4 ms·

I don't think Ubuntu or any of its variants--or "flavors"--are really well-suited for old machines. I find them to be very "bloated", as it were. I'd pick a bar

by Funes- 6y ago

I don't think Ubuntu or any of its variants--or "flavors"--are really well-suited for old machines. I find them to be very "bloated", as it were. I'd pick a bare-bones, basic installation of Arch/Artix and go upwards from there, probably using i3 as the window manager, too.

mixmastamyk 6y ago
That may have made sense twenty years ago, but more time has passed that perhaps realized. They're quite light when no unneeded apps are installed, and time is money, as they say. Spending a lot of time fiddling is a cost that is not going to help a no-revenue maintenance project like this succeed. Perhaps a light CentOS variant would be better as they tend to have longer support windows.
def_true_false 6y ago
KDE has decent performance these days. Then again, if one goes out of their way to avoid the default DE, it stands to reason they might want to avoid the distro and its questionable choices entirely.
the_pwner224 6y ago
This is immediately obvious if you install them in a virtual machine - even on the latest fast hardware Ubuntu and Fedora both lag pretty hard. Even Xubuntu is pretty slow. I use a VM for Zoom and MS Teams, so after some time dealing with it I finally gave up and installed Arch Linux with a minimal Openbox configuration. The VM gets to the desktop within a few seconds with autologin and automatic X starting, and is lighting fast (zoom and teams still a bit slow but everything else is instant). I set the Openbox menu to only contain the items I need - Zoom, unofficial teams-for-linux, v4l2 (webcam) test&configuration utility, pavucontrol (volume control), SimpleScreenRecorder, Thunar (file explorer) with my shared folder to get recordings out of the VM, and a shortcut to a .txt with my Zoom meeting IDs and passwords (Mousepad as the editor). It'd be nice to make a compact disk image from this and distribute it, but there are some machine-specific things that need to be configured for the VM - not hard, but you can't make it a zero-configuration download-and-run type thing (shared folders, selecting USB passthrough for webcam, configuring resource allocation to the vm, etc.). Installing Arch takes about 10 minutes and installing+configuring all the GUI software takes maybe 60 minutes more. Of course part of the slowness in VMs is due to not having fast graphics which GNOME etc. rely on, but again Xubuntu is pretty slow too, and if you install a GNOME distro on bare metal it still lags pretty often. Plus the boot times for Ubuntu & Fedora are also really high in the VM.
- fomine3 6y ago
  GNOME's slower performance in VM due to lack of HW accel is problem, why Red Hat decided to drop support other WMs?
- mixmastamyk 6y ago
  Super fast startup is not a requirement for this application. Also, I think you are overstating the case with the exception of Gnome 3. It just had a big performance regression fixed. Mate and xfce never suffered from it.

by Funes- 6y ago

mixmastamyk 6y ago

That may have made sense twenty years ago, but more time has passed that perhaps realized. They're quite light when no unneeded apps are installed, and time is money, as they say. Spending a lot of time fiddling is a cost that is not going to help a no-revenue maintenance project like this succeed. Perhaps a light CentOS variant would be better as they tend to have longer support windows.

def_true_false 6y ago

KDE has decent performance these days. Then again, if one goes out of their way to avoid the default DE, it stands to reason they might want to avoid the distro and its questionable choices entirely.

the_pwner224 6y ago

This is immediately obvious if you install them in a virtual machine - even on the latest fast hardware Ubuntu and Fedora both lag pretty hard. Even Xubuntu is pretty slow. I use a VM for Zoom and MS Teams, so after some time dealing with it I finally gave up and installed Arch Linux with a minimal Openbox configuration. The VM gets to the desktop within a few seconds with autologin and automatic X starting, and is lighting fast (zoom and teams still a bit slow but everything else is instant). I set the Openbox menu to only contain the items I need - Zoom, unofficial teams-for-linux, v4l2 (webcam) test&configuration utility, pavucontrol (volume control), SimpleScreenRecorder, Thunar (file explorer) with my shared folder to get recordings out of the VM, and a shortcut to a .txt with my Zoom meeting IDs and passwords (Mousepad as the editor). It'd be nice to make a compact disk image from this and distribute it, but there are some machine-specific things that need to be configured for the VM - not hard, but you can't make it a zero-configuration download-and-run type thing (shared folders, selecting USB passthrough for webcam, configuring resource allocation to the vm, etc.). Installing Arch takes about 10 minutes and installing+configuring all the GUI software takes maybe 60 minutes more. Of course part of the slowness in VMs is due to not having fast graphics which GNOME etc. rely on, but again Xubuntu is pretty slow too, and if you install a GNOME distro on bare metal it still lags pretty often. Plus the boot times for Ubuntu & Fedora are also really high in the VM.

fomine3 6y ago
GNOME's slower performance in VM due to lack of HW accel is problem, why Red Hat decided to drop support other WMs?
mixmastamyk 6y ago
Super fast startup is not a requirement for this application. Also, I think you are overstating the case with the exception of Gnome 3. It just had a big performance regression fixed. Mate and xfce never suffered from it.