OT: Ubuntu

[Floid]

motorollin wrote:
If you're worried it won't be as responsive as you would like, you may want to consider Xubuntu as it doesn't include the overhead of the bulky Gnome or KDE desktop environments.

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moto

XFCE's savings are overstated.

This isn't to say that it's not nice software, but you're generally talking 16-32MB differences, the bulk of which may quickly end up swapped to disk and never see use.  In turn, those megabytes of cruft in the 'larger' environments may actually contain features you care about (keyring management, background thumbnailer, beagle search daemon, etc), and the old XFCE file manager was decidedly *not* any faster than Nautilus on my dual P-II -- Thunar might show some improvement.

...

I guess it's 'lightweight' if you're 32MB or 50MHz short of being able to run Gnome comfortably, but (as demonstrated) OO.o's requirements are orders of magnitude 'even-worse,' but that's rarely the case -- either a system is too hopelessly slow or memory-crippled to run either one with comfort, or a system will run either well enough that it just comes down to taste.

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Meanwhile, Ubuntu is great, but whoever manages their package repositories is taking their sweet time in producing any backports for the 'LTS' release, and 'Edgy' certainly had some warts and regressions that weren't smoothed out at release time for basic tasks like, um, running OO.o.  On the whole, it's certainly a fine distro, but expect Debian-like lag on updates to 'stable' releases (apparently Debian's gotten 'even worse' in recent years...), and I wouldn't count on their release process smoothing out until X.org's does.

OS X isn't particularly better unless you're a developer craving some particular NeXT/post-NeXT feature, so consider that a point of comparison.  Much like OS X, Gnome suffers from the occasional half-implemented or half-forgotten UI feature, but I see marked improvement with each release lately.

[Floid]

To qualify my previous post...

Debaser wrote:

Which might I add - is awesome. Brings life to any 233mhz + x86 you have laying around. Try the LiveCD and see how it flies!

...The interface may fly (and, in fact, Gnome may or may not do half bad), but the minute you attempt Firefox or OO.o you'll discover why you won't be getting anything done on the hardware.  With OASIS OpenDocument become a standard, you could use AbiWord if you just want to take notes, and maybe limit yourself to one window, no tabs, and no heavy Flash sites in the browser (or pretty much the same behavior with Opera), but that does effectively rule out a good chunk of activities.  

The desktop environment is just not really likely to be the limiting factor here, since you're going to have an uphill battle watching YouTube on a P233 no matter what.

Oh, and UNIX's way of dealing with a true out-of-memory situation is to quietly kill off what may or may not be the offending process.  (There are technical reasons for this, though implementing a mechanism to 'bless' the graphics server and a notification client might not be a bad idea.)  If you find yourself starting some of today's mega-apps only to watch them disappear, this is why.

[Floid]

Okay, last data point from me tonight -- on recent-vintage Sempron boxes for office usage, using Ubuntu's default Gnome environment and, notably, a 256MB VMWare VM for the legacy Windows image...

512MB RAM appeared livable, with modest grinding when loading OO.o.  However, given memory leaks and all other contributing factors, after a month of uptime running a "standard" small-office stack (OO.o, a long-lived Firefox session averaging a dozen tabs, the Windows VMs) things would begin to get painful; specifically, trying to work on five or ten documents at once with OO.o would get even more painful.

Bringing the machines up to 1GB effectively eliminated the issues; any memory leaks don't outrace my haphazard patching schedules, and it's possible to juggle as many OO.o windows as one could want without getting into trouble.

This is, of course, a ridiculous amount of bloat (almost entirely on OO.o's part), but pragmatically, it lets work get done and leaves plenty of headroom, especially if one assumes OO.o will eventually see rounds of profiling and optimizing after the scramble for feature-completeness is over (in a decade, let's say; something similar happened to Mozilla).

In comparison, a PPC Mac Mini with an equal 1GB of RAM will still bog down when using NeoOffice from time to time... and you'll be wishing for far more than that if you get serious with Illustrator on that platform, these days.

[Floid]

Yep; I'd personally do OpenBSD or NetBSD for older hardware, but among Linux distros, most of those compact suggestions should be fine.

Just trying to put it in perspective -- 7 years ago, when I found I couldn't fit XFree86 + Netscape into 16MB RAM that probably would've supported OS/2 "just fine" (if with a good day's swapping to get anything done), that was rather disappointing.

However, once you realize X provides some services and security measures other GUI environments may not (and, of course, the option to use 7 competing widget libraries at once if your memory can hold them), it's less egregious.

Statements of "*NIX is great on older hardware!" should generally be amended with "...if you stick to the console and don't use any program popularized after 1998."  Of course, for use as a firewall or server you don't need a pretty display (on the same host).

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[I should actually amend the above... DX2-66 with 16MB, best to live with no GUI.  P233 with at least 64MB, sure, at least with one of the compact distros.]