What distro should I use on an older PC?

[Wally Balljacker]

Vector is basically just Slackware, with alittle pizzazz on a new 2.6 kernel. It's real fast, and lightweight, with Gslapt/slapt-get for package management. My only gripe with Vector is the small number of packages available in their repository, although anything from LinuxPackages.net, or Slackware's official repository should work.

[Jza]

Any distro might run, Linux run on a bunch of text files, scripts, and the binaries are really reduced.

Really any distro will do it, just depends what you want to do. Desktop apps can be really heavy, using OpenOffice.org, Firefox, Mono and X might eat like 300mb of RAM.

Gnome is slow, KDE is slow, OOo is slow and Firefox is also slow, there are other apps that are slimers.

Abiword-Gnumeric, Opera, XFCE/Enlightment and you should be all set. Unfortunately things like X might have some issues so really invest time in learning which XFree / Xorg version should you use since there is a track record of memory leaks.

[snarkout]

Vector is basically just Slackware, with alittle pizzazz on a new 2.6 kernel. It's real fast, and lightweight, with Gslapt/slapt-get for package management. My only gripe with Vector is the small number of packages available in their repository, although anything from LinuxPackages.net, or Slackware's official repository should work.

I really have a hard time with slapt-get, and the multiple repos you have to enable. I'm sure it's just a personal thing, but everything feels very piecemeal - incomplete. I don't want to have to research which of 50 different sources to get packages that aren't included in the base system. This is more or less what I don't like about slack as well. I'm sure with more familiarity, I'd have a better idea what I'm doing. Maybe what I need is a good slaptrc (or whatever) - but even then, you get multiple choices for several packages, and afaict, no indication which repos they're associated with when you do a slapt-get --search. Also, in what way is slackware's /etc/rc.d in any better than sysv? IMO its far more confusing. Even if it's not, it's certainly no less confusing. And wtf is up with lilo? Is there seriously anyone out there who's had major problems with grub being unstable?

The installer for vector was very slick though, and funny. It required possibly even less "attention" than the debian sarge installer does - answer a few questions, and go away for 20 min. Come back to a functional system. Very well done.

[CptnObvious999]

Any distro might run, Linux run on a bunch of text files, scripts, and the binaries are really reduced.

Really any distro will do it, just depends what you want to do. Desktop apps can be really heavy, using OpenOffice.org, Firefox, Mono and X might eat like 300mb of RAM.

Gnome is slow, KDE is slow, OOo is slow and Firefox is also slow, there are other apps that are slimers.

Abiword-Gnumeric, Opera, XFCE/Enlightment and you should be all set. Unfortunately things like X might have some issues so really invest time in learning which XFree / Xorg version should you use since there is a track record of memory leaks.

I use KDE and for the most part only KDE. If you use Konqueror for webbrowsing, KOffice for office suite, and all the other KDE centric apps they load pretty snappy, especially with the new qt (theres also a patched qt that makes it even faster, its in the svn repository to be used for KDE4 but I havn't tried it).

Mine is using 330MB of RAM with konqueror, beagle daemon, ktorrent, skype, yakuake, mysql, apache, kerry, kmail, akregator, kopete, xorg 7, kde 3.5.2, and a few smaller programs in the background.

KDE does use more resources than fluxbox or enlightenment but if you have enough RAM it feels very fast. If you have a decent computer it should run fine.

[Judland]

I really have a hard time with slapt-get, and the multiple repos you have to enable. I'm sure it's just a personal thing, but everything feels very piecemeal - incomplete. I don't want to have to research which of 50 different sources to get packages that aren't included in the base system. This is more or less what I don't like about slack as well.

All I can really say about it is this: after almost two months running Slackware on my test box, each and every system wide upgrade with slackpkg has worked without any breakage.

As long as I can keep my KDE updated to the nearest first decimal point, I'm happy.

[snarkout]

I really have a hard time with slapt-get, and the multiple repos you have to enable. I'm sure it's just a personal thing, but everything feels very piecemeal - incomplete. I don't want to have to research which of 50 different sources to get packages that aren't included in the base system. This is more or less what I don't like about slack as well.

All I can really say about it is this: after almost two months running Slackware on my test box, each and every system wide upgrade with slackpkg has worked without any breakage.

As long as I can keep my KDE updated to the nearest first decimal point, I'm happy.

So how do you deal with packages that aren't part of the basic repos, and require strange actions on your part? Case in point - udev, hal, and dbus - installing hal and dbus requires me do *downgrade* udev in nearly every case - not something I really want to do. Plus, the "enable testing, upgrade what you want/need and then disable it" shuffle is counter-intuitive to me, and honestly seems like a recipe for disaster. Maybe it's perfect for people who want to spend a lot of time making their systems just so, with multiple versions of packages to choose from. It's kind of a bummer, since I was really hoping slack would be, to me, the awesome distro so many others feel it is - I'd love to have the simplicity of arch w/ more stability. I'm really not seeing the "simplicity" in slackware.

I guess what I'm saying is that it seems to me that keeping my slack/vector system up to date with the components I would want would be equally as much a time-sink-hole as fixing the occasional breakage I deal with in arch. Again, maybe I'm wrong - if someone wants to give me an example slaptrc file I can try, I'd be more than happy to try again.

[Judland]

I really can't comment on that topic... I haven't bothered with such things.

Believe it or not, I actually don't mind having to mount and unmount my storage devices. I actually like having that control over them. But that's just me.

I have hal and dbus working on my main Arch system and, quite frankly, it acts "strangely" sometimes.