ms on the offensive again

[Walter Dnes]

On Fri, May 20, 2005 at 09:19:04AM -0400, Rob Sutherland wrote

> I'm still looking for a good distro to recommend for that purpose -
> has anyone had good experiences with one in particular

  I'd say go with Debian for new users.  It's not bleeding edge, but
it'll let you surf, email, listen to music, yada, yada, yada.

  One thing that people often miss is that "a lightweight linux" can be
achieved in virtually every distro.  Here's the scoop... replace
KDE/GNOME *DESKTOP* with Blackbox WM and fbpanel.  The following is a
*VERY* important distinction which must be understood to do things
right...

  GNOME and KDE have quite a few very good apps (e.g. AbiWord, Gimp,
Gnumeric, and their KDE Office equivalants).  GNOME and KDE are better
known for their "desktop environments".  Unfortunately, the people
behind GNOME and KDE seem to be going out of their way to match Windows
fat, bloated, eye-candy, desktops with GNOME and KDE fat, bloated,
eye-candy, desktops.

  I'll let you in on a secret.  If you *INSTALL* GNOME and KDE
*DESKTOPS*, but *RUN* Blackbox (or some other lightweight WM), you can
still run all those GNOME and KDE *APPLICATIONS* on an older PC.  My
450mhz Dell, PIII, with 128 megs of RAM, from September 1999 is still
going strong.  Outside of streaming video ("internet TV") it's easily
powerful enough to do almost everything I want.  And it's quite snappy.
I have tried KDE and it's painfull watching the icons populate as KDE
come up.

-- 
Walter Dnes <waltdnes-SLHPyeZ9y/tg9hUCZPvPmw at public.gmane.org>
An infinite number of monkeys pounding away on keyboards will
eventually produce a report showing that Windows is more secure,
and has a lower TCO, than linux.
--
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