[TriLUG] Choosing a new home computer

[Kevin Hunter Kesling]

At 1:28pm -0500 Mon, 06 Jan 2014, Steve Litt wrote:
> On Mon, 06 Jan 2014 08:50:50 -0500 Peter Neilson wrote:
>> The box I'm using now is one I bought used about five years ago,
>> and it's having trouble displaying Ubuntu. It'll display in
>> "default" mode, but when Ubuntu tries to use specific aspects of
>> the display processor it fails.
>>
>> So I'm thinking, "New machine time!"
>
> [clip]
>
>> Any other good advice I'm forgetting to ask about?
>
> Yes.
>
> You don't mention your desktop environment, but if your hardware video
> is having trouble with it, my suspicion would be Unity.

> [ KDE, Gnome, and Unity require _way_ more resources than you might
>   think.  If you can forgo their flashiness, you will have a completely
>   usable machine again.  I, for one, run OpenBox. ]

(Hopefully Steve will pardon my paraphrasing.)

> PET PREJUDICES follow:

> Your mileage probably varies, but I've had such horrible problems
> with KDE stability, RAM-grabs, and CPU theft, that I've removed all
> KDE programs and libraries from all my computers. To me, KDE's like
> that hot girlfriend you thought you could never get along without,
> but somehow, you're happier when she's gone, and you'll make sure you
> never let her back in your life.
>
> On my desktop I use OpenBox. Lacking a taskbar (scuse me, panel), it
> gives me max screen real estate (I'm blind as a bat), and it's set
> up from the bottom up for hotkeys. Here's something I wrote about
> Openbox: http://www.troubleshooters.com/linux/openbox/

Your pet prejudices closely follow my experiences as well.  To 
double-down on the point about n-year old hardware still running 
perfectly well with today's Linux, I recently installed Xubuntu 13.10 on 
PIII era machines, some with as little as 128MB of RAM.  They were not 
zippy by today's standards, but they were also no worse that I recall 
Windows XP being at the time.

In my mind, the only real difference between Ubuntu and Xubuntu is Unity 
and Compiz.  For example, if one can live without the fancier effects of 
Compiz, I claim 90% of functionality from OpenBox, albeit with a minor 
amount of XML rc file modification.  For that 10% loss (things like 
accessibility zooming, drawing on the desktop), I notice no change in 
GUI performance between my 24 core desktop at work and my 6 year old 
2-core laptop at home.

Are you aware that you can effectively try out Ubuntu-flavored desktop 
environments with an idiom as simple as:

     $ sudo apt-get install lubuntu-desktop

Before you buy your next machine, try poking around your system with 
htop while running different desktops environments to see the memory 
difference.  While it's not 100% accurate, there is a often a positive 
correlation between low memory requirements and speed.

Cheers and good luck,

Kevin