bejita:
I agree with shadowsnipes - while the result could work really well, waiting for everything to compile in order to make that possible doesn't sound very appealing. Last time I tried on really old hardware, I first had to wait for ages, and then things broke (possibly my fault, but considering the time I had been waiting, it was no-go after that).
shadowsnipes:
Sorry for not responding earlier (workload - funny how it piles up before X-mas); what you said about
Slackware being able to be "small" and "focussed" (or "rounded") can be applied to every major distro I know that's not purely desktop oriented(!) - but I agree that it's more likely that a system using
Slackware gets configured that way since choice is genuinely more fine-grained than it appears(!) to be with other distros (having no meta-packages makes for KISS sure enough; but it also makes for trouble if one's not careful). However, if - as most people do - one chooses to simply do a "default"
X install, you'll end up with
KDE on
Slackware, which is not exactly what I call resource friendly
But the same thing's true for
Debian and
GNOME, of course.
I run a customised
Debian install on a old
Toshiba laptop (Celeron 300 (Mendozino), 192MB RAM, 4GB HD) using
Fluxbox, and it's really usable that way, whereas when using the default desktop installation with
GNOME, it's crawling hopelessly. Generally speaking, changing the WM/DM to something less demanding normally solves most performance problems to a major degree, so it should be chosen over changing the distro! However, distros that already come with a efficient WM/DM can be good choices to see what is possible in terms of speed and usability. Of those,
Zenwalk's a very good choice for
Slackware based distros,
DSL does something comparable for
Debian (though it's quite a peculiar system for new users), and
Puppy is always worth a try on its own accord.
That said, in my experience every system can be easily optimised by using common sense and a good package manager, possibly with a GUI to make things more accessible. I really like
Synaptic since I get to see the package, its dependencies and a reasonable description of what does what... but of course, it can be done on every system with just about every tool (in spite of
Synaptic and
aptitude, I still use
apt and
dpkg quite often since I know my way around).
It all boils down to this: If you want to have a usable machine, you'll have to experiment quite a bit, especially if it's old. Having tools at hand that make this easier is very desirable, especially if your experience is limited. Those who prefer hands-on to pre-packaged are very well served by KISS distros; for others (like myself),
Debian's a good compromise since it offers quite sophisticated tools while still packing all the punch one would want from a distro on the long run, like a full set of CLI tools and various reasonable ways of doing things.
M.