I just built Falkon on it - took about 90 mins.

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Looks like I have made a fundamental error when I posted about my 'relatively low-spec machine'. Perhaps I need to hunt out my old DX2/66 to be truly low-spec .

Back when KDE 4 first "hit the streets", you may recall that the KDE team stated it was "not ready for primetime" but most distros jumped on it just top be first with "The Latest!". That and the growing pains of the team to take a huge risk trying to be truly creative in providing a lot of new features, resulted in considerable disaster for KDE. Over time they fixed their issues and KDE 4 is now reasonably light and very powerful, even as default. Admittedly I've only played with KDE Plasma 5 on a few test distros and LiveSlack, but it doesn't seem overly hoggish to me AND in every case above, including the initial release of KDE 4x, nobody is holding a gun to our heads to stay with default services. Every version of KDE I have ever tried is possible to pare down to being on a par with Xfce, so I still don't get all the concern over footprint.

Again, I like Xfce and used it as my main during the transition to a reasonable default KDE 4, but some things are just "clunky" where KDE is smooth. It did take me some time to get used to Plasmoids and in my case they do a whole lot more than I ever need but once I learned how to use them properly they are no longer an issue at all. I used to logout of KDE (I boot to runlevel 3 and launch KDM for fast and easy WM/DE switching) and use Fluxbox or even Blackbox to run new and taxing games but the difference these days is insignificant on my machines.

Everything can be analyzed by cost/benefit but if you don't experience the benefits all one sees is costs. There are net gains to be had.

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I saw your thread. Glad to see you got everything up and running.

I've never built a web browser, or really changed browsers that much. I've mainly stuck with Firefox over the years. But I have wondered if I would get a much better experience with a lighter weight one. Thanks for posting your thoughts about Falcon. I'm thinking the next time I have a nice chunk of free time I will try out Falcon, and a few others.

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Hey andrew.46,

My lowest spec Slackware unit is a Lenovo T410 with an i5 2.40 GHz CPU and 4 GB RAM. It runs XFCE very well indeed. My main Slackware box is a Dell Optiplex 790 with an i7 3.40 GHz CPU and 8 GB of RAM. I use XFCE on my main box. KDE runs well on it as well.
I also have another Slackware laptop and two desktops. All 5 units are happily running Slackware64-current like a champ.
Merry Christmas!

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Oh, my lowest spec system with Linux is a lot less then that: Dell Dimension 4100 with a Pentium III/800 MHz cpu and 512 MB of RAM, running still on its original 40 GB disk (Maxtor).
THIS system started with Slackware 7.1 and nowadays still is on Slackware, although not the newest releases anymore (it's too small for that). I use XFCE on it and it still is going strong as a music centre (playing music files, not creating them).
I use XMMS with several additional plugins so that it can play most kinds of music encodings.

My _first_ Linux system was even smaller: a 486dx2/66 with only 16 MB of RAM.
It started with Slackware 1.1.2 in 1994 and went all the way to 4.0 until it was retired

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Once a month when I'm away from home for a couple of days I use this

14.2 32-bit
Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 3.00GHz
2GB memory
KDE


What makes the system usable is a 120GB Samsung 750 EVO SSD cost £50.00 and boosted my system dramatically.

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That rings a bell. First computer I had was a DX 25 or 33, 4MB RAM, Windows for Workgroups 3.11, 1993? I'd never heard of Linux then, never mind Slackware. Spent too many years from that day on with Windows PCs, learning nothing.

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I need to stop drinking... while reading post. Cleaning monitor yet again.

LOL, I was going to post the P4 specs I was running Slackware on not to long ago, but it gave up the ghost and is no long with us.

I have a 2006-vintage Dell laptop with a Core Duo T2500 CPU, 1GB RAM, and 100GB hard disk running Slackware-current.

I use it to play music from the Internet and local disk. It does that well. Its main downsides are that it predates HD video, has a perennially-full disk, and is the last 32-bit machine that I own.

I expect it to get another few years of use before I waterfall down a less-old PC to be the music player.
Ed

I have used a computer with a 8 bit CPU, 64K RAM and a 10M hard disk (IIRC). Slackware wouldn't have fit in it, but it didn't existed anyway. It has a Fortran compiler a BASIC and a text editor. It costed around 6500 $ then.

My first PC (in 1984) was comparable: 8086 (_real_ 16-bit cpu) at 4.77 MHz, 256 KB of RAM and dual 360 KB floppy drives, NO hard disk. Oh, and it had 32 KB of screen memory on a built-in CGA adaptor (so you couldn't replace it with something better).
Before that I did some work om 8-bit 8080 systems (with 64 KB RAM, no hard disks either), but they weren't mine.

The first "computer" I used at work was an Olivetti Programma 101...

My first exposure to computing was preparing punch card decks in secondary school to be run off site and printouts returned if all was OK.
The first work computer I used was a genuine Apple IIe, that a lecturer allowed me to use to type a document. Typewriters became passé.
A friend had a home computer running CP/M off an 8" floppy drive. We filled the lounge room with paper full of maps while playing Zork. (Slackware has 'adventure' if anyone wants a taste).
My first home computer was an Apple IIe clone, that taught me about assembly language and how to pack information into a byte.
I remember the time I went out and bought a 5MB hard drive for my second home computer, an IBM clone with an 8088. Ahh - the expense but also the luxury!

A little more on topic. I have Slackware64-current running on an old Dell E520 with Core 2 Duo CPU and 1GB RAM as well as Slackware-current running on an eMachines EM250 with Atom N270 CPU and 1GB RAM. I use WindowMaker as my window manager and both are responsive with my typical workloads, but things crawl for updates and compilations. My thanks to our BDFL for introducing icecream into -current; I see significantly reduced compilation times for the 32bit Atom when distributed to other 64bit machines.

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For some reason, this thread makes me think of this Monty Python skit.

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