Hi all.

First off, I'm sorry about even mentioning the word distro; I'm sure you all are pretty fed up with it by now. I think I have a slightly new twist to it though...

I've been looking around for days now, trying to decide which distro to get. I've tried RH8 earlier, and I didn't like it much. It was much slower than windows on my cel 800, and that annoyed me enough to give it up (until now that is). It was good fun though, I got everything I really needed working So anyway, what I'm looking for is:


- A distribution that is fast. I assume this means a distribution that lets you choose software that's optimized for your hardware?

- A distribution that gives you alot of control when it comes to what is installed.

- I suspect that a reason for RH being slow is the window and desktop manager? If so, I want a distribution that lets me install something faster.


I guess basically what I'm saying is that I want something that is (feels)faster than windows and is fairly configurable. I don't like the idea of having tons of stuff installed that I have no clue to what it is, or what it does. Guess I should say that I've been looking at gentoo and slackware, and kinda concluded that without having a printer, or an online computer while I'm installing, those really aren't an option...

Any ideas and input would be GREATLY appreciated. Also links to how to optimize linux etc. would be nice.

If you want a quick and responsive desktop you shouldn't go with the heavy Gnome and KDE desktop environments. Choose something more lightweight like Openbox/Blackbox/Fluxbox or XFCE4 (which is pretty quick despite using the GTK2 toolkit). Bells and whistles usually decrease performance a lot (as can be seen with recent Fluxbox development tree releases) so stay away from useless eye candy.

When it comes to your distribution of choice...well...errr...you said it pretty well yourself. We've had it up to here.
Distributions that are often regarded as lightweight and highly configurable include Gentoo, Vector/Slackware, Debian and LFS. All of these are somewhat harder to install and configure than current versions of SuSE, Redhat/Fedora and Mandrake, but on the other hand you're bound to learn heaps of stuff if you stick with the less fancy distros.


Håkan

Thanks for the reply! Since you're svensk, I'll take you up on debian Ha det!

Just a pointer, if you can get a copy of Go! Linux floating around (it was a German distribution but it was in English and Swedish too), that may be worth it. I managed to get that running very quickly even on a P2 366MHz laptop. It's designed for beginners so command line usage won't be necessary (at least to start with, you will need it at some time though!). That's only recommended if you really want X with all the eye-candy though, although you can opt not to install it - it is very configurable, like you asked, and the considerably simpler/faster/crapper Another Level is also bundled with it.

That's kinda what I'm looking for - a pretty simple but fast graphical interface. Anyway, anyone who reads this and has input, please post it!

VectorLinux is pretty cool IMHO. It sets up a fully functional system with XFree86 and a choice of lightweight window managers and a sane assortment of applications.

It runs fairly quickly on my IBM Thinkpad 760XD (P166/48MB RAM) even with XFree86. I'm running an "old" (stable ) release of Fluxbox on it because it's pretty and it's fast.


Håkan

Håkan: I saw you mentioning vector, and now that I've checked it out, I just have to say that it looks COOL! Thanks, dude That's exactly what I've been looking for! The only thing now, I guess, is that I want their deluxe cd also, lol. Anyway, debian went down the drain. Going for vectorlinux...