AntiX Keeps Going For Low-End Computers

[ashkbajw]

What linux gave us? Freedom, security, sustainability, efficiency, absence of DRM, open drivers with lifetime support, execute file attribute, repository install/upgrade approach and much much more.

bluetooth-applet stays in the background and you need to disable it from the start up applications menu, that's not on demand :|
same for a lot of services you never use and are just dependencies of some software you dont use.
modem-manager is another example i just noticed just a while ago... because who doesnt have a 56k winmodem in his/her machine....

As for the rest that has little or nothing to do with performance, and foss drivers dont have lifetime support, may i remand you of the few old cpus and gpus that were dropped reciently?
further more, execute file attribute is as simple as some lines of code, what does that have to do with performance and general usability? repos might be a good point but freedom and drm have nothing to do with linux, that has to do with us, because be it linux, hurd or whatever, it us that decided we wont support drm and non F/OSS.
Efficiency and sustainability i dont think so, a we still struggle with buggy, low quality, with missing indispensable features software. And it's sustainable until the devs stop getting payed.
We are a lot better than before but we still miss a lot of stuff that is not hard at ll to fix.
We still have the dynamic vs static/semi-static linking dilemma and sandboxing stuff to alow per user application installation and incompatible applications to work in the same machine.

AntiX is a lightweight variant of MEPIS, so it's ~ a respin of a Debian-based distro.
Which means (a) it has tons of software an apt-get away, (b) it could/should have good hardware support.

yeah but i was talking about the rest which have their own package managers like puppy and slitaz.

Odd that that doesn't match my experience with XP and Ubuntu on this Aspire One (1 GB RAM, 160GB 5400 RPM HDD, Intel Atom N270/Intel 945GME graphics).
Up through Jaunty, yes Ubuntu took a long time to boot...but it was just a few seconds over XP, considering the time to reach a useable desktop. I used xfce and icewm, finding the former miserably slow (I expected that going from the 550 MHz PIII/ 384MB Thinkpad I had before would result in a speed increase, not a drop--but that turned out to be just xfce vs icewm.)

In my experience, XP ran a lot better in my atom than mint lmde. I'm using cinnamon and even with zswap it still is pretty awful to use. Even in an old p3 933 with also 1 of ram firefox and xp ran without issues where now i have to constantly be freeing ram by killing firefox and restarting cinnamon because after a while, not sure if is a memory leak or those glibc issues, but ram goes up and it starts swaping and it never stops and the only way to fix it is doing that.

As far as what I gained over XP...
1 Speed.
2 Multiple workspaces.
3 A CLI that can do more than the Windows GUI and CLI together, faster.
4 A free development environment, capable of building drivers and many other things, covering C, C++, FORTRAN, Pascal, and more.
5 A web browser that didn't completely suck, and easy access to 15 other browsers.
6 The ability to update everything at once from one interface (rather than 3 different updaters covering a third of the software).
7 The ability to install software without worrying about which site to use.
8 A bundled office suite that had a chance of actually opening third-party documents (ever used MS Works? It doesn't.)
9 Python.
10 The ability to set up a second experimental installation, and to fix either install from the other.
11 A couple forms of sandboxing (AppArmor and chroot--yes, I'm aware of the deficiencies of chroot, but it has uses).
12 The ability to set up backwards-compatible environments without creating VMs (libc5 chroot).
13 Compatibility with a whole lot more DOS programs.
14 Email clients worth the time to set them up.
15 A game I actually enjoyed (go ahead, follow the link).
And a ton more control.

1 is relative to what you do, some stuff works faster, some other slower, same against macos or some other os.
2 is DE dependant, i suppose kde for windows also has that. And there's also 3rd party apps to provide that on windows, there was one i dont remember that was free that was later bought by some company and made premiun, that provided the multi-workspace ability and even the 3D cube.
3 i agree, but sometimes it also does less than windows' gui
4,5,8,9,13,14 are also available on windows, not linux's alone
6,7 still need standardization (as in everyone using the same) and some features, I know everyone is free to use whatever they want in their distro but we'll never get anywhere like this. There's some stuff that needs to be addressed, including interdistro compatibility.
10,12 yes.
11 said it above.
15 never heard about it, will give it a look :P

[stqn]

In my experience, XP ran a lot better in my atom than mint lmde. I'm using cinnamon and even with zswap it still is pretty awful to use. Even in an old p3 933 with also 1 of ram firefox and xp ran without issues where now i have to constantly be freeing ram by killing firefox and restarting cinnamon because after a while, not sure if is a memory leak or those glibc issues, but ram goes up and it starts swaping and it never stops and the only way to fix it is doing that.

Why are you running one of the heaviest distro+DE combination there is on such low-end hardware? I?ve heard Manjaro (with Xfce) works great on a P3 with 1GB of RAM ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y9TIkkkuwoc ? though the author?s P3 is running at twice your P3?s frequency.)

[mrugiero]

For those who like (or need) to keep the desktop lightweight, I'd recommend using JWM rather than IceWM. I'm not sure which is lighter, but both are REALLY frugal windows managers while maintaining most of the functionality needed for the desktop within the WM, but IceWM doesn't seem to be maintained, while JWM is actively maintained, as you can see in the repo https://github.com/joewing/jwm/commits/master

Of course, there's always preference and it's a matter of taste.

[GreatEmerald]

Of course, there's always preference and it's a matter of taste.

Yeap, you could use TWM

[ashkbajw]

Why are you running one of the heaviest distro+DE combination there is on such low-end hardware? I?ve heard Manjaro (with Xfce) works great on a P3 with 1GB of RAM ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y9TIkkkuwoc ? though the author?s P3 is running at twice your P3?s frequency.)

mint lmde + cinnamon isnt heavy at all, my atom has no problem running it, the only problem is when it starts hoarding a lot of memory for no reason, and same goes for firefox. I read somewhere that that kind of behaviour is from a design fault (or feature) of glibc, because allocations are expensive or something and so it wont free the lot of small memory sections which are constantly being reallocated.
the example showed that if you do a malloc(1GB) and then free() it, you return to your original memory size. but if you do a for with 1024 iterations of malloc(1MB) and then free() all of them, you'd still be at 1GB of allocated memory

anywats, windows XP could still do all those effects with some 3rd party software and would still do fine. I tried 7 and still didnt have memory problems with firefox. All of them use about 200mb of ram at start up.