux on a machine with 48M, Gnome would drag like crazy. Did I change the distro? No. At that time, I used WindowMaker and everything was fine. And it is more keyboard shortcut frendly. (That’s the reason I use Fluxbox anyway.)

By: Alan Rochester

Alan Rochester — Mon, 18 Apr 2011 13:25:08 +0000

Isn’t it time Distrowatch did something to reflect the true position?

The *buntus – Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Xubuntu, Lubuntu, Edbuntu – have a release cycle of 6 months. A new, clean install is recommended over an update. Is is any wonder that people keep downloading again and again? It would be interesting to know who is downloading the latest version of the *buntu when they already have/use *buntu.

The second most “popular” download is just given as “Mint”. Does that cover both the versions based on *buntu AND the version based on Debian? There is no differentiation.

Someone who uses a distro with a much longer release cycle e.g. Debian, or a rolling release e.g. Aptosid had no need to keep downloading. They just update…

By: mulenmar

mulenmar — Mon, 18 Apr 2011 13:23:42 +0000

IIRC, KDE is supposed to use more RAM at the start, but doesn’t increase nearly as much as you load more KDE programs.

By: Hippytaff

Hippytaff — Mon, 18 Apr 2011 11:09:06 +0000

I know there are a plethora of ‘Minimalist’ distros based on ubuntu. But this one
http://bodhilinux.com/index.html
is actually very impressive. You have probably heard of it, but I think it is worth a plug.

By: Moose

Moose — Mon, 18 Apr 2011 07:01:01 +0000

I don’t think any of the *buntu’s are very well done, although Ubuntu is tolerable. I actually set up a very nice looking Xfce configuration today, looks way better then my Gnome does. Still, I always wind up using Pekwm/Openbox/Fluxbox/Icewm. If I want a good Xfce I use Salix. Wonderfully configured Xfce. Many distros have a great KDE such as Mepis, Pardus, OpenSUSE and PcLinuxOS. Really no reason to use *buntu.

By: Tobias Mann

Tobias Mann — Sun, 17 Apr 2011 18:20:59 +0000

I ran with Kubuntu a few months back and got tired of it quickly actually. When memory usage was better than in Ubuntu the 6 Month release schedule has a huge effect on it. Optimizations often aren’t seen until the LTS.

However I have a ton of ram and I don’t cry when I hit 50% running 50 tabs in a few Chromium windows. It sandboxes, I remember that and think well I have another 2GBs sitting on top of this.

So yes I agree KDE does seem to use less MEM than Gnome, and yes KDE is very customizable, but the focus has been on Gnome.

And because of the strange movements of Gnome with version three I may find myself wondering back to KDE or even XFCE. :O