which is the fastest OS
 

hi, since I've tried most of the linux distros, (ubu, xubu, kubu, mint, suse, vector, pear, puppy, salix,
lubuntu, chakra, snowlinux, fedora, xpud, lubit ecc.) just to say some of them and actually now I've a bit of confusion, so I'd like to ask you: for my pc HP mini 5103 which is the fastest OS? (I don't care about the booting time, I mean how fast is to open programs or files) I don't use it to watch movie, only to write docs, e mails, listen some music or correct some pictures (gimp).
Thanks a lot for your kindly replay. Bye ms

Well with that kind of netbook, the distro is less important. It depends on what you run. The full blown desktop like KDE, gnome and even Xfce will obviously not perform so well. Get a lightweight window manager and you will have more resources available for running programs. If it has the usual 1366x768 resolution (which I believe it does) you can install a basic panel or dock and keep it on the left/right to avoid wasting vertical space.

HP 5103

OpenBox, Fluxbox,Icewm, like cynwulf stated is how I fly on my Netbooks.

I guess E17 or LXDE woulkd be my next choice.

The fastest one will be the one with least amount of background processes running.
AntiX fits the bill for me for that on my Atom Netbooks.

I guess Salix Ratpoison would be pretty fast, but beyond your skill set to drive.
But, I could be wrong about that. It would not be the 1st time I made a wrong assumption.

Trick is I guess finding Broadcom support for your wireless in a live session.
I think Crunchbang Linux with OpenBox has Broadcom wirless support in a live cd session.

You're gonna have to spend some time optimizing your distro.

I have an Atom netbook, similar to that one and here's what I did to optimize it. I use fluxbox for the window manager, but you can choose any light one like icewm, openbox, etc. NO KDE or GNOME for sure. XFCE is in-between. I use 64-bit Slackware on it, but you can use Gentoo or LFS or Salix. I compiled a custom kernel, but this makes slightly less of a performance difference. I also recompiled glib, glib2, and glibc with optimization because everything depends on these being fast. With Gentoo you can compile everything yourself, so that will be faster, but on an Atom processor this will take a while.

I recommend these CFLAGS:

I'm running Slackware 14.1 with LXDE on my Asus eeepc 1001HA, and I've increased the RAM to its maximum 2 GB. It's not fast, but I didn't expect it to be. But it's not too slow, either.

I'm surprised you find it slow. It's not a home users' computer, like the eeepc, but aimed at a business market: you've got 2GB and a dual-core processor, which is more than I have on either of my computers.

My Thinkpad is slow, with a Pentium M processor. On that I use Salix with Xfce, which does reasonably well. Look at the daemons running, and shut off all unnecessary services.

If you are unhappy with some of those you noted then there may be other issues going on here. You seem to have many of the distro's that are targeted towards low end systems.

My Dell Mini 9 netbook has 2 GB RAM. Currently I'm running Mint 17 and E17 and it works just fine.

If I'm not using E17, I use Fluxbox.

There is no true fastest. The real end result comes from how well your system software is optimized with a balance between stability and performance, as well as hardware.

FreeDOS? Although it may not be exactly what you are after... ;-P
FatDog is pretty fast too (64-bit only).

My guess would be these, as all are written in pure assembly:

http://www.returninfinity.com/baremetal.html

http://www.menuetos.net/

http://kolibrios.org/en/

Arguments can certainly be made against them, but its my two cents.

one learn a lot with you!

:-)

(BTW I carry both racy (puppy) and FatDog with me in memorystics. Pocket Linuxes! You can borrow your friend's HW only without touching his/her disk.)

Probs Crunchbang
 

Of all the distros I have used, probably crunchbang because its a openbox environment. Elementary os also seemed to be very fast!

I've got slitaz booting faster than any other distro i've used. Along with coreboot, i've got my entire boot time to 6 seconds.