Hi guys! I currently am a college student who doesnt have the money to to buy an expensive computer, so I was forced to purchase a cheap computer with Vista. It has a 3ghz intel proccesor, and 756mb RAM, and it is PATHETICALY SLOW!!! I hate Vista so much its not even funny. I was going to down grade to XP again, but honestly, I hated that OS too...So now I am looking at a Linux OS. What distro would you guys recomend? I really want something that will go MUCH faster than the Vista that I have now. I dont have any experience with linux yet, but I'm fairly handy with computers. I was either thinking about the Ubuntu, or the Slackware what do you guys think?

Thanks,
Daniel

If you've got the time and space, why not install and discover both? Or install one and run a Live CD version of the other (though only for the experience, CDR's are slower, right).

cool, thanks for the reply are there any that run faster than others? I would like it to look good, but i'm not too concerned about anything flashly, I would rather have something faster, than a flashly Vista type OS...

My "Getting started" link might help...

thanks guys! I am thinking about going with ubuntu, but because Vista was sooo slow, would you recommend the xubuntu instead? oh yeah I checked my computer, and I don't have 756mb RAM, I have 512mb...and a shared ATI radeon Xpress 200 graphics card...would the standard Ubuntu with beryl be super slow like Vista is? and what exactly are the differences between the Ubuntu and xubuntu, other than the xubuntu comes with a "clean" empty desktop?

thanks again,
Daniel

The differences between the *buntus are the type of desktop it uses and the software that's installed by default. Xubuntu uses xfce which is more stripped down and less resource heavy. The xubuntu developers also gear seem to choose default software that's also uses less resources. Kubuntu uses KDE which is probably the heaviest of the three available *buntus, but it has a lot more integrated together and I've heard a lot of people say it feels more similar to windows in behavior than other desktops. Ubuntu uses gnome which is probably closer to KDE in resource use though a little lighter and the software isn't as tightly integrated as in KDE. I've heard people say they think it feels more like a mac's interface, but other than the default position of menubars I don't really see it.

I have a similar amount of ram and an older processor and video card. I usually run KDE with no problems. When I tried out beryl it slowed down a little but was definitely usable. Trying beryl with XFCE didn't seem to affect the performance at all. I'd say burn all three liveCDs and see which you like the feel of the best, though keep in mind that when running the liveCD will be slower than when you have installed it to a harddrive.

you could just get ubuntu and install xfce if its slow

I think you will find that the heaviest of linux distro's is lighter than vista, or even XP. word on the street is ubuntu is very very easy to install and learn though I have never tried it myself. if you need to go lighter than xubuntu you will probably need to step up to a slightly less user friendly distro like arch [my current distro of choice] or gentoo. xfce on arch on my P4 2.8 HT with 1 gig of ram and on board video is faster than a computer I built for a client with a athlon 64 4600+ with 2 gig of ram, a 10k rpm HD, and an nvidia pcix video card that had a very light XP pro install. I do really recommend trying the livecds for each version of ubuntu and seeing which feels friendliest to you, they should all be faster and lighter than vista on the same hardware. XFCE is probably the most non intuitive of the 3 desktop options discussed in the thread because it is based on the CDE desktop from solaris, I use CDE at work so its a little more comfortable for me.

Hey... I'm a newbie, too. My experience so far has been that PCLinuxOS2007 seems to run well. I'm using it on a beat up laptop with less than a gig of processor.

Not to encourage or discourage one distro over the other, but for me, PCLOS is one of the simplest ways to get started w/Linux as a Windows convert.

Install took me less than 20 minutes on an ancient system. Even so, it runs well, and I haven't had any issues. Your mileage may vary. Download the ISO, and burn it as an image (your can find plenty of freeware burners for Win that will do this).

If you have a few CD-R's to spare, do as the others suggested and try different distro's. That's the beauty of Linux; you're not stuck with just one version.