lubuntu-desktop team mailing list archive

[Liam Proven <lproven@xxxxxxxxx>]

To reply to the message that I forwarded earlier:

2009/7/23 Andrew Woodhead <andrew.woodhead666@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>:
> In my opinion:
>
> 1- what will Lubuntu offer that any other version of *buntu does not offer?
>
> Lubuntu will offer a reactive DE, XUbuntu previously offered this but seems
> to have lost sight of its target

I would like to hear some evidence of this. I have tried both and
certainly Xubuntu seems lighter than GNOME to me.

> 2- what kind of performance increase shall we see with Lubuntu?
>
> LXDE is a very light DE so much less RAM is used over Gnome or KDE. Most of
> the default apps chosen are also light on the system which preserves its
> snappines. Obviously users are free to remove and add heavier more feature
> rich options but the default aims to provide a decent level of performance.

That is, if I may say so, a bit of a cop-out. Just a lighter-weight
desktop with the same suite of relatively heavyweight apps will make
relatively little overall difference to the RAM or disk "footprint" of
a distro.

And for what it's worth, I've tried full GNOME Ubuntu recently on a
couple of low-end machines: at Yule, on a Pentium II 400MHz with 256MB
of RAM, and more recently, on an Athlon 750MHz with 192MB RAM. Both
had 20GB EIDE hard disks and DVD-ROM drives. It works very well,
booting significantly quicker than Windows 2000 and running quite
well. Applications do load slowly, but they are usable; switching apps
is slow, and the systems bogged down if lots of apps were loaded, but
one at a time, they were fine.

I also tried Xubuntu on the PII system. It was no quicker, and
significantly, for a beginner, I was not able to lock the system down
by, for instance, locking icons and controls into place on the panel.

What I conclude from this is:

[1] that actually, current Ubuntu copes quite well with a low-end
Windows XP or even Windows 2000 PC. The small benefits offered by
Xubuntu are not really worth the drop in functionality of the simpler
desktop and they don't make the distro any more suitable to low-end
hardware.

[2] to effectively target low-end machines that cannot usefully run
Windows XP or 2000, we need to do something considerably more drastic
than just swap the desktop environment.

> 4- is Lxde ready for its own *Buntu variant?
>
> Sure is, There is even MoonOS but it is not an official release. The other
> 'major' DEs have their own release so why not LXDE.

The answer to the question "why not" is: what benefit does it bring?
Why should someone use Lubuntu instead of Ubuntu itself?

> 5- how will Lubuntu compared to Xubuntu in terms of GB install, Ram
> usage, performance and functionality?
>
> http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=120972
>
> LXDE is lighter which will free up more resources for user apps on mid range
> systems, and allow older systems to be used.

As I've commented above, on its own, this is not enough.

-- 
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