Ilwrath wrote:
The smaller distros (and the BSDs and whatnot) are much more difficult, if you're new to them. But they can run faster, because they are a little trimmed back... So they don't need quite as big a system... It's all a trade-off.... And finding the sweet spot is tough.
BSD, harder than Linux? You must be on drugs. :afro:
But seriously, the "speed" you kids feel (or don't feel) on the desktop is more a function of the massive GUI toolkits in use than anything else. To put it charitably, that's what Windows would feel like if it didn't compromise security or stability... and the situation on UNIX-alikes is much like that with MS-DOS; things are fine until you start WIN.COM.*
@Whoever: No such thing as "XWindows," the dumped project was XFree86.
*If it helps, remember that the X server itself is basically just a big, full-featured graphics driver... one that any system with 32MB RAM can probably handle easily. It's KDE and Gnome... or worse, running programs linked to major portions of each of the two at once, which you'll probably end up doing with a 'cute and friendly' distribution like Mandrake until you learn better... that really bog the system down. There is a single major counterexample that comes to mind -- if you are still running XFree86 4.1 or possibly 4.2, the "XRender" extension was horribly slow when first introduced, and is now taken advantage of heavily by roughly anything offering AA fonts.
