Fast Distro's

[DaveQB]

Having heard the latest episode yesterday, I thought I would start a thread on Linc's topic of fastest Distro's out there. Why let him have all the fun through emails.


I too have been on this quest trying to get the most out of my P3 600 laptop.

What i have found are:

Feather
Puppy
DSL
Arch
Vector

From them, puppy gets the best write up, but I have yet to try it.

I found slack to run the same as Kubuntu (which I am currently running)

Arch looked good, but wiped it quick, as I was desperate to get my mp3 player working and Arch proved to me it wasnt an issue i thought it may have been.

On a side note, how long does OOo take to launch on everyone's old system's ???

I am folowing a thread on the OOo forums and so far I have by far the worst start up time

60 seconds without a document loading.

2:03 mins with the default kernel and a document openning.

So what do others get and what do you do to speed this up ??

[Gomer_X]

I don't think it's a matter of distro, it's what software you run on it.

I've got an AMD K6-3 400 Mhz with 192 megs of RAM running Fedora Core 3, and it's plenty fast. Of course I don't have X installed at all, but I still do a lot of work on this machine. I read all my mail on this box with Mutt, I do almost all my web development on it with Vim. I also use it as a CVS server, an NTP server for my network, and I also do some web browsing on it.

I imagine I could install X and use TWM or Fluxbox and it would do just fine.

As far as OOo start times, here's a radical idea: Don't install OpenOffice! Plenty of people use AbiWord and Gnumeric and don't use OOo at all. Trying to use OpenOffice on a low spec machine is like trying to herd cats. Save yourself the trouble.

[DaveQB]

Well from my experience, thee's a dramatic experience with different distro's speed. Of course, with X.

My favourite, Mandriva, it slow as shit on old hardware, but fast as Gentoo on a decent spec'd system. So I need to run something with decent speed on.

As for OOo, i really do need that on my laptop. Abiword and Gnumeric are on it, but they suck at importing OOo documents; may as well make the document from scratch tne try and tidy it up.

Koffice is much better at importing OOo doc's so i do use that, but it does struggle at times, especially with Presenter files.

[CptnObvious999]

I use Kubuntu and with the tweaks from Optimizing Desktop Performance Part I, Part II, and Part III it runs pretty fast and with KDE 3.4 it looks extremely awesome too. Although Gentoo might be somewhat faster I couldn't get it installed right, so I just downloaded Kubuntu (on dialup which is a magnificent acheivement ) and I don't want to try switching again. Although Gentoo may be more up to date not by much.

[DaveQB]

I have taken Vector for a mighty wirl and am very impressed with it indeed.

Its much more user friendly then I thought it would be, being a Slackware derivative. plus is fast as heck. Way faster then Slackware and Kubuntu was on my laptop.

Big thumbs up for older systems (and new ones too, I going to give it a shot on my desktop)

[danheneise]

i vote for slackware, i've tryed so many distro's within the last week and can't stop using slackware, nothing that I've tried beat's it's speed even running the i386 version on my athlon64