I've an AMD A8 6410 @2 GHz with 8GB of RAM. This is my only machine and I use it for work purposes and multimedia. Former includes coding in C, Java, etc. , MATLAB programming, video conversions/encoding, testing stuff in VMWare Player/Virtual Box etc. And as for other uses there are watching YouTube, playing songs, watching movies and such. I used Ubuntu, Fedora, Mint before. A few months back I thought that if I move to lighter distros, my work will be somewhat faster. So I used Antix MX, Lubuntu, LinuxLight and I I'm currently using Cub Linux. But with all these distros I'm facing two issues compared to the mainstream ones :

• execution time of processes are faster in the light weight versions
• the light OSes fail to utilize all my CPU and RAM, my RAM usage never crosses 4 GB to 5 GB in them. I run VM OSes with 4Gb of RAM. Still my RAM usage doesn't cross 5. And a little load is put on them, the system crashes. For example, running VMware and using Chromium together, my system crashes. But neither my RAM nor my CPU was being overcommitted. CPU usage was around 30% and RAM was 4710 MB of 6940 MB. And also I don't know what Cub Linux did to one GB of my RAM.

What I need is a distro that works out of the box for internet and multimedia codecs and drivers and is still lightweight. For these reasons I'm not going for Arch or Debian since I'll have to spend time configuring the OS and drivers, whereas the programming environment and the databases take their own length of time to set up. I need to fix the crash issue or I will need to switch distros for which I'll gladly take recommendations.

I'll appreciate any kind of help, thank you.

You can test Xubuntu, but it is also based on Ubuntu.

You can use Gentoo.

dup (see "Similar Threads" below) of:
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...ion-4175590079
(more replies there)