I have an Acer Aspire One AO722. It's an 11.6" netbook with an AMD C-60 APU. I'm looking for a full featured dirsto that doesn't have a lot of over-head and that doesn't hog screen real-estate.

I'm currently running Ubuntu 12.04 and love the Unity design and how efficient it is with screen space, but I hate the resource consumption. Even with Unity2D, the CPU never sits idle (usually 10-20%) and I get about 4 hours battery life, vs the 7 hours I get with Windows 7 (Animations disabled, Composition, Peek, and Aero buttons enabled).

I've tried Xubuntu, but it's not that great with screen space, and takes for ever to set up because I end installing LibreOffice (amongst other programs), keyboard shortcuts (which don't always work), and completely overhauling the layout; it's too much work. More or less the same with Lubuntu as well (except there is an extra step where I have to edit a configuration file to output to speakers instead of HDMI)

The distro I'm considering is Linux Mint. It's very fast on my desktop, and I have no real gripes about it. I think the issue with my netbook is that I would something a little different because Mint is set up too similarly to Windows, but again, not a real gripe. Just not enthusiastic about it.

I just kinda want to try something different, featured, and efficient with screen space that isn't outright wasteful with hardware resources (*cough* Unity *cough*). Is there anything else out there that might suite my needs?

Additional specs:
1GHz dual-core/ 1.33GHz Turbo
Radeon 6290
2GB DDR3-1066
64GB Crucial M4 SSD

I think the problem is the 1GHz CPU, it is somewhat slow.

Mint is afaik very similar to Ubuntu or Kubuntu. I think your choice will depend on your knowledge about Linux. With some experience you could also try distributions like Slackware, Arch or Gentoo (when you do the compiling on another computer). These need much less recources. I've for example Slackware-13.37 installed on an old laptop with Intel Celeron (2.8GHz) and only 256MB of RAM, it works properly.

Markus

If you want to go for Mint I would recommend the MATE edition, it should be much lighter on resources than the Cinnamon edition. Also keep in mind to install the proprietary AMD video drivers to get a better battery life and things like proper video decoding, which helps a much to reduce CPU usage and power consumption.

The resource issue is Ubuntu specifically. I have the same problem with my 2.8GHz Core 2 Duo laptop and 4.5GHz Core i5 desktop. Also, I have no performance issues with Windows aside from Flash applications. I do have some experience with Linux and the terminal. I've tried Arch in a VM and it worked fine, but when I put it on real hardware I couldn't really get it to work (wireless, graphics, updating/installing software), plus rolling releases tend not to have the stability I would like. I don't have any experience with Gentoo or Slackware.


I'll give MATE a shot. I've been a little afraid of Mint's fork projects as I've had problems with both in the past, but Cinnamon finally impressed me, so I'm somewhat hopeful with MATE.

Then try Slackware. The hardware support depends not on the distribution but on the kernel-version, you can be pretty sure that the hardware which is supported by Ubuntu (wireless and graphics) is also supported by Slackware.

Slackware is not a rolling releas but rocksolid. We have a very helpfull and knowledgeable community here at LQ http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/slackware-14/

Markus

It's definitely different. :P

I'm going to slap on Mint MATE on my netbook and play around with slackware in a VM before I install it. It looks interesting

You might try Debian Wheezy (or any distro, really) with the Gnome 3 desktop, which in my opinion has most of the good usability features of Unity, but fewer of the performance/stability problems.