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Review/Overview of Lightweight Linux Distros
pcause writes "Here is a review of various lightweight Linux distros. Not sure I agree with the conclusions, since I am a PuppyLinux user, but it is a nice overview of some current options." Reviewed are: Arch 2007.08-2, Damn Small Linux 4.2.5, Puppy 4.0, TinyMe Test7-KD, Xubuntu 8.04, and Zenwalk 5.0.
This should be true of any distro with a sufficiently advanced package manager and repository system.
Gentoo starts out the simplest, with nothing more than a livecd -- you have to format yourself, unpack a tarball, chroot, and do the bootstrapping, pretty much all by yourself.
Ubuntu has a variant which installs something about as minimal as Debian. You can always install everything else you need -- the bigger variants are as simple as "apt-get install ubuntu-desktop" and such.
Those are the ones I've used extensively. My guess is that the review is about how it all comes together for a specific lightweight UI and such, but I haven't read TFA yet.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Arch is a great distro. Sure, you have to do a lot yourself, but that's the point. By making you look over your /etc files at install, you get a good sense about what your system is actually loading during boot.
Well, I run Xubuntu on a laptop with 2GB of RAM....
The reason is that I do almost all my work these days on virtual machines. There are all kinds of benfits from working mainly in virtual machines that I won't go into here, but the reason I use Xubuntu over Ubuntu is that it uses slightly less memory. Most of the time the performance of the virtual machines is not noticeably sluggish, but every so often you run into memory limitations. Using less in the first place means that it happens less often and recovers faster.
Probably I should consider using a distro designed for some resource constrained machine, like DSL. However my current setup works well enough that I haven't been motivated to try DSL or some other minidistro. I'd be interested if others have.
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