9 months is plenty of support. My experience with Ubuntu users is that, after a few months, lots of people start asking "how do I upgrade firefox? how do I upgrade libreoffice? how to I upgrade the kernel?" and doing a release-upgrade every 6 months is a perfect solution for these users.

Debian Wheezy (Stable) works great without having to reinstall a new release every few months. Also Fedora's life/release cycles are great. I would go nuts if I had to install a new operating system every few months, which in part is why I stopped using Ubuntu and Ubuntu based distro's. And I don't say that lightly. I started using Ubuntu when it first came out. I loved it, I use to be a huge fan and I got many others to use it as well. I honestly think that they tell users this is what they want, whether they do or don't, when in reality it has to do more with Canonical not wanting to put time and effort into supporting it. But to each their own.

I want to add that I am not trying or meaning to bash Ubuntu. Each of us has a right to our opinions and thoughts. The above are mine.

Nothing wrong with using a very stable distro like Debian. I personally use CentOS on my work laptop.

Just making the observation that many Ubuntu users seem to find the software "outdated" and I suspect switching to Debian Wheezy would not satisfy these users on that count.

Also it is a complete myth that "Ubuntu users must reinstall every 6 months." The facts are, that the LTS releases are supported 5 years (longer than Debian Stable) and in any case, there is a granny-simple three-step upgrade procedure: http://www.ubuntu.com/download/desktop/upgrade

Three clicks every 6 months is not an onerous burden on the user, IMHO. Compare with, for example, what a Windows user goes through just to keep their system defragged and virus-free, not to mention a major upgrade like from Windows 7 to 8.

I was actually thinking of something like that as I was typing the reply. When I used Windows for mostly everything at one point I had to reinstall the system every 9-12 months. And as you said defragging and other maintainence, if done right, can take a lot out of each day.


Looks like we are both wrong on LTS. I thought the time was shorter. But it looks like, for LTS, it is 3 years for Desktop and 5 years for Servers. https://wiki.ubuntu.com/LTS That makes more sense than every few months.

This is why for subjects like this you should create your own thread Timmi, rather than tacking your own question on the end of another thread (even if its got the same suject).

The OP was 'mvickers' in 02-2012. You were replying to 'Timmi' who posted on this thread 11-2013.

Maybe for an interested adult/teenager, not for an 8 year old.

I'm a bit suprised to suddly see 'pro-ubuntu' posts from you snowpine.

Since they have now descended into trademark trolling in an effort to remove websites that are critical of canonical (and tell people who to remove the canonical spyware) I will never suggest any canonical OS.

Nope. Stupid canonical grpahics make data reading harder.

10.04 LTS is 3 years desktop, 5 years server.

12.04 LTS (Unity) is 5 years desktop/server.

Other desktops have different support lengths even on 'LTS' releases.

Sorry if my request caused some confusion.
Whether to create a new thread, or jump in on this one, was a judgement call. I believe in consolidation, where practical - in the end, I thought it might have been more efficient, since the OP and I are essentially looking for the same thing.

But with all due respect to OP, I think you can run pretty much any OS in 2GB of RAM (workstation OS, not server), and your applications will dictate if you need more, and how much that will be. My dad started programming in the late fifties, and in the late sixties, with 2KB of RAM, wrote code that could process payroll the size of that of a major corporation (the German Railway, no less). So if you ask me, if you can't make an OS run plenty fast in 2GB, it's just sloppy program code (whether that be the fault of the programmer, or the language and tools he chooses to code with).

In the case of my daughter's netbook, we wish an OS (preferable one of the 4 I mentioned) that will run efficiently in 512MB of RAM. If we upgrade it to 2GB, it'll just run better and still be a good choice. But I can't pick an OS if I have all that space to play with - the differences come out with more constraints. Ever notice how an OS slows down after 6 months to a year of use? Even in the case of the OP, it would be wiser to choose something that needs 1/4 of the RAM that we have at hand, than to find something that needs all that space from the outset. And our little eeePC brings that to the table. Otherwise, we are just splitting hairs on which OS runs best on any computer (because there is 2GB of RAM on OP's machine, after all), and that is a discussion that may never end.

Update: I've downloaded Linux Lite, have set an SD memory card up with it, and I'll have the netbook boot from the SD card for a while, with a dedicated data partition that is already on the hdd. If all goes well, I'll make a dual-boot hdd with Linux Lite, and winxp (to have something to fall back on, just in case). The eeepc has been reset to the original factory install of windows (thanks to the hidden restore partition). This will allow me to get a good feel for how it runs with Linux Lite versus how it was out of the box with Win. (although reading code from a Class10 SD card, although much slower than RAM, is still much faster than reading from a HDD and may give it a slight unfair advantage).

PS: @OP - for your machine, I would certainly choose Mint xfce or mate - without hesitation. It has a long track record for being good, with great support, worry-free codecs included, experienced guys running the operation, and hoisted itself up gradually to be the number 1 on distrowatch today. You can't go wrong. But on our machine, I fear it may be a little tight.

Windows bitrot. Linux doesnt seem to suffer from it, I've got a few very old installs that run just as fast as ever.

Class 10 SD is 10MB/sec minimum.

You will find faster class 10 SD cards around than 10MB/sec, however thats all it 'needs' to do to get a class 10 rating.

10MB/sec is bloody slow vs a HDD, even older versions. Old, say circa 2002/2003, HDDs will hit over 50MB/sec peak, and current HDDs will hit over 100MB/sec peak.

I guess I was thinking of access times - the time it takes to get little bits of information - and not data transfer rates - the time it takes to transfer quantities of information once they have gotten to the read-ahead buffer.

Access times for HDD are quoted in milliseconds, memory is quoted in nano-seconds. 1ms is 1000ns. but I know SD cards are way slower than RAM, so my guess, without googling, is probably a factor of 10 better than HDD, and factor of 10 worse than RAM. roughly - just order of magnitude.

I don't really know how it'll play out - the SD card is way faster in terms of access time, but the HDD beats it hands down in transferring what it has in it's read-ahead buffer to RAM for larger volumes of data. Don't forget though, that an SD card is quoted in MB per second (so for a class 10 that's still 80mbps - but with a much faster access time than say, 10ms for a HDD. for each 100ns delay in the SD card we have a 10,000ns delay on the hard drive. Even if your controller transfers the data at, say, 400Mb/s, that is 5 times faster than the 80Mbps of SD c10... we are still dealing with seek times that differ in order of magnitude by 100X ! And we're talking quoted specs for the controller in terms of potential data transfer rates (oh! how manufacturers like to make things look good), but that doesn't mean that the bus the controller is attached to is running at that rate - it may, it may not. We'd have to actually get into details like what is the transfer rate of the bus that the eeepc has the SD card reader on, versus that of the HDD (and in a small simple machine like the eeepc, both may actually be on the same bus). But I think we digress, because that varies from machine to machine, and isn't helpful towards our goal.

So things aren't that simple. All I wanted to say, is that we cannot necessarily transpose performance results from the OS ran from the SD card, to the other OS ran from the hard drive. Whether it favors one way or the other, or the differing advantages cancel themselves out, I'll bear in mind that both aren't installed on the same medium.

Ah ok. I see what the confusion was about with this thread. I will get in the habit of checking the dates And Canonical... Nothing I can do will stop the confusion I get from them these days.

Use backports that allows you to keep up with current versions. I do it in Debian and used to do it in Ubuntu.

Again use backports. My Wheezy based system has kernel 3.10, Iceweasel 25, LibreOffice 4.1 etc etc etc. The not up to date argument is invalid for people who know what to do.

Hmmmm. maybe now but when I was using Ubuntu it was quicker to download a new iso and do a clean install instead of using (what Widget used to cal) Update Mangler to update to the next release. Just for kicks I tried updating an up to date 10.04 to 12.04 and Update Mangler broke the system so much that I was forced to do a clean install.

1 members found this post helpful.

Acess times are only part of the story. When I've seen access times listed on reviews for SD cards, they are normally in ms (milliseconds). Access times for SD cards are allover the place, and a lot worse for writing than for reading, eg-

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/...10,2574-7.html

Even if you have a SD card with fast access times, a traditional HDD can still be faster in most situations. 10MB/sec is very slow.

No, I'm not just looking at the controller speed. If I was, I would have said 100MB/sec (ATA-6/UDMA-1000), 133MB/sec (ATA7/UDMA133) or 150MB/sec (SATAI) for a 2003 drive.

The 50MB/sec number for a 2003 drive I was using is a read world continuous speed. I only said 'peak' because HDDs slow down as you get further into the drive, so what can do 50MB/sec at the satrt might drop to 25MB/sec at the end of the drive.

Indeed a good question... I'm not keen on going backwards to a version 13 - I realize that the LTS versions strictly adhere to a timetable - but it came out in a period of transition, since which desired maturing came about.
According to the Mint website, MATE needs 512MB to run, while XFCE needs 384MB, but that both prefer 1GB+
Following the suggestion of LXDE, I visited Lubuntu website, and they aren't clear on how much memory is required. They only say that if you revert to text-everything command-line install you can install on between 32mb and 192mb, but that says nothing about running it.

Also, I think WattOS is out of the running for me. I haven't succeeded in finding good feedback on it to lend it support. Without information, I don't feel safe.

EasyPeasy is an awesomely designed OS - it just feels right on a netbook. But they have an alpha version of it's replacement, and I need this today.

Just read a commentary under LXLE, about it not being as reliable as Mint, but a little bit faster, although the user forgot to mention what version desktop he was comparing it to.

MATE will run on less than 512MB RAM, the issue with Mint is it is bloated (even LMDE is bloated) with alot of things that just are not needed. If you run mate-core (which is the basic panels etc) and don't go overboard with mate-desktop-environment-extra (which is the whole kit and caboodle) and then add big programs on top of that you'll be ok with 512MB RAM. It may not be the fastest DE out there with low RAM but getting away from underlying bloat that you never see and 99% of people never use and you'll be able to make any DE work on less than the advertised requirements.

1 members found this post helpful.

LTS as far as ubuntu/canonical is concerned is unity only. Other desktops have varing support lengths on a LTS release- IIRC with 12.04 KDE gets 5 years, Xfce gets 3 years, Lxde only got 18months, so Lubuntu 12.04 is almost out of support already.

What 'desired maturing' is there in mint 14+ that you need? With an old netbook, the hardware should be fully supported even on older releases.

Different distros will have different hardware/RAM requirements even if they use the same DE.

As far as lubuntu goes, I havent used a newish version for ages (never really liked Lxde myself). When I've run it on 32bit/1GB/debian 'sid' version which was roughly similar to the current debian stable, after starting it used about 80MB of RAM on idle.

I'd exepct that mint and most if not all ubuntu versions and ubuntu based distros will use more RAM than debian even if they are all using the same DE.

Mint isnt a DE, its a distro.

I'd guess that whoever wrote this was refering to Mint MATE. Seems to be nothing more than a point of view, not a hard fact.

I didn't use Linux when I was 8 years old (it hadn't been invented yet) so I have absolutely zero personal experience of which Linux distro is the best choice to be installed, maintained, and updated by an unsupervised child. Perhaps mommy or daddy can give the kid just a little bit of help, if they want to nurture this hobby?

Don't act so surprised: Ubuntu was my first distro, and I have thousands of posts on UbuntuForums. That being said, I no longer use or recommend Ubuntu (for a variety of reasons). Rather, my previous post was defending the 6-month release cycle (used by several of the top distros: Ubuntu, Mint, Fedora, etc.) for home/media/projects/games/education, as I feel the concept is often unfairly maligned on the forums. People forget that the 6-month cycle was Ubuntu's original "killer feature" that gave it the edge in popularity over Debian, for casual users. Once I got into the mindeset that my operating system is a disposable consumer product with a 6-month planned obsolescence, it was actually very liberating, and gave me confidence to tackle risky intermediate projects, because I knew I would be reinstalling a blank slate in another few months no matter what.

For work/productivity, I use and recommend very stable distros with a long release/support cycle, such as: Debian stable, CentOS, Slackware, etc.