Not my headline, but one from Christopher Dawson over at ZDNet. Seeing as how I’m under the effect of another bloody Chinook headache, and seeing as how I can’t get the neurons firing to think of a topic to blab about myself, I will just let you read that.
And read this too, because it’s got some nice detailed info. That second article is actually where I first read about “Lubuntu”. And now I use “Lubuntu” on 4 of my computers. The only computer that still runs basic Ubuntu with Gnome and Nautilus is my newest one, with 2 cores and 4 gigs of memory.
I can’t think right now… fucking headache. So I’ll copy & paste some numbers:
Lubuntu: 57,908 KB
Xubuntu: 156,852 KB
Ubuntu: 153,840 KB
That’s memory usage on a fresh install at the point when the desktop has finished loading. I used to use Xubuntu, and actually 3 of those “Lubuntu” machines of mine are still basically Xubuntu machines with the LXDE package installed. My first computer has a fresh install of Ubuntu 8.04 that got the lovely, shiny LXDE desktop put on it. What Mr. Dawson says in his post is very true. For a simple user-friendly Linux distro for older hardware, you can’t go wrong with Lubuntu.
Now the problem, as I see it. Lubuntu technically doesn’t exist as an installable OS yet. You can download and try out a Live CD, but that CD won’t give you an option to install.
That’s coming in April, but to get it the way I did is easy. Just install the LXDE desktop package to your system. My Ubuntu 8.04 installation didn’t include the LXDE package, so I had to add a Launchpad repository to my software sources list. If you’re a Windows user and you have no idea what I’m babbling about, never mind.
I’d go into more detail and give some more links, but my head hurts.
Check out what LXDE looks like. I fell in love with it not only because it’s extremely efficient and full-featured, but also because it looks so damn good! You can use GTK themes with it too, and I had some leftover from my Xubuntu days that mesh with LXDE just perfectly.
The only gripe I have about my “Lubuntu” setups are that I have to mount and unmount media manually. Meh. Small annoyance, but I’m sure with the Ubuntu people working on it, there will be an improvement there too.