[clue-tech] Looking for distro recommendation

[David Mccowan]

On Wed, Sep 15, 2010 at 3:52 PM, David Williams <dkwloki-clue at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> Guys,
>
> I am looking for a distro recommendation for a netbook.
> I would like a decent desktop, and want to do surfing and a bit of development and network hacking.
>

I would suggest Arch Linux,
http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Arch_Compared_to_Other_Distributions,
it is quite snappy and lean, with decent package management.  Arch
makes it east to keep the system small, and fast, without having to
compile everything.

I am recent coming back to it after using Debian for a long while
because the machine I am currently using is quit low end, but still
686 and just switching I have seen a massive speed jump.  I know that
on the Debian mailing list that comment gets shouted down but for
non-64bit x86 they still think compiling to 386 is fine.  Arch is
quick to set up including the install of packages but they endeavor to
patch the source as little as possible, and so configuration is though
upstream methods usually config files, (which makes things easy to
backup and port to another sys).  They do have an /etc/rc.conf that
makes editing run levels a snap and the only services turned by
default are syslog-ng, the network if configured, netfs if configured,
and cron; as such Arch has excellent boot speed without any fine
tuning.

If ease of administration is more your game and you have more up to
date hardware, I would suggest Debian,
http://www.debian.org/intro/why_debian.  Ideally squeeze the current
testing, testing itself, or sid.  In all three set ups once configured
administration is a breeze and for standard tools Debian's defaults
are usually just fine if not easy to change via debconf.  Since your
are use to Ubuntu it would be less of a culture shock than an rpm
based distro.  If you choose not to auto install recommends and
suggested packages it can be kept lean, also I feel that Debian has
the best package management despite that many apt like features are
standard in other distros now, this is mainly because Debian is quite
willing to patch and has excellent policy.  This policy does have some
down sides for the rate in which packages enter the various Debian
level. For example although there packages can be opened with standard
unix tool, there are not simple tar.[gz,bz2,xz] files.  Reading there
package database and installing with dpkg can take a large amount of
time on slow hardware.  On the other hand you would likely never have
to compile anything, which can be good or bad.

Don't get me wrong, I like both distros, have used them a lot, 5+
years for Debian over my 10 years of Linux and around 1.5 years for
Arch, although not recent until as of a week.  I do plan to try give
Gentoo another try some time in the future once I get my tech back up
and have a spare system to hose, and maybe also give Crux, Slackware
or one of the BSDs a turn.


> I have used Ubuntu, it seems to get slower w/each release, and has endless updates.
> I have used CentOS as a desktop and that has been OK, not as rich an environment as Ubuntu.
>

Have you considered switching away form a desktop environment and to a
plain window manager.  This can often cause a surprising change in
system responsiveness and with a netbook can be a great way to remove
clutter and maximize screen space.  I personally use ratpoison,
http://www.nongnu.org/ratpoison/,
http://freshmeat.net/articles/the-antidesktop but I realise that it
may not be for every one.  Other choices include jwm,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JWM, and icewm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IceWM.  I think both support applets so
you can use things like nm-aplet although I am not sure of that
Because I don't use them myself.