1. Fedora 11?

2. CentOS?

3. Ubuntu?

4. Debian?

5. Mandriva?

6. Suse?

7. others you prefer?

Who is the ideal Linux distribution for laptop?

Tinycore-2.0 and Microcore-2.0

Ubuntu, since most people using a Laptop need the distro to work "out of the box".

Slackware, naturally.

especially low end machines.

It is personal preference really, use whatever you are comfortable with. Laptops aren't anything magical, as long as the kernel included is recent enough to support all of your hardware, it should be fairly smooth sailing.

All of mine run Arch, but there isn't anything in Arch that makes it more suitable for a laptop than most any other distribution out there.

I just recently installed Mandriva 2009.1 on my AAO after using Debian Squeeze and I must say, Mdv done a heck of a job, everything seems to be working out the box more than Debian. Of course with debian, it doesn't include alot of non free stuff as mdv. But as elliott678 said, its more of a personal preference...

Any machines.

Why Debian of course..

This is another vote for your favorite Distro right ?

Actually out of the Distros in the poll the only one I would NOT recommend for a laptop is CentOS or RHEL. It is designed with Servers in mind, uses an older kernel than most of the other distros, which means hardware support won't be quite as good. Typically when installing on a Laptop hardware support is is a pretty important factor. you want your distro to support a wide variety of hardware due to some of the weird components used in laptops. just my 2 cents.

well... Ubuntu is Best for Laptops..it works on most of the laptops..I have seen many people are facing problems with other distributions..thats why we are here to discuss about that..

Actually, this poll should've been seperated for older lappy's and new lappy's

Ubuntu, of almost any variety, would not be best choice running on any "old" laptop with under 256mb RAM and slow processor.

Slack can run either new or old
same with Deb.

But, many new Gnome, KDE types are not for older lappy's.

My vote for both is unchanged at Tinycore/Microcore_2.0+

slackware, the only one that works without a hitch on my vaio laptop.

Have people ever heard of icewm (which works great with gnome apps), fluxbox, lxde, or a number of other lightwieght desktops. Why is it that if you are not running the over bloated ghome or kde4 a computer is worthless or too old and too slow. I can remember when people begged to have a pentium one. I think linux developers need to take a reality check especially with a restricted economy. The best way I have of converting people to linux is the support for older systems linux traditionally has had. Pentium I laptops make great portable thin clients for ltsp. For what most people do a Pentium I computer will fit the bill. I still use my old compaq p1 computer with 96 megs of memory and 10 gig hard drive. Works great.

With a plethora of cloud computing, there is always a more more powerful machine to do the heavy lifting when necessary via web applications. In our business we are going towards the web based applications. That means less software to install on a system and more centralized management of data. In addition terminal servers make older machines more valuable. Need to do cad or some other heavy duty application, just remote into the ltsp or other terminal server. with vnc to connect oa an apple server, rdp to connect to a windows server, and a vnc/web browswer to connect to an ltsp server,


There are actually quite a few apps that are text oriented (aka command line based) that are quite good programs. It is ashame that people have become addicted to the mouse jockey world of (ms or x)windows. I have become addicted to bash file programming. Computers work so much faster when not running a gui. I only use gui for the web access as necessary. There is so much more performance available by not using the gui. We did an experiment with some of the following programs in our small school and we found that more was done in a non-gui environment.

alsa sound modules – music and to support speech programs (and voice recording)
Twidge – twitter client
links2 – internet browser
ps2ascii – convert postscript files to text files.
bashpodder – audio podcast collector
alpine sendEmail – email client tools
irssi – interrelay chat
centerim – instant messaging client
vim can be used as and editor or word processor, there are many others.
antiword – for dealing with proprietary word procesing formats.
screen – allows you to easily switch remote sessions
ledger – accounting program
curl wget – web page and file extracting tools
bash – the built in programming language that can be used with awk, sed, sort tr figlet (make your own database or game programs as well as other tools).
ImageMagick suite – manipulate graphics
cadubi tetradraw – ascii drawing programs
opensched – schedule formater.
hnb – notetaking and outlining
moc mplayer aplay ffmpeg – audio tools and players.
nget – newsreader
pal – calendar/planner program
cdrecord – burn cd’s and back up computer.
ssh and other tools. – network administration/file amangement
espeak festival – voice synthesis (great for having your computer read outloud documents) Who needs a kindle?

Guess my point is that if you want to do a poll, there is more to it than just the distro. How is the distro used? Why do you have to use the default system? Why not perform a net install and have a leaner system? Lots of questions that need to be considered.

One last conderation is that a lot of computing is done on embedded systems. which makes for even more plethora of linux variations. We still use i486 and i586 for electronics control. A lot cheaper than purchasing all the new sbc's and the development costs associated with them.

Thalt shall repurpose. Time to reconsider Slackware again.

Fedora of course! and as it has already been said you can use different desktop environments and window managers to suit your taste.

Fedora's LXDE LiveCD will give you a feel of how snappy it can be when it's installed. I currently have laptops running Acer CentOS 5.3, Acer Aspire One Fedora 10 and 11. Have an XO laptop that runs Fedora 10 from a SD card but it is quite slow running the Gnome desktop but much quicker running Sugar.

I'm happy with my AAO's running Fedora but Fedora isn't for newbs but if you don't try different distros and fiddle with settings and such you will always be a newb. Don't be afraid grasshopper, with knowledge comes understanding.

It used to be gentoo, then debian, but Kubuntu did it for me. Easy install, easy maintenance.