Which Distro on Dell Netbook

J

jcg624

Limp Gawd
Joined
Oct 14, 2007
Messages
299
My wife got a Dell Netbook. She is not happy with it. It is very slow and sluggish with
booting and loading webpages.

What would be a good distro to install on it that would be easy to use for her
and is more responsive than Win 7.
 
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I have been suggesting Mint to new users. If you choose a spin with a lightweight Desktop Environment (LXDE is my personal favorite), then it should run using relatively little resources. I'll write my generic list of low-resource OS's though:

Lubuntu/Xubuntu
Debian
Knoppix
Puppy
Slax
 
I'll throw in that antiX and Crunchbang have been pretty popular as of late, but I don't have experience with either.
 
Would probably suggest Lubuntu or Xubuntu as primary ones to consider. Others include Linux Mint and Ubuntu; though Lubuntu and Xubuntu and Linux Mint Debian (Xfce) would be faster on lower-end hardware.

Regarding the netbook though, it's probably slow in part due to the bloatware installed by default by the various manufacturers; wouldn't be surprised if Dell does that too.
 
Linux Mint Debian Edition had promise, but there just isn't enough manpower on it, and they struggle keeping it up to date so I don't recommend it anymore.

I wish they would just dump Ubuntu and put all their resources into the Debian side. Maybe they will eventually. I certainly liked it better than Standard Linux Mint.
 
LuninuX OS is good mac OSX-esque like distribution that's forked from Debian/Ubuntu. It's quite intuitive for new users and a good out of the box distro.

http://luninuxos.com/
 
Lets stir this up a bit...Slackware with Xfce. It's light, stable and should provide just what you need.
 
Jesse B said:
I have been suggesting Mint to new users. If you choose a spin with a lightweight Desktop Environment (LXDE is my personal favorite), then it should run using relatively little resources. I'll write my generic list of low-resource OS's though:

Lubuntu/Xubuntu
Debian
Knoppix
Puppy
Slax
Click to expand...

I have Linux Mint 11 on my HP Mini 310 and Linux Mint 12 on my Dell Inspiron 1525, running wonderfully on both. Then again, the Dell laptop has a faster processor than the HP Mini-- Celeron single core CPU at 2.0 GHz with 4 GB of RAM. It's a big improvement over Windows 7 Starter (HP Mini) and Windows 7 Home Premium (Dell Inspiron)-- bootup and start up are faster, and no noticeable sluggishness.

I'd recommend LXDE as Jesse suggested above since it's designed to run on computers with low resources such as low memory and slower (and older) processors.
 
i have an old dell latitude d810 that i got for free through work. its very low on resources (256 ram), so i installed Mint 11 LXDE. it's actually quite good in using minimum resources. I can't compare to other distros that are minimalist, but I would definitely recommend a lightweight desktop environment (LXDE, Enlightenment, etc). Mint includes a package specific for dell laptops (may work for other laptops?) that automatically allows various laptop functions to work (touchpad, etc). I also chose it because it's debian-based and i'm fairly used to ubuntu.
 
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