I currently use a win 2000 and its does what I need it to. On a pentium 2, basic tasks( opening folders, looking in the start menu, creating files etc.) it does it in a good amount of time. Yet when I used both debian gnome and xfce, The speed of these tasks lagged. On KDE, it was so slow I couldn't get anything done. I have tried LXDE, its goes fast, but I couldn't seem to like it.

Just wondering... why is the default desktop enviroment on linux, slower than win 2000???

It shouldnt be that different, unless you've got some issue.

I'd doubt that its due to not enough RAM, but its possible. Win2000 wil run on 64MB (though it wont be happy), even debian Xfce will run horribly on 64MB. I wouldnt be surprised if you had driver issues. No video drivers, or poor video drivers can make everything lag badly.

BTW, there is no 'default desktop enviroment on linux', and dont forget that Win2000 is 11 years old and out of support.

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Cascade's driver theory seems plausible.I am running Pentium Centrino w/512Mb ram and intel graphics, on a 2005 laptop, I have 2 different distros and one does better then the other. One also has current support for my video card, and the one that doesn't? ...
Compiz (Graphic windows manager) won't work right, my Dock takes forever to load, opening windows is a pain (of course compiz is on, just set minimal), it won't do anything video related well at all,mouse lags from time to time. I switch over to my supported distro and everything works fine (compiz on full), flash is happy, windows just pop open, my mouse doesn't lag, etc ... and both of them boot faster then my computer did when I had XP.

If you are just looking to try a minimal Desktop, Fluxbox is pretty cool. It was recommended to me once, and it is simple. Panel,right click to access menus, and that's about it. Fluxbox has different styles (I think they are all done in script, not 100% sure though) and what not but it is definitely not gnome,xfce,kde, or unity ... it is small and light. Some things are a little tricky to setup on it, but once it gets going it's a mini-beast

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Well, if you are comparing an OS from year 2000 to an actual version of linux then you already have your response. Memory requirements alone will make a big difference. Would you expect Windows 7 to work on that machine?

So, you will have to use something adequate to your machine. That could be a modern distro with a light desktop like lxde (which you don't like), fluxbox, openbox, enlightenment, or an old distro that uses kde 3.x (not 4.x), pyppy linux, dsl, or something like that.

Alternatively, you could try adding more ram to your machine, if that's the problem. You can use the top or htop tools to see the memory usage. You are probably hitting swap heavily (which is slow) when you open any of the big desktops.

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There is not "default Linux desktop". Linux is just a kernel, it can't even be used directly. I guess that the closest thing to a "Linux default desktop" is the command line.

GNOME and KDE are more about eye candy than minimalism.

Also, there are many lightweight window managers (not desktop environments).

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Have a look at AntiX and Vector Light. They'll both run in 64MB, so they're not very demanding. The window manager is Ice: I remember using that a decade ago on a 66MHz Motorola 68060!

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as other people have said, ofcourse a current linux distro wouldn't have the same system requirements as windows 2000. the release dates are 11 years apart. if you compared the system requirements of a linux distrobution from 11 years ago with windows 2000 it would be way lighter.

there are a few lightweight distros out there though.

you could look into crunchbang, puppy linux or slitaz... though if i was looking for a resource light distro i would probably just build debian with lxde.

crunchbang is probably the one you'll be most interested in.

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Windows is a good product. I don't know why people bash it all the time.

If you like it then keep it.

BeOS used to be much faster and maybe Haiku-OS is still faster.

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yes you are comparing apples to oranges
if you were to find a linux distro from the era your computer was built and installed it on the machine i'm sure you'll find a different result, however older distros require a bit more knowledge to use and don't have as much automation as modern ones do
newer distributions assume you have newer hardware and install software that requires newer hardware to function with any decent speed, but being linux you can change that and install a lighter weight desktop environment, this of course requires a big of know how
another suggestion is to at the very minimum add ram to your machine (preferably upgrade to the max amount your board supports), and if possible i would go farther and say upgrade the video card to the best you can afford for that machine's hardware (pII is probably pci or agp video card), those 2 changes will show probably the most bang for your buck in terms of performance enhancement.

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I like windows 2000 for its speed on my old hardware. I also like the design of the filesystem and the start menu. The only problem I have with windows 2000 is it doesn't work with newer software. Google Chrome refuses to install on anything less than xp sp2. K-Melon just doesn't run, for some reason. Other applications, I just have to add dlls to the system dir.

Haiku-OS sounds like a good idea for me. It's lightweight. The file system layout looks simple enough for me, and it looks like theres a good sized software repository.

Does dual boot on a dell optiplex gx1, pentium 2 with 254 mb ram sound good?

You could also try Linux with a plain window manager (no desktop environment).

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I know a desktop enviroment contains a window manager, but what does a desktop enviroment consist of? This wouldn't leave me with the command line would it?

If it would be command line, what windows would there be to manage?

A desktop environment is basically consists of a window manager, panel, file manager, program that draws desktop icons, and a suite of consistent applications. You don't need any of these to be able to comfortably use a GUI, other than the window manager and possibly the panel. Also, you can still use DE-dependant applications (all they really need is a DE-specific shared libaray to be loaded, they don't need the DE itself to be running).

Right now, for example, I'm usign the Openbox window manager and the "tint2" panel.

The panel isn't even really necessary because Openbox lets you switch windows and desktops by keyboard shortcuts and by a menu that appears when you middle-click the desktop.

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Ugh, chrome takes like 6x the ram that win2000 needs to run (and that provided that you won't use more than a couple of tabs), you wanted a strange marriage there and it failed, no wonder. Also, I have no idea what you mean with "the design of the filesystem". The Win implementation of fat32 is not the best (just try to open a directory with many hundreds of files, or look at the artificial 32gb limit when partitioning) every other OS does better at handling fat32, and that's a real pity when it was MS that created it in first place.

Or maybe you meant the directory layout. But that's an entirely different thing...

Uhm…

IMO Haiku is fine to stick in a virtual machine, but I don't think it's really that great of an idea to install it on physical production hardware.