They've been bloated for a long time.

I know for a fact I considered Mandrake with it's fancy ass KDE 3.1.3 bloated back in 2003 and used Debian with Blackbox instead.

>I wish every modern distribution was this easy to install and use.

I find them easier to use than I did 10 years ago, but maybe that's because I have 10 years more experience than I use to.

on a similar note, having an old ibm notebook I went ahead and installed pangolin (12.04) on it. Any clues on how to make it speedy? Unity makes me think of Windows ME.

A very very basic gui with a web browser, a terminal and just enough for networking would be nice. Perhaps a different distro with gnome is better?

Oh right, I plan on a LEMP setup too (currently running {slow} on ubuntu)

>>186
Ubuntu is dead easy to install, bro. A friend asked me to help him set it up, but after I told him what image to dl, he did it all by following the instructions in the installer.

Only hiccup was Windows complaining about its boot loader, but that fixed itself

>> 188
On an old IBM notebook...

Given your requirements, I would recommend you check out Fedora's XFCE spin, or if you don't like the high-rev cycle of Fedora maybe Scientific Linux 6 (6.2 is latest version atm) minimal install, and then do a "yum install epel-repo-config" and then "yum install xfce" to get XFCE running there.

Its *very* painless to do this. XFCE works how you are familiar with Gnome2 working, but ditches all the candy and focuses exclusively on core usability features of a DE (as in, cut/paste, drag/drop, and launching applications).

Fedora goes through a major release every 6 months, and releases are supported for one year. So you can go an upgrade once a year at the slowest if you want. But that's way too fast for some people (I find it very easy to deal with as long as you make /home mount to a separate partition and never reformat that one on the next install -- which is just sound advice in any case).

Scientific Linux is based on RHEL, but is supported by a team at CERN, Fermilab, Los Alamos and a few other labs, and I've found their community to be *much* more helpful and easy to get along with than the CentOS community (though the actual operating systems are extremely similar and you can easily pull SRPMs from CentOS, SL, RHEL and nearly anything from even forward versions of Fedora and cross build them usually with no changes). There are also a huge number of solid extended repos to get new software if you're willing to read the littlest bit about yum.

Also, these distros don't suffer from some of the security boo-boos that Ubuntu tends to -- which are almost always mistakes in default configuration in the interest of being "user friendly" which just winds up being malware/cracker friendly when done without a minimum of forethought. (But even Ubuntu is massively more secure than default Windows or an unwatched OS X or iOS install.)

Anyway, that's my 2c. A Fedora-based distro + XFCE if you have limited system resources. If you have *really* limited resources then IceWM would be a great solution, but it even sacrifices native drag/drop in the interest of providing a GUI stripped purely for application execution speed, and that's a no-go for a lot of people who don't live their entire life inside the browser.

Oh, also... if you have an AMD or nVidia graphics chip on your board, I strongly recommend installing the proprietary graphics drivers (and the AMD ones are exceptional these days, which is a huge change over the past) to push as much work to the graphics chip as possible. Things just feel faster that way, always, even when you're just doing 2D work on the desktop, rendering can be a rather large load on an older CPU.

>> 188
Also, KDE 4 is a bit heavier than XFCE, but its way lighter than Gnome3 or Unity and has a much, much smaller library dependency chain. This results in an accordingly shorter execution path for nearly every basic instruction it needs to run, which makes it run faster even with an actually larger available feature set. It also doesn't require acceleration -- all the candy is structly optional. It takes getting used to, though, because the paradigm is a bit different than you're probably used to -- but if you learn to use it you'll probably start liking it a lot; the workflow is much faster than any other DE I've used, but it took me about a week to figure out why people had been saying that.

>>188
What model is it? I have an old IBM thinkpad 600X and any DE runs slow as hell on it. I'd recommend a minimal installation of debian (stable) with a WM such as fluxbox or openbox. If you find them agreeable, a tiling window manager would be even better( I recommend xmonad).

>>188
What model is it? I have an old IBM thinkpad 600X and any DE runs slow as hell on it. I'd recommend a minimal installation of debian (stable) with a WM such as fluxbox or openbox. If you find them agreeable, a tiling window manager would be even better( I recommend xmonad).

>>188
Maybe you can try CrunchBang, since it's interface is really minimalist and don't require modern graphics.
Uses Openbox as desktop interface.

http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=crunchbang

>>188
If you want a very lightweight system, you could try configuring an Openbox setup with a panel such as tint2. However, this will take some non-gui configuration to complete.

X11 in general was a bloated, yet all-enompassing system from its creation, with bits that no one uses from the 80s and 90s still being maintained (can you still make circular windows in X?) and with a design that is steadily starting to show its age. Even lightweight WMs are just standing on the hands of an obese giant. Combine this with DEs that follow Moore's Law to a tee, and have the current situation on the Linux Desktop.

As far as Desktop usage is concerned, I cannot wait until Wayland becomes a feasible option.

>>190
I love IceWM, although I don't use it currently (Fluxbox 4lyfe). Fedora is also my favourite distro, despite the regular releases (actually, I tend to like anything based on Redhat). Props to you. >>188
Try installing Slitaz: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slitaz

Alternatively, Debian with LXDE is an alternative to configuring Openbox with Tint2 or something yourself. It's heavier, yes, and it looks like ass, but it's the best of a bad lot of full DEs.
Godspeed.

SAGE has been used.

>>242
I hate how LXDE's panel/menu doesn't allow commands (or arguments, whatever they're called) in the application shortcuts, such as "/usr/bin/firefox -safe-mode". I'd switch immediately from Xfce if it allowed that.

SAGE has been used.

trudat