Running from an external USB 2.0 drive is slower than from an internal drive. USB 2.0 speeds are pretty awful, and CPU use is higher than with internal HDDs.


Mint and ubuntu might be 'easier', and 'better for beginners' but IMO its like saying 'a tricycle is easier than a bicycle'.

Therer is some basis in reality. Mostly because of 'jockey' (hardware dirvers install program) that ubuntu and ubuntu based mint versions use. Mint and ubuntu are pretty much as hard, or as easy depending on your point of view as debian, apart from the drivers.

Most people can manage to get closed source hardware dirvers installed with other distros. Its not that hard. Just some people dislike dropping back to a command line, which is what you have to do in a lot of cases to get video hardware drivers installed. I wouldnt be suprised if your laptop had no closed source drivers to install (intel video hardware) so the 'easiness' of ubuntu and mint wont matter at all.

BTW, part of why mint has a big name now is because ubuntu 11.04 and newer versions uses the 'unity' DE by defult, which a huge number of users hate. Mint is trying to keep the old gnome 2.X DE, which was the default desktop for ubuntu 10.10 and earlier. They've had various goes at it, nothing has worked quite as well as gnome 2.X did.

For new users, IMO its best to avoid unity, or gnome 2.X, or DEs that try to mimic gnome 2.X (like 'Cinnamon). The gnome 2.X project is dead, its better for a new user to find one of the current DEs that works for them.

The win7 burner will burn isos, but I'd rather use a better program, like imgburn-

http://www.imgburn.com/

Adding one light program will not affect your compile times at all. Even adding a couple of huge bloated programs will have no or minimal impact on compile times, unless of course you start running them while you are compiling.

thanks dude.

If you are a Linux newbie, Ubuntu is a good place to start with, then you can try out others like Mint, Fedora, Chakra and PCLOS.

I'd actually put Mint before Ubuntu in that list. It tends to treat you like a baby more than Ubuntu does.

Agreed but then we are here to learn Linux as well

When all that goes well, Chakra is another territory you can look into, currently its the only distro that runs without hitch on my ASUS K53T laptop with AMD quad core and dual ATI GPU.

The most popular desktop distros are ubuntu and fedora, all the two surport the most of hardware now. For problem that your laptop is bought four years ago, I recommend xubuntu or fedora with xfce.

About Arch, I agree with you. But in Centos I think it can be a good choice even for beginners.
And at last, I should appreciate you for your opinions about me.

I think a few people in this thread, I'm guessing you know who you are, could use to calm down a bit. Lets keep this thing on topic.

Thanks.

Hey Flex if you are a windows user then I will encorage you to try Zorin OS. The graphical interface will be somewhat similar at what you are already used to, so that will make the transition a bit easier for you, you can try a more advance distro once you are very familiar with how linux works.

Here is a link to Zorin OS home site http://zorin-os.com/

I always advice to test a distro first in a live session to make sure all your computer parts work fine especially wireless conection and proper display.

Good luck to you and welcome to Linux!

I just installed the newest Crunchbang. It's extremely fast and runs perfectly on my laptop.
Despite the fact that I have an optimus chipset, I have yet to find a single hardware issue.

It comes with openbox which is quite plain, but extremely fast, functional, easy to customize. I really think everyone should give openbox a spin before deciding it's too hard to use. I love the simplicity.

I tried ubuntu 11.4 before that and couldn't stand it. Unity is weird. I actually think it's a little awkward to use. Aside from that it runs just as slow as windows.

I guess I could have installed a different environment on it. but I could do the same on crunchbang.

I would prefer suggesting you running lxde or xfce on an operating system, since you are a newbie, better go for ubuntu netbook edition

Why Ubuntu netbook edition? What advantages does it have, considering it is Unity and not Lxde or Xfce, over any other *buntu?

I thought this entry was already solved.

Marking as "Solved" doesn't stop other people from adding their own point of view.

Here's my personal experience with different window managers, although I'm quite new too:

KDE 4: Extremely customizable, beautiful, my personal favorite. It supposedly uses more power, so if it's slow you could choose a different theme by doing this: Settings> Workspace Appearance>Window Decorations, as well as Settings>Application Appearance>Style. Good distro for this: Kubuntu because it uses Ubuntu's repositories. Note: I'm using openSUSE 12.1 right now, because there were rumours that it was the best KDE distro, but really, I DON'T recommend it. The repositories are terrible, and it's ucky green. I've heard more good things about openSUSE 11.4, so maybe that's what you should use instead if you want openSUSE.

Gnome 3: Aims to be easy to use, but omits many things that I like. You have to install extra software if you want more configuration. There are no minimize or maximize buttons on window borders, which in my opinion is insane, but I guess some people like it somehow. It does not allow you to configure anything, like even changing the position of panels. It also uses lots of power, supposedly less than KDE. Good distro for this: Fedora (Please note, I haven't actually tried Gnome 3 or Fedora, all this info is from screenshots (!) so really, I don't have any right to say anything.

Unity: At least it has all three buttons there, but it doesn't let you change anything either. The taskbar is on the left, and you can't change that, and there's also a panel on the top that is unmovable as well. It also uses lots of power. Good distro for this: Ubuntu (I think it's the only one with Unity anyway). Note: Unity is built on top of Gnome. I have personally tried Unity for a long time. If you want any configuration, you have to edit text files with gconf-editor.

Enlightenment: This looks great, and I'm actually just experimenting with Macpup right now. Enlightenment is really light, but is loaded with animations, and tons of configuration options. I've only used it for 2 days, but I'm already loving it. It might become my favorite over KDE soon. Elive want 15 dollars for it, so Macpup is my recommended distro for Enlightenment, as it's only 158 megabytes (I recall from memory). It might almost have too many animations for your liking, and I'm still figuring out how to do things like search (!), and other usual things like ALT+F2. Note: it has small repositories as well. Even though Enlightenment has lots of configuration, I still think that KDE has more, and is easier to use.

LXDE and XFCE: Out of these two, I would recommend LXDE. It doesn't have animations like Enlightenment, but it looks nicer (I was actually quite impressed) with shiny-looking window borders, for example, and it's lighter as well. XFCE looks very boring and old-fashioned, but it does what you need it to do. I can't say anything about the configuration of these, though. I like sticking close to Ubuntu (because it has more forum help, as well as better repositories), so again, I would recommend Xubuntu or Lubuntu for these Desktop Environments (I think they are).

In conclusion, I would recommend you to try Kubuntu first, and if you see anything that is not good enough about it to move on, then try Lubuntu.

Good luck!