Linked by Thom Holwerda on Sun 10th Feb 2008 21:58 UTC, submitted by Vincent

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Member since:
2006-10-08
Sadly, this is true. I've experienced this fact when trying XFCE based Linux distros on older hardware. Sadly, that's something I've noticed with most Linux distros. They are not aimed at speed anymore, they seem to want to benefit from the new possibilites of modern hardware. Don't get me wrong, that's nothing bad per se, but if you intend to use hardware that's not up to date, you will need to use older software of tailor a system by yourself.
That's impressing. Allthough I prefer Gnome over KDE (allthough I don't use neither of them regularly), KDE seems to be more responsive in some cases, as you mentioned. But on the other hand, that's just my individual feeling.
Maybe geubuntu (using Enlightenment, as far as I remember) could be an alternative. I tried it on a 300 MHz P2 from the live system CD. The impression sentence would be like: "Hey, this is Mac OS X!" :-)
On the other hand, a "self made" FreeBSD with XFCE 3 and OpenOffice 1.1.4 gave a good solution. Together with XMMS and mplayer, even multimedia playback wasn't any problematic. And the XFCE 3 desktop (btw, using "simple old" GTK), was very easy to use, and this was the impression of a very computer illiterate person. I would not dare to try the same with "Windows"...
An earlier XFCE 4, such as the one from the FreeSBIE 1.1 live system CD, could be a solution, too.
Okay, maybe it'sn not because of XFCE itself, it seems to be the problem of the many stuff GTK2 involves which makes the environment heavy (but still alternative). XFCE is a viable desktop alternative to KDE and Gnome, but sadly, I think you gonna pay for this amount of funtions with response speed. :-(
Edited 2008-02-11 19:54 UTC