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I've been using linux for 4 years now(if I'm correct), ubuntu 6.04 lts being my first experience(very good start I might add). now I can't make up my mind on the hundreds of distros available. what I do know is I want kde... I also have a few questions/problems...
first i should say the hardware i'm running on is:
intel pentium m 1.2 ghz
512 mb RAM
60 gb hdd (21 gb [windows], 9 gb ext4 [pclinuxos] (9 gb etx4 [empty] 1 gb fat32 [for hdd installs] 28 gb fat32 [data] 1 gb fat32 [pagefile]) 1gb [swap])
ati radeon mobility 9200
kde3 vs 4: I like kde4 and have seen it out perform kde3 in slackware, but I've also seen kde3 run insanely faster and smoother on a live CD of nimblex in fact my live CD of nimblex can outperform any hdd install I've put on this computer(pclinuxos 2010, slackware 12.3-current, xubuntu, kubuntu and ubuntu)
redhat base vs debian base vs slack (or any other):
the only redhat base I've found tolerable as far as dependencies is pclinuxos, although it's very user friendly, installs proprietary driver on setup, and wine worked on my first try, it seems to lag a little as if it's using a little more system resources than it should, and flash based videos drop to 4fps or lower in full screen mode
the only debian distro I've found that wasn't basic and bland was ubuntu and its counterparts which seams to be very bloated and runs slow on here although i do enjoy the fact they have irc support right on hand when you need them and they're getting better at proprietary drivers
slackware I've found is very easily tweaked, somewhat lighter that most of what I've used i would prefer it to run a little faster but i don't know how to get it up to par on speed, never did get wine working on it, and i had the option of audio and missing drivers for my ethernet card or recompiling the kernel and losing audio for ethernet
of course i could run dsl or knoppix, or even nimblex, but with major restrictions and excellent speed. I'm actually wondering if there's a distro out there that's balanced performance user friendliness and options, or if maybe i could stick to a choice I've already got and fix the issues i have in ether pclinuxos or slackware
Linux Mint based on Debian testing may be worth looking into although you would have to apt-get kde as at the moment it only comes with a Gnome desktop.
Keep in mind with your CPU & RAM you can just barely get by running KDE4 and shouldn't expect it to be speedy. You would be better off using a WM such as xfce, lxde, etc.
Keep in mind with your CPU & RAM you can just barely get by running KDE4 and shouldn't expect it to be speedy. You would be better off using a WM such as xfce, lxde, etc.
Not sure why this wasn't mentioned sooner. Your CPU and RAM aren't looking so good for running any release of KDE. You may get decent performance, though, if you have a distro that integrates KDE well. I'm using PCLOS and KDE is more responsive than Gnome.
That aside, LXDE is a very lightweight desktop environment which has a similar look and feel to KDE, if KDE is too heavy.
well the distro chooser wasnt much help... it came up with pclos and mepis(along with fedora an mandrake i think). Mepis is running excelent with kde4 on here, but seems limited on configuration and ive already got dependency issues with blender. most annoying thing is i cant get grub to boot pclos now. and theres no autoconfig or anything in mepis that i can find. i've never tried fc though... maybe ill try that next
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