Hello again. I have been using Ubuntu 7.04 for just over a year now, and I have noticed that it is getting a bit old (it's getting hard to find packages, for example). I am looking to upgrade, but my concern is that I have found Ubuntu to run a little slower than I expected. I have it installed on an older machine, so I am looking to find a distro that will run well on it with minimal sluggishness. I read that a liveCD installation of Fedora might work well, but I am not sure. If anyone has any advice about how well Fedora 10 would work on an older computer (or if I should keep looking), I would appreciate it. Thanks.

Fedora
Pros:
latest. Has good support.
Cons:
slow

Debian:
Pros:
fast and configurable
very large user grou
cons:
stable versions are not bleeding-edge latest but are a bit old

I would recommend debian (which is the parent of ubuntu). So in case you feel u want a system which is fast and more
responsive go for debian (lenny/sid). In case you feel you need easy configuration and things to work out-of-the-box
then go for the latest version of ubuntu.

I am sure may of the people here may have different opinions. I am not starting a flame here !!!

It might help to know what type of computer you are running... If it is an older computer I am assuming that it is slower and underpowered meaning that you would be looking for a "lighter" desktop environment. You could keep your current OS if you are comfortable with it and just switch to a smaller desktop manager. I run Xfce on a 3 gig hard drive and it is extremely fast and responsive. Look up either Xubuntu, Debian w/ Xfce, or openSUSE with Xfce. I tried Fedora before and didn't like it.

Try http://www.dreamlinux.com.br/ for an older system.

For older computers with <512 MB RAM, Vector Linux is best. Other possibilities: XFCE things mentioned above or LXDE ones (for <128 MB RAM)

Probably the major issue with running Fedora would be that each version is only supported for 13 months. After that their are no official updates of any kind. One of the reasons that Fedora is sometimes called slow is that a default install has tons of extra stuff running. Half of which most users will never use. You can shut off a lot of this and see a significant speed upgrade.

If you have 512 ram or more and are looking for long term support, I would look at Centos. Centos is RHEL(Red Hat Enterprise Linux) with the logos removed and is binary compatible with RHEL(made from same source code). It is free to download/update (unlike RHEL) and has a five year (plus) support life. It does suffer the same problem as Fedora in that everything but the kitchen sink is turned on in a default install.

Thanks guys, the PC I'm talking about has about 300 MB of RAM, so I think I'll have to go with something else. I hear Xubuntu is good for this situation, or perhaps openSUSE. Thanks again!