I'm just so sick of every distro being based on Ubuntu. Ubuntu has a great interface but it's fucking SLOW. It completely locks up several times a day on my Athlon 64 laptop. It seems like every distro out there now is either based on Ubuntu or Mandrake, both of which are fucking _slow_. What else is out there? Are all distros a bloated mess or are there some nice indie distros I'm not hearing about? Help me like Linux again guys. There is no excuse for the fact that I had a more responsive interface with Icepack Linux on an AMD K62 back in high school than I do on my current hardware.
Try Fedora (CD version only) and/or openSUSE. They are way less bloated and quite faster than Ubuntu. If you want to spend some time, you can maybe try Arch, or if you have 15 years, compile your own Gentoo.
I have no knowledge about Linux systems what so ever, but if this image is anything to believed you have dozens of options that aren't the one you're currently stuck with. Whether they're any good, I couldn't tell you.
Try Arch Linux. You can install only the stuff you want. Think of it as Gentoo without the hours of compiling.
>RPM based distros >Faster than ubuntu > If this is true, that's a real shame. That's like finding out that McDonalds is a healthy alternative to organic food or something. Bonus points to anyone who saw what I did there That just sounds like a pointless masochism.
All I'm saying is, if Fedora truly is faster than Ubuntu, that's pretty pathetic on Ubuntu's part, as historically RPM based distros tend to be sluggish pieces of shit.
Try Debian? I can assure you that, quite the opposite of your test case, Ubuntu is based on Debian. Alternately, if you don't mind some effort on your part, you could get the alternate installer, install a basic copy of debian, then instead of getting the standard debian desktop, you pop open a root terminal and apt-get install xfce4 XFCE is way more lightweight than GNOME.
I share your feelings, Mad Echidna. Seems like all linux software is becoming bigger and heavier, while not getting especially better in functionality. Have you tried Debian? There's been a new release out lately, and while I'm not as impressed with Debian as I once was, I think it's much less bloated than Ubuntu.
Then I must misunderstand how it works. Isn't RPM just the distribution media and then it gets unpacked when installing? If so, the end result should be the same either way...
It is, but historically Debian based distros have adopted processor optimizations at the compile stage earlier than RPM based ones. Nowadays it is the opposite, with Debian increasingly needing to support more architectures, it tends to use baseline processor optimizations (as Fedora used to). I've found that Fedora is usually faster for me over Debian and Ubuntu because of the processor optimizations and a few other things...
I tried Fedora a few years ago (2006). It was cocked out, big time. It ran very slowly on my old computer (which ubuntu also ran slowly on, but not as slowly as this fedora did). It seemed to me that what made it slow was the huge amount of services that were installed and run by default. I didn't enjoy the experience of trying to use it, and I replaced it with an ubuntu server (my distro of choice in those days) install pretty quickly. PENIS FOREVER!!! !!! !!!
The last Ubuntu I've tried was 9, and was having the same issues until I changed the window manager. Changing to FluxBox made it waay faster. Changing to IceWM turned it lightning fast compared to what it was before. Up to 10 - I think - they used Metacity for drawing window borders; if that's what your setup uses, change your window manager ASAP as Metacity is uselessly slow. Sure, most of the apps will still use GTK or whatever widgets, which will still be slow to load. But the desktop and window border load will easily show the difference. Give it a shot and perhaps unleash the power of your Ubuntu..! ...or something.
I'm getting sick too. Today, I installed Linux Mint on my main desktop computer. It was... fine I guess (slow). Then I proceeded to install NVIDIA drivers. Reset, Xorg wouldn't start. Reset, I was taken to some busybox prompt. Now I'm angry and going to install Snow Leopard again.
If you try Debian, I believe that the latest release, Squeeze, actually has experimental support for a kernel based on FreeBSD. Not having any experience with BSD-based kernels, I could not tell you if this would bring about improvements, but the one or two people I've spoken with online who have used BSD-based *nixes swear by them, so there's that. I guess it's worth seeing if the alternative kernel brings about BALZING FAST SPEEDS. Then again, perhaps just having a slimmed down... everything else would fix everything. At any rate, you want to make sure that all compositing is disabled and turned off. Recent releases of ubuntu are bad about defaulting this to on, even when your computer shouldn't really do that.
This, so much. Haiku is everything Linux used to be and more. If someone would at least port Virtual Box, that would be my primary OS in a fucking SECOND.
Is Haiku that great? I mean.. don't take me wrong, but it looks really primitive to me now. I hope Haiku grows though. PS: I'd be using PC-BSD if it wasn't for some propietary software that only have linux versions.. (Google Chrome) YES I know FreeBSD can run linux binaries blabla.. but how the hell do I install a deb package on a PC-BSD system?
Vector Linux is good and lightweight, if that's what you're looking for, but then, so is Puppy linux, but that looks like Windows 98. I operated on SliTaz and Slax back in November '09-January '10 , when my hard disk broke.
