You mean like Mint Fluxbox CE is out of the box saving you all those extra steps...

Eh, I've never tried mint. I assume it's a lot like Ubuntu which means a little slow. I really like Slackware and run it on my desktops. Salix is an interesting offshoot of Slackware to me. To each his own.

One thing to consider is that Mint Fluxbox comes with a particularly effective menu system. It should work well in Ubuntu, but some of the entries in the root menu will probably need to be changed.

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Hi everyone, personally I'd like to thank you all for participating. I trust the discussion will continue for all those interested and looking at the different Mint Community Editions.

For the moment, I've reinstalled everything in Mint 8 standard, pending more stability and less bugs in the Mint's CEs.

And although I love Mint ubuntu, I can't help but wonder if Mint will be releasing a super small and fast edition for underpowered netbooks.

And in the meantime, I will try out (this may please a poster or two here):
for my fastest machine (and possibly my other ones), the new upcoming PCLinuxOS that issues in versions for all the popular windows managers (KDE, LXDE, XFCE, FluxBox...) and there is even a superlight edition. What attracted me is how distrowatch describes it: stable, fast, has all the media codecs and hardware detection we all want and expect; even their criticism of the author being very conservative and not having a fixed frequency upgrade cycle pleases me, because quite frankly, reinstalling a distro every 6 months and having to address new bugs doesn't appeal to me at all.

EDIT: tried PCLinuxOS miniME today... rather slowwww... awaiting upload of the other new editions.

I run Leeenux 3.0 on my slow netbook, and with it, it has become faster... although the upcoming Puppeee may just make it fly. EDIT: bugs in Puppeee... some common with Puppy - needs to ripen.

So, to sum it up, I will meet you here again, once Lubuntu is stable and maybe a new Mint based on it comes out...

I have a satellite a205 with intel graphics. I'm now intrigued and will have to install fluxbox on the Ubuntu boot to see what happens.

Please try also ArchBang 2.00 Timmi as its Arch Linux, very nice with precustomized Openbox desktop
http://archbang.org/

and if you aint got spare cd, you can dd it to usb or install manually
I can tell you how

Thanks. I read a lot of good about it and tried it, and it did not appeal to me. I find it hard to be enthusiastic about a distro after having used Mint for a while. I found it to lack polish, and require more end-user intervention to get it running compared to Mint.

I have an A100 VA7, which is a core2duo with Centrino chipset (all intel chips for graphics, bus control, and wifi). I think graphics is an Intel 950 (and my memory tells me it was developed with ATI, having seen something to that effect in the docs years ago).

Mint is VERY fast on my core2duo (but then again, what isn't).
I tried those, and came away disappointed. Although a lot of good is written about them, they didn't seem to work well on my hardware, and aren't as much for newbies as Mint ubuntu is. EDIT: my memory is telling me there were bugs in salix, and that is why I discarded it. Unfortunately many distros lack the human resources to do really thorough testing before release.

Yes, thanks, I agree. But it is buggy on my system. Also, a cause for displeasure, is that the Mint CEs aren't any smaller than the original, suggesting to me that they all use the standard Mint gnome edition as a starting point to build other windows managers onto. Other distros vary much more in ISO MB when you look at them... suggesting that their LXDE, Fluxbox or XFCE versions, being much smaller, may run faster on netbooks and generally slower hardware.

Even on top of Gnome, fluxbox will run much faster on slower hardware. I just installed fluxbox from the Ubuntu repos on top of a base gnome. While disk space isn't smaller, it is MUCH faster. Granted my oldest/slowest machine is a celeron at 2.8 Ghz witha GB of RAM, but the differnce is night and day. Browserlinux was also fast and could play the limited media I threw at it out of the box. http://www.browserlinux.com/ It's a smaller version of puppy.

Do remember that smaller doesn't necessarily mean faster or slower. Processes that don't load when booting or logging in generally don't effect the speed of the distro as a whole. That and you're more than welcome to screw with the default settings to whatever end. Do keep in mind that not every combination of software works well with every combination of hardware. At Mint we're fully aware of this fact and we're going to continue to try and resolve it, but it's still there and we know it.

Would you care to message me your email address. There's a private beta of something in the works and I'd like to get your scrutinizing input.

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Yes that is perfectly correct.

I was thinking that reduced ISO size is often an indication of smaller apps, and smaller apps generally run faster. On a netbook with an SSD size matters, and on just about any netbook, SSD or HDD, speed matters.
(edit)

I (superTimm) can't (@) wait (gmail) !

This thread came up in Google search, actually.

Xfce4 takes 40 seconds to start on Suse 11.2 (Yes I have counted the seconds) and on contrast Lxde takes 1.2 seconds !!