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Mind a suggestion? Give Vector Linux a spin. They have a supported KDE 3 (called KDE Classic) and they have several versions tailored for different uses, such as light, standard, and SOHO editions. They of course also have Live CDs so give it a spin, its nice.

I never understood why when things were getting nice and stable both KDE and GNOME would suddenly shitcan all that work. i mean what was wrong with them? They both looked nice, ran fine, were low resource, so what was wrong with what they had? Could they just not live without an assload of bling like OSX and Windows has gotten?

That is soooooo true. Imagine if all the resources would have been put to polishing KDE3 and GNOME2 instead. We might not have the latest whizbang innovation UI, but a good solid, basic desktop. That's exactly what Linux needs, not another broken mess. And those two both have Compiz support so you get some eye-candy spices too.

BTW for those that prefer the KDE way of doing things Vector Linux has a "KDE Classic" edition based on 3.5.10 that is nice.

And there's, of course, the Trinity Desktop, which is a similar project to MATE, but it bases on KDE3.

I never understood why when things were getting nice and stable both KDE and GNOME would suddenly shitcan all that work. i mean what was wrong with them? They both looked nice, ran fine, were low resource, so what was wrong with what they had? Could they just not live without an assload of bling like OSX and Windows has gotten?

BTW for those that prefer the KDE way of doing things Vector Linux has a "KDE Classic" edition based on 3.5.10 that is nice.

May I make a suggest which may shock you since I'm supposedly an "M$ Ninja" secretly shilling for "teh man"? Give your mom Vector Linux which has a fullly supported "KDE classic" which is a HELL of a lot closer to the old XP way than anything else out there. Also works great on older hardware and they have a live CD you can test with here. Let her try it, I bet she likes it.

But if they are currently Windows users that is a big change, and lets face it unity bites. A better suggestion would be Vector Linux who not only has a standard and SOHO edition but also has a "KDE Classic' which is more like WinXP than Ubuntu and would probably be easier for someone unfamiliar to Linux to pick up.

Thank you for that brilliant suggestion. is it really so much to ask to give us a little overview, why it was created, who its targeted at, why they think its better than the other guys, is that really so much to ask for? For a good example look at Vector Linux which is actually a damned nice distro. it says what their main goals are (speed, performance and stability) why they think its better (keep it simple, keep it small and let the end user decide) and gives a very nice overview of the whole thing. if you want to know more there are plenty of links, its all nice and easy to read. Hell even their download page gives a nice simple summary of each version and who it is for.

Really guys, with over 600 distros on distrowatch asking for a little "why should we care" page really isn't asking for a lot. it would take maybe an hour to cook up and could allow someone to quickly decide if the OS is right for them.

Thank you for that brilliant suggestion. is it really so much to ask to give us a little overview, why it was created, who its targeted at, why they think its better than the other guys, is that really so much to ask for? For a good example look at Vector Linux which is actually a damned nice distro. it says what their main goals are (speed, performance and stability) why they think its better (keep it simple, keep it small and let the end user decide) and gives a very nice overview of the whole thing. if you want to know more there are plenty of links, its all nice and easy to read. Hell even their download page gives a nice simple summary of each version and who it is for.

Really guys, with over 600 distros on distrowatch asking for a little "why should we care" page really isn't asking for a lot. it would take maybe an hour to cook up and could allow someone to quickly decide if the OS is right for them.

Question: As someone who has never run WM what advantages does it have over more supported lightweight DEs like XFCE or LXDE? Because those are well supported with many apps that integrate well and are VERY light on resources whereas this has been dead for ages so naturally application support for the look and feel of WM i'm sure is sorely lacking.

Not saying its not a good WM, hell if someone went to the trouble to bring it back for the dead i'm sure it has SOME good points, i simply don't know what they are. What distros support WM? Which ones have the latest version talked about in TFA? Are there any distros that prepackage it in a light distro like Vector does with IceWM and JWM? Virtualbox images? BTW anybody that prefers KDE 3.x would do well to try Vector Linux and their "Classic KDE" release, its pretty good.

Uhhh...you DO know there is actually a Linux distro that comes by default with an updated version of KDE 3.5, now called "KDE Classic"? of course not, you're too fucking stupid to even get a quote correct.

The correct quote fucknuts is As FAR AS THE USERS ARE CONCERNED there is NO CLI in Windows" and I stand by that statement. Ask the local checkout girl, the person you are standing behind in the bank, you know NORMAL PEOPLE how to launch command line from windows and guess what? They will say "What's command line?" because THEY DO NOT NEED IT.

So don't get all butthurt because your OS won't run without Bash, that it doesn't work without "Open up bash and type" because hey, its FOSS right? You CAN fix it.....but of course you won't, because you think it makes you in some way superior to the "noobs" which is funny as hell. First with Vista and now with windows 8 MSFT is giving you a 40 meter head start in the 100 meter dash, what do you do? Scream "I'm leet!" and shoot yourself in the foot while jacking off to a bash script. You're gonna lose, and you have NOBODY to blame but yourself.

Actually you are partially incorrect. while its true that Metro is a serious clusterfuck of a UI (I've shown the screencaps to over 120 customers so far and NOT A SINGLE ONE liked the look or thought they would want to try it. The closest I got to an endorsement was this exchange "That is a nice looking cell phone screen, what kind of cell phone is it? Is it Android? i've heard those are quite nice....what do you mean Windows? Windows what? why that's just stupid! Why would I want a cell phone for my desktop?") there is also a "classic mode" which you can see in some of the developer's presentation which is just the Windows 7 GUI with a square start button instead of round and from what I've heard a simple registry change makes it default.

So actually in this case with BOTH Windows and ubuntu you don't have to take the clusterfuck UI, although I hear its more of a PITA to strip out unity and get something decent running than it is to just run Xubuntu or Kubuntu in the first place. Personally if it were me I'd be looking at Vector Linux which not only has 6 versions tailored for what kind of machine you want to run it on, from ultra light live to workstation, but they also have a "KDE Classic' version that has a fully updated KDE 3 as the default DE. I've been playing with it and its pretty nice, especially the light live for older laptops.

If you are on a laptop try Vector Linux. I've slapped it on a couple of old Dell laptops and it is quite snappy. You'll have to fiddle with the WiFi of course, but I haven't seen a Linux where you didn't have to fiddle with the WiFi. The nice thing is they have 6 versions, so you can pick one as heavy or as light as you like. Oh and they have KDE classic which is nice.

But here is what I don't get, the community FINALLY has a Linux that could gain some real share, and could even end up on the majority of computers, and its being completely ignored. I'm talking about Expressgate/Splashtop which if you've tried it you know its a game changer. No fiddly, no CLI, no update/upgrade mess, just 6 seconds and you are on the web, bam! And you don't have to "convert" anyone since they don't have to be either/or as the nice thing about EG/ST is its built into the system so you simply have two buttons, one button if you want Windows, the other button if you want the web. Oh and it adds a good 20-30% on the battery life as well.

So you have this truly great new thing, its fast, its easy, it costs the OEMs virtually nothing, and with support of the community you could have it one practically every consumer machine and yet its ignored. i honestly don't get it. If the community would get behind writing apps for it it could be fricking huge but instead everyone gives all the press to Ubuntu when Canonical seems to be going out of their way to piss people off. is there ANYONE not on a tablet that like Unity? It would be like going back in time and giving the community the latest Android, all wrapped in a pretty bow, only to get told "Nah, we think this WinCE thing is gonna be big!". Talk about snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, its just nuts.

Of course thanks to the drooling fanbois I'm sure to get modded down for not speaking the standard line, so for their benefit I'll give it to them: "Gee Biff, isn't Ubuntu sweel? it sure is chip, and RMS' farts smells like roses and cure the hole in the ozone!".

Check out the response of a couple of Democrats when i started this thread.

Mepis based on Debian

Or just sudo apt-get xubuntu-desktop

Odd place to ask but look at Arch or Vector those distros are pretty, lightweight, and modern. http://www.archlinux.org/ http://vectorlinux.com/ And in my experience a fresh carefully done fresh XP install will feel pretty quick. But once I have used it for a bit it always slows down.

Although the parent post's a bit... overcaffeinated, he has a point: maintaining a Slackware box teaches a lot about Linux overall. As a stepping stone for those who find it "as user-friendly as a rattlesnake", might I suggest they try out VectorLinux ( http://vectorlinux.com/website2/ )? It's a Slackware-derived distro that's easier to get to grips with, & runs nice & quickly on old boxes (which is why I often use it). Not totally pure in terms of 'free' (as in speech), but rather usable.

A few weeks ago I came across MadTux.org while looking at the VectorLinux website. I was surprised how inexpensive their machines are ($149 - $289), all very well-equipped for the money. Most people would only complain about the size of the included HDD at 13.5GB, but it's plenty of room for your OS. You can get other drives for files (or not). Would also make a great thin-client in a fat box.

http://store.madtux.org/product_info.php?cPath=57&products_id=311

For example, for $149 you can get:
* AMD Sempron M 3000+ Processor
* 512MB DDR2 RAM included
* 13.5GB Hard Disk
* 100Mbps fast-ethernet port
* 128-bit 3D/2D Graphics engine
* Full-featured AGP v2.0 compliant 8x transfer mode AGP controller
* 3 PCI slots
* UltraDMA EIDE controller
* Memory expandable to 2GB
* Two 32-bit PCI slots
* Two IDE connectors onboard
* Realtek ALC655 6-channel AC'97 Audio CODEC
* Two PS/2 ports for mouse and connector, one serial, one parallel ports, one VGA port, one LAN port, four USB 2.0 ports and audio jacks

Except the problem with this approach is Microsoft biases the results simply because they can afford PR people who can get stories printed many places that matter.

Example: Microsoft sends Vista to Walt Mossberg over at the WSJ. (BTW, on a smoking-fast system of his choice) He will at least look at it because Microsoft buys advertising. Let's say someone over at Vectorlinux http://www.vectorlinux.com/ attempted to spend some time doing PR.

1. Editors would not give them the time of day because they can't afford to advertise.
2. Let's say there's an editor with a heart of gold out there and throws Vector a bone. Vector would probably need to provide their distro on a laptop. "Oh, just install it." probably won't work. From there, the distro is a punching bag for Microsoft as the only article that sells advertising/copy is "Microsoft versus Linux Death Match!!!"
3. How can Vector legitimately bribe the editorial staff in a manner they are accustomed?

Ubuntu's distro is not superior in any special way. Ubuntu gets press because Shuttleworth pays for PR.

VectorLinux might be what you're looking for. It's slackware based, but with gui package management and all. I liked the IceWM with Rox Filer desktop, but there's a choice of a few if it's not your thing. Ran fine on a laptop with 64MB RAM. You want the standard edition, not the SOHO one.

My favorite is Vector SOHO http://www.vectorlinux.com/ It was way easier for me to setup up than Ubuntu, and has a lot of nice apps straight off the cd. user support forum: http://www.vectorlinux.com/forum2/

Now if you want a distro to try out and get a feel for linux, Puppy http://www.puppyos.com/ is a great live distro designed from scratch to appeal to Windows users and runs great on older equipment. (Its user support is first rate too! http://www.puppyos.com/forums.htm )

Both great Os(es) that I feel are really under rated.

My favorite is Vector SOHO http://www.vectorlinux.com/ It was way easier for me to setup up than Ubuntu, and has a lot of nice apps straight off the cd. user support forum: http://www.vectorlinux.com/forum2/

Now if you want a distro to try out and get a feel for linux, Puppy http://www.puppyos.com/ is a great live distro designed from scratch to appeal to Windows users and runs great on older equipment. (Its user support is first rate too! http://www.puppyos.com/forums.htm )

Both great Os(es) that I feel are really under rated.

I ran Linux in a much more constrained environment back in 1993 (4MB RAM with ample swap, 40MB Disk, 386, laptop) and it ran at a decent speed with a decent set of applications (yes, even back then).

I'd be *really* surprised if Linux today couldn't fit in your environment. But you'll likely have to forget KDE/GNOME. They're *nice* but not necessary. My old system used FVWM which is still perfectly capable (I was used it last year on Solaris -- there's even a Win95-like config), although now there are slicker alternatives like XFCE and IceWM which are also available and better supported by default on many distros.

Here are a few alternatives to consider which are more targetted to your needs. You might want to them all out and see which one you like best:
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Xubuntu
http://www.puppylinux.org/user/viewpage.php?page_i d=1
http://www.vectorlinux.com/
http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/

A good one for older hardware is VectorLinux. The standard edition uses icewm and Rox filer, which is nice and fast.

I have a celeron 300Mhz laptop with memory maxed out to 160Mb. I tried xubuntu out about 2 weeks ago because I fell in love with apt after using my p200 debian server. I wasn't really impressed with its speed (it swapped out alot, which was a dog on my 4200rpm HD). To be fair, I didn't give it a fair chance of trimming it down. But overall, when I ever get a computer with more memory, I guess xubuntu is the distro I'm gonna use. For now I installed vector linux. It *flies* right out of the box. I use xfce on it and I get 118 mb free memory on startup. It never hits Virtual Memory for normal use. Fluxbox or icewm are a bit lighter, but I shamefully admit I like the xfce eyecandy and the gperfection gtk theme. Also vector uses slapt-get. It doesn't compare to debian repositories, but vector or slackware ones aren't too shabby! They're actually quite good. Here's a good review.

You got it the other way around. Vector Linux's free download version is the lightweight version. The Deluxe version is $26.97. Check out

http://vectorlinux.com/

http://www.vectorlinux.com/

Minimum Requirements: 125 MB Hard Drive, 16 MB RAM.

Vector Linux, based on Slackware, is the best personal-use distro I've seen. Got all of Slack's stability, basic package management system that doesn't try to do anything for you, but set up a bit more for desktop use. And it's FAST, the fastest binary-based distro I know of by a long shot.

http://www.vectorlinux.com/

Now I just need to wait for them to update so they're compatible with 10.2...

From what I understand, having not used it (though I plan to try it out this week), the Slack-based Vector Linux integrates some form of dependancy checking and apt-get-like functionality.

Hell, if you're too lazy to do that, just grab one of these babies:

http://www.vectorlinux.com/

http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/

http://www.goosee.com/puppy/

http://www.vectorlinux.com/ Try this one.

I've had success with VectorLinux. Based on Slackware, it was designed to run a GUI on older machines.

It comes in two flavors - a stripped-down, basic version that works well for web-browsing and email; and the SOHO version which still runs well on older machines, but comes with a full complement of productivity software.

It appears that only the SOHO version is available on the Linux ISO torrent site. The basic version is available at the VectorLinux site itself.

http://www.vectorlinux.com/ is supposed to be designed for older hardware. Works nice on newer hardware too, very fast.

http://www.emperorlinux.com/
http://www.vectorlinux.com/

As others have pointed out, you're probably going to have a hard time filling all your requirements on a really low-end box.

However, I recently installed VectorLinux on an old, mid-90s laptop (Toshiba 220CS) and it runs pretty well.

The main requirements for the laptop were word processing (Abiword) and music (XMMS).

Performance isn't stunning, but it's pretty usable.

Feather Linux 64 megabytes total install (I've run it on a 300mghz with 64 megs RAM, and my regular box with a 200PP at 224 ram) It's a knoppix/debian live CD that is hard drive installable, or can run from a 64 meg flashdrive, etc, that's what it's designed for really, but cool for older systems with minimum resources

Vector Linux A slackware-ish effort: this is from their requirements page, note, I never tried it: VL 4.3 Hardware Requirements

The minimum hardware requirements to run VectorLinux 4.3 are a 166 MHz Pentium class processor with 32 MB of RAM memory, and just 850 MB of hard disc space (*).

To have a more comfortable experience with VectorLinux 4.3 we would recommend a 233 MHz (MMX) processor with 64 MB of memory as a minimum.

(*) 835 MB of space for the installation plus 64 MB of swap space is the very minimum.
Extra space would be required for additional applications and / or your personal files.

I run FC2 on my machine, and in my experience, yes, ram is more important than processor speed

Of course, I still got my old mac 512k, runs a GUI environment from a floppy......

Basically, you get what you want and pay for, want a zillion programs and a lot of multitasking and full GUI, you need moah powah, regardless of OS.

Bloatware -- it's not just for Microsoft anymore. Your typical latest SuSE and RedHats require 64MB of main memory or more, and god forbid you try running OOo on the thing. Still too much!

What to do for your granma's system? You want something with up-to-date kernel, a low-profile windowing system and a nice combination of office apps that don't chew up memory and disk like they were going out of style.

Run Uptodate Linux Everywhere is one place to look.

Vector Linux is another.

Vector Linux. It's based off Slackware and I've had a fair amount of luck with it on slower machines. That's also its aim.

Gentoo works well too in certain circumstances. I have a powerful machine that compiles generic packages and I install over the network on my slower machines. When I say "slower" I mean old PIIs. There's not much of a reason (for me) to keep anything older around. The performance in those cases is also acceptable. This is a really poor option for someone who *only* has a slow computer though.

These memory debates get old pretty fast. WindowsXP doesn't run that great with less than 256M of RAM. It runs okay with 128, but then again so does my laptop running KDE 3.3. Not great, but acceptable. (OpenOffice is ass slow to start up on pretty much any platform.) The reality is that hardware is getting faster and memory is getting fatter. I want Gnome and KDE devs to design around modern systems... not dinosaurs.

Anyway, the days of Linux on older machines aren't over. Vector with XFce4 run wonderfully. Start up times can be slow, but once things are running performance is pretty good. It's not great, but if you're expecting "great" on old machines... stop. It's silly.

When all else fails there's FVWM or console apps.

I have to admit that I'm not entirely up to date on small distro's, since my current machine is pretty beefy. I remember hearing good things about VectorLinux though. It's Slackware based and according to the site the minimum requirements are a 166 MHz Pentium class processor with 32 MB of memory and 700 MB of hard disc space (including swap). Exactly the system you described :-)

Basically, I've got an 802.11b setup in the house, and one reasonably fast PC (AMD xp1800+) set up with SUSE 9.1 (used to run slackware and still do on other machines, but got tired of dependency hell on this one). I've also got an abysmally slow laptop (P-133 with 32MB of non-expandable ram) with a wireless pcmcia card. I put Vector Linux http://vectorlinux.com/ on the client PC, and some of the logins automatically ssh -X into the server, where the login script there does a 'startkde'. Aside from the fact that you have to type your password twice, its made the thin client full featured and much faster than it ran standalone, and this is on about 2MB/sec practical throughput. I don't know what the load on the server is, except I can play UT2K4 on it while my wife surfs the internet on the laptop, and neither of us notices a slowdown. Only problem is when you wander out of 802.11 range with the laptop. Everything stops.

Slackware was my first distro too can't remember the version, but it was pre version 1 - old man :-(.
I've just installed Vector Linux 4.0 on my laptop and on an older desktop - it's a good way into a fast efficient no-frills linux system. I'm a windows developer so my work laptop is a w2k machine, to make it bearable I've installed niceties such as bash, gvim and perl. You could use Bochs machine emulator to run w2k under linux. If you dual boot, you can use thunderbird email on a dual boot system with a single mailbox.

Vector linux is easy to install and configure, forget all the folks who think a gui is essential for everything, as a windows developer you'll already know how to hack your way through the registry and various config files. That's all you need to do with slackware too.

Linux will run very well on those old Dell 266's you got at school- particularly if you use something like it comes with some of the liter window managers.

Well, USB1 is what the notebook comes with but consider, the guy is currently booting dos and some old word processor off a floppy disk. You complain about USB 1 speeds, but floppy is even slower. There are plennty of Linux Floppy Distros. With 128 mb of ram and a USB thumb drive, that would be great.

It should be simple to pick one of the distros and make a very workable solution. I mean if he has a 512 mb USB thumb drive, he could load something like Vector Linux on the USB drive and just make a boot floppy to mount the USB drive. Last time I used Vector it fit in 300mb. It should work pretty decent as it was designed for lowend machines.

I have used this one on a similar laptop. Worked fairly fine. I did have an issue with the default X not supporting the video chip (CT??? something) However, you could choose to install an older version of X which ran fine.

Vector linux

Hope it works for you.

try vectorlinux

There is also Vector Linux that I used sucessfully on older hardware. Just look for "minimalist" linux distros on Linux.org .

Yes, I love old hardware and alternate OSes. How did you tell?

Check out VectorLinux (based on Slackware)... lots of positive reviews.

Try Vector Linux. It runs nicely with a graphic windows manager (ICEwm,Fluxbox and XFCE) on an older pentium machine.

P200? I'm running X 3.3.6, IceWM, Mozilla Firebird, Xmms, Abiword, ect... on a P120 Toshiba Tecra 500cdt laptop with 48 megs of ram and 96 megs swap running Vector Linux 3.2. Playing mp3/ogg files uses about 1/3 of the processor and page renders take a few seconds but its quite usable. At lest enough to post to /., do email, and act as an in car mp3/ogg player when on the go. These are all modern applications for a laptop and this old klunker does the job just fine.

Both KDE and GNOME suck up processing power. If you don't care for either of thems bloat, try Vector Linux

For older machines, the "minimalist" or "mini" distributions are the way to go. Thanks for the advice: if VectorLinux turns out not to work (X is playing it's games again, and I couldn't reuse XF86Config from the previous install because now it is a 4.1.0 version), I will give FreeBSD a shot. (first thought of NetBSD myself) Network install is not an option: the dongle of the PCMCIA network card I have is broken. :-( Everything must go over CD.