Light Linux distro for X64 Laptop?

A

Ashton

2[H]4U
Joined
Nov 13, 2004
Messages
2,514
I've gotten sick and tired of Windows gumming up my laptop. My last install lasted ~1 week before it got a virus and the prior one lasted around 2 months of very frugal use.

I was very happy with my Ubuntu build on my desktop, so I tried to install it on my laptop.

Big Mistake.

Despite the laptop being a 2.0ghz dual-core X64 processor (with 3gb RAM) everything lagged, and not only that, but it keeps running out of memory and giving me "blank" windows (known issue)

So, I looked for a lighter-weight distro, but so far most of what I'm seeing is NOT x64 compatible. (my first choice was Puppy, but I cant find anything about it being 64-bit)

Anyone got suggestions? All I need to to access the internet (WiFi), type, and if possible watch videos and listen to music. Very basic system.
 
If that is all you need the system to do then why does it have to be 64bit? Any 32bit distro will do what you want perfectly fine and you won't lose anything.

Also, you're doing something wrong if you can't keep windows working for more then a few months, fyi.
 
criccio said:
If that is all you need the system to do then why does it have to be 64bit? Any 32bit distro will do what you want perfectly fine and you won't lose anything.

Also, you're doing something wrong if you can't keep windows working for more then a few months, fyi.
Click to expand...

Well, I figured if Ubuntu was lagging on 64-bit, I damn well better not drop back to 32-bit or I'd spend an hour waiting for it to boot.

I've come to the conclusion that one of the sites I visit a lot (most likely Deviant Art) has an infected advertising banner because I listerally just left my laptop alone and the only thing changed was DA's rotating banner and I came back to a virus (and all the other PCs are clean and behind 2 firewalls, so it's not from my network)
 
install Mint. 32bit or 64bit. It won't matter for that system.

Your "lagging" issue has nothing to do with that. Describe what you mean by lagging.
 
criccio said:
install Mint. 32bit or 64bit. It won't matter for that system.

Your "lagging" issue has nothing to do with that. Describe what you mean by lagging.
Click to expand...

Takes a long time to switch apps or desktops, images load a lot slower, Click an icon and wait upto a MINUTE to Firefox to load (switching to Chromium dropped it to about 20 seconds). Honestly it just feels like an older, less powerful PC than when it was running windows.
 
Ashton said:
Takes a long time to switch apps or desktops, images load a lot slower, Click an icon and wait upto a MINUTE to Firefox to load (switching to Chromium dropped it to about 20 seconds). Honestly it just feels like an older, less powerful PC than when it was running windows.
Click to expand...
Did you test Ubuntu using the other architecture image?
 
Cerulean said:
Did you test Ubuntu using the other architecture image?
Click to expand...

The version I have downloaded only allows use of Unity. I dont know if the video driver issue though (blank windows) is present in the old version or not...

EDIT:
D'oh! Architecture, sorry. no. I only installed the standard X64 image asuming, as above, I needed to squeeze every ghz I could out of the CPU.
 
Honestly, Windows 7 is better on laptops than Linux, and just as fast. I have a laptop with the same specs as you except 2GB of ram instead of 3, and dual booted Win7 and Mint 11 64bit for a while, and just yesterday deleted the Mint partition. Even with tons of power management tweaks, the best Mint would do on battery power was 20 watts, while Windows got down to 14W - that's over an hour extra battery life. This is a known issue with the Linux kernel, along with power management just not being as advanced as Windows. It's a toss up on speed between the two OSs, and Windows, in my somewhat limited experience, is actually more stable than Linux these days for a daily use system.

Install FF with adblock/noscript (allowing [H] of course) and use Microsoft Security Essentials and any Windows install that you don't completely screw up by doing something dumb will last years. This wasn't the case with XP and earlier but it is now.

But, if you're set on using Linux, I recommend Mint 11 or 12 as others have, depending on whether you like Gnome 2 or 3 (I like 3, many don't). Ubuntu was pretty slow on my laptop too compared to both Win7 and Mint due to the crappy and slow Unity interface, though not nearly as slow as you're saying. You could try installing either Gnome 2 or 3 on it, but when I did that and uninstalled Unity everything just went to hell, so I scrapped Ubuntu.
 
repoman0 said:
Honestly, Windows 7 is better on laptops than Linux, and just as fast. I have a laptop with the same specs as you except 2GB of ram instead of 3, and dual booted Win7 and Mint 11 64bit for a while, and just yesterday deleted the Mint partition. Even with tons of power management tweaks, the best Mint would do on battery power was 20 watts, while Windows got down to 14W - that's over an hour extra battery life. This is a known issue with the Linux kernel, along with power management just not being as advanced as Windows. It's a toss up on speed between the two OSs, and Windows, in my somewhat limited experience, is actually more stable than Linux these days for a daily use system.

Install FF with adblock/noscript (allowing [H] of course) and use Microsoft Security Essentials and any Windows install that you don't completely screw up by doing something dumb will last years. This wasn't the case with XP and earlier but it is now.

But, if you're set on using Linux, I recommend Mint 11 or 12 as others have, depending on whether you like Gnome 2 or 3 (I like 3, many don't). Ubuntu was pretty slow on my laptop too compared to both Win7 and Mint due to the crappy and slow Unity interface, though not nearly as slow as you're saying. You could try installing either Gnome 2 or 3 on it, but when I did that and uninstalled Unity everything just went to hell, so I scrapped Ubuntu.
Click to expand...

Power management is a non-issue. The battery gives me 30 minutes TOPS because for 6 months I so rarely used it (literally one night every other week or so) and let the Li-Ion cells go 100% dead too often. I've learned to keep an extention cord with me, and to have an inverter in my car at all titme.

I had to go back to Windows Vista on my desktop for my CGI work, and so far I've been running Chrome with ad-block and had no real issues (other than the HDD is dieing, but that's not windows' fault) I had several times though when I clicked on sites and they tried to execute code that Linux just went "huh?" and couldn't execute, which I have to wonder if was a virus. That's my main argument for linux is it cant execute viruses (which also means I don't have an antivurs running constantly - one of the things that killed performance on my laptop) So since I dont have a need to run windows on my laptop (read: no programs that are "windows only") I think it's better to make it completely virus-proof.

I really like KDE before the last major rehaul... *sigh* I've not used the latest Gnome, but from what I've seen I think it's similar to unity, so I'd just as soon go back to 2 as long as there arent major security holes.

I'll take a look at Mint. At this point all I'm wanting is a fast interface for a basic device.

Oh crap, I forgot MAJOR ISSUE: It has to be able to run DROPBOX (I use it to sync all my papers and documents) Can mint run it?
 
I've never been much of a Ubuntu/Debian fan.
I prefer Fedora for being in the RPM / CentOS / RHEL family.
Fedora is mostly a cutting edge distro in terms of how fast they adopt and change Linux OS features and conventions.

For a lightweight distro...I recommend a spin of Fedora (latest is 16 as of this post) either:
1) Fedora LXDE
2) Fedora XFCE

Gnome 3 recently got sort of bloated....but if your hardware specs are fair enough....you probably can use it.....still a bit of a concectual deviation though for long time Gnome 2 users. Jury is still out regarding Gnome 3 for most.

LXDE is a lightweight GUI desktop environ, and so is XFCE
I recently for few years prefer LXDE for leaner GUI needs, as XFCE is recently getting slighly bloated from its original intent (still not a bad GUI though).

A fair smattering of distros happen to 'be based' off or use core of a mainstream distro like Fedora or Ubuntu and offer up convenient GUI alternative as stock.

(Ex: Mint and Ubuntu both have a few subvariants.....some of which also use LXDE or XFCE...or some other GUI entirely....)
 
Mint is probably the most popular distro now days.

As for the Windows issues, Windows doesn't give itself malware infections; users give Windows malware infections.
 
I have to concur with others here. If you want better speed, stay away from anything based on Ubuntu. A well configured Linux system can be faster than Windows 7 for everyday tasks, but you're not likely to see that from any *Ubuntu system.

Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE) Is the perfect balance between ease of use and speed. I don't like any of the Gnome or Unity stuff either. Try out LMDE Xfce edition if you want a fast and easy interface. There are 32 and 64 bit versions available. Also, it uses way less memory then most distros by default. And probably half as much as *Ubuntu.

As for 32 vs 64 bit. That's an ancient issue. Nearly every Linux distro has both versions, and both are stable enough for anyone to use.

Linux Mint Debian Edition Xfce 64-bit DVD ISO torrent:
magnet:?xt=urn:btih:c2b15f18a60573d...er.publicbt.com:80&tr=udp://tracker.ccc.de:80
 
I recommend ArchLinux. You install only what you want and have the choice of any conceivable desktop environment. It is a rolling release model as well so you never have to worry about updating or clean installing every 6 months.

I used Ubuntu for years but over the past 2 releases, things have gone way downhill.
 
Just installed Linux Mint x64 edition. Waiting on all the updates.

Strange issue I assume is outdated graphics driver: Letters/numbers are not showing up in places, such as the clock says " 2 " instead of "02:00" and a lot of lowercase "e"s are missing, along with other letters... waiting on new driver to install to see if this fixes it...

EDIT:
also unrelated but I cant get Vista's ISO burner (built in) to burn a bootable CD/DVD... Windows 7 burns them fine, but none of the discs I burned on Vista (Clonezilla, PuppyLinux, Mint) will boot...
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top