I am speaking from my own experience. My experience cannot account for every single user in the world. Additionally, it was quite hard to put Linux on that ThinkPad in the first place, because you can’t just plug in a Live USB and be ready to go. There are incompatabilities with this model. So perhaps Linux runs even worse on this Laptop in general, I do not know and it does not concern me.
I don’t think anyone assumes manipulation and they are definitely “valid” in their own way, but certainly not “valid” for every single user on earth, not even close.
That is great and makes things interesting.
I fully agree with that, especially you pointing out, that there is a lot from this topic depending on personal opinion.
However, I see that you again speak about the duopoly here, so I must clarify the following:
I don’t use any Ubuntu. I don’t like Ubuntu. But I understand why so many people use it.
I don’t use any Mint. I don’t like Mint. It is based on Ubuntu, which is the main reason for my distaste.
I use Debian on normal devices and DietPi (Debian based) on embedded devices like the Raspberry Pi. I use it, because it is extremely lightweight and yet it has lots of features. The mini version of the original Debian is also extremely slim and that’s what I like about it. The good thing is, that you have access to a huge range of packages, so if you need a bit more bloat, you can have an easy go at it.
It’s boring to see only Mint and Ubuntu related posts, but on the other hand we need to understand that the best way of getting into Linux is first trying a distribution that is easiest to learn. The product that is easiest to learn is always the one with the biggest support and community. Which is clearly Mint + Ubuntu and you can even count both as one, as you can do almost anything on Mint that you can do on Ubuntu and vice versa. This forum mainly features Linux newbies and has only a handful actual experts, so it’s no surprise we mostly see Mint and Ubuntu posts here. Perhaps on Gentoo’s forum, you wouldn’t see any posts about such lowly distributions.
I do not think any Ubuntu/Mint user tries to put their distribution first, trying to undermine Trisquel or whatever. They just are getting started with such a distribution and do not have ill intentions regarding any distribution rivalry.
So, please go on and post your experiences, your opinion, your thoughts about anything Linux related. The only thing we could describe as an issue is, that most people here are Regulars and know already what Trisquel is and that it is so performant. Therefore, people start getting annoyed, as they read these posts so many times now. One of those people is me, that is why I was motivated to debunk this whole performance-centric view toward a Linux distribution.
So you have 33% more RAM with your better spec old laptop - yet can’t do with your choices of light distro and DE that I can do with my ancient set-up. Thought you had all the experience and technical knowledge here? I am an OAP old age pensioner one year into linux and I’m the fast lane…taking you to the cleaners… What…with less RAM than you and others advise…and a middleweight OS…you cannot be serious…?
Bit of advice from me - drop that RAM hungry KDE and go for Mate - easy peasy. Then just ask Richard Stallman how to get gnuLinux onto a Thinkpad - easy peasy.
Your opinion not mine - just ask TopGear or Fifth Gear - don’t be silly
This is ridiculous - ubuntu easy - no way. My wife with no computer experience uses Trisquel for banking with a dicker secure key that generates codes; etc during covid lock-down.
What on earth - your 21 posts on KDE - pot calling the kettle black. You must be confusing me with Mr Mint you know that guy who likes you a lot - 139 times who has posted 123 times on Mint bless.
Thought I had generated a lot of interest - even my single topic on ePhone has over 700 views - totally unexpected. Just looked - 2.7k posts read in one year with over 300 likes - again totally unexpected and at complete odds with your views of me.
I look forward to your evidence and screen-shots as I suspect others here do - bring it on.
Dear @Akito and @Andy2,
there are actually two categories among the twelve :
Application
Discussion
Feedback
General Linux Question
Hardware
History
Humor
Linux Command Line Linux Mint
Linux Server
Science and Technology Ubuntu
Uncategorized
Perhaps you two should add a category for your own tastes.
How about Debian and one bastardly named ** Ubuntu-Debian** ?
There has been a couple question about Manjaro.
Are we going to make a category for them too? It is one of the top 10 Distro and a different branch.
It is based on the Arch Linux operating system.
And of course this could get our of hand. Last look, there are 275 Distro on the watch list.
Ubuntu based on Debian
Manjaro based on Arch Linux.
Fedora basée on Red Hat
Mint based on Ubuntu and Debian.
Mageia based on Mandriva Linux
Solus
openSUSE based on SUSE
Trisquel based on Ubuntu
So we got 5 categories
ArchLinux
Debian
Gentoo
Red Hat
Slackware
The idea is to help us, the beginners, to distinguish between distros in the different topics.
This would certainly help the moderators to forward/police different topics to the correct category.
Just a short intermission regarding the original topic of this thread:
For beginners, I would strongly recommend rather mainstream distributions based on Debian or Ubuntu. They are well maintained and work pretty much out of the box.
I just stumbled into a stupid problem on Arch: My image viewer (gwenview) failed to open an webp image. Not a problem of the program, though it does open them without problems on Kubuntu, but with the system libraries. Searching the Arch repository, I found several libs for making it work, one broken and others causing conflicts with already existing libraries. When trying to remove one of the conflicting ones, I got the warning that it would render about 20 existing apps useless.
Reminded me of the times when you tried to compile a program and you constantly got the error messages like these:
package foo requires at least lib bar v2.3
failed to build (existing version of bar is 2.4)
I’m not asking for help as I’m going to figure it out eventually, but issues like these can really turn new users off Linux in general.
Things like that practically don’t happen in the mainstream distributions.
I strongly oppose the idea of creating a whole zoo of distribution related categories. Experienced users don’t have many distribution related questions. Everybody who uses OpenSUSE, GenToo, Arch etc. already knows her way around the common cliffs and booby traps.
Whilst Mint is technically an Ubuntu distribution, a new user wouldn’t necessarily know that, so, in the spirit of being as newcomer-friendly as possible, it makes a lot of sense to have their two main distributions as categories.
All other specific distribution related issues can be dealt with in a single (new) category.
You know I have not seen Linux-Lite mentioned anywhere on here. They have customed Kernels for hardware like printers, scanners and any other hardware that I can’t think of at this time. It’s XFCE based comes down at 1.4GB. When the first ever Linux-Lite came out it was 1.0GB in download size. Just saying that’s all.
The remaining question is: how light is LinuxLite?
What I am mainly interested in: how much RAM does it use after boot when idle?
I was able to download some ISOs and ran them in a VM and tested them with htop:
Mate 20.04: 689 MB
lubuntu 20.04: 320 MB
lubuntu 20.04.1: 370 MB
lxle: 725 MB
I was shocked by MATE as I was of the opinion that this distro could be attributed the “light”-flag.
I also ran MATE as a live session on my ventoy-stick (on my PC directly). Here RAM consumption when idle (directly after boot) was even more than 800 MB (as opposed to over 400 MB with Lubuntu 20.04).
If I were you, I’d stop worrying so much about the “weight” of a suitable distribution. 8-10 years old laptops with quad core processors and 8 GB are easily available between 100 and 200€ and are perfectly able to run every version of Linux. If you then run into performance problems, it would be because of heavy applications and not because of your OS eating up too much memory.
Again, if I were you, I’d focus on usability, comfort and ease of management.
This may very well be a valid point. To me the “weight” of a distro is mainly RAM usage. Therefore I posted the idle RAM usage after boot in post #153.
Yet Mark´s (@clatterfordslim) suggestion seems very enticing and in the end reminded me that I still have an older LITE-ISO (linux-lite-4.4-64bit.iso) lying around somewhere. I finally found it and ran a live session in a VM (qemu/KVM again) and htop informed me of 404 MB RAM consumption (idle).
So I´d say this looks pretty good.
Version: 5.0 Release date: 31 May 2020 Codename: Emerald End-of-life date: April 2025 Based on: Ubuntu 20.04 LTS
Also not bad I´d say.
P.S.:
The reason I´m focusing on a light distro is that with my new system I should be able to do what I presently (Lubuntu 18.04.5) can do without any difficulties:
running thunderbird and chromium-browser (both not exactly lightweight themselves) and a VM (BodhiLinux, with just 1 GB RAM allotted to it I have to admit) at the same time without any hiccups.
Therefore I wouldn´t prefer a system which takes up more than 800 MB of RAM when idle after boot.
There are things you can stop auto starting at boot. With Linux-Lite and Cinnamon I always stop the annoying login sound. Mate has that Welcome Screen, that can be switched off and these days nearly every OS boots with Bluetooth app starting up that annoys the hell out of me, as you can easily attach your charging USB, for file transfer. For as long as the lead has Data transfer built in? Screen savers are a pain as well, as these days we don’t need them, unless you’re using a CRT Monitor (Cathode-Ray-Tube.) Never wanted to move my room around so much when we used them, they weighed an absolute ton. If you want a really fast boot uninstall anything to do with Snaps, though I don’t think Linux-Lite uses Snaps I’m not sure.
To quote Mina - “Despite being a bit tired of the constant advertising…"
And other moderator getting perturbed…
we now have … #150 above
“it makes a lot of sense to have their two main distributions (ubuntu + mint) as categories.”
I am also very tired of the constant advertising of ubuntu and mint and find this duplicity, hypocrisy and double standards quite amusing… add on 124 x Howard and all the Fanboys it starts to challenge Fawlty Towers and Monty Python…
Even more amusing… "being as newcomer-friendly as possible…”
What ubuntu newcomer-friendly as possible… priceless…
Hilarious… funniest thing I’ve read on it’sFOSS Who would want to start out with ubuntu-20 with all sorts of issues “very heavy on resources” - eating up CPU and RAM making it so slow, even with 6GiB RAM. Visitor rating 7.5 Distractions and gliches too… what a pile of Cr4p for a beginner to contend with…?
I should know - started out with ubuntu 16.04 LTS which I have just wiped from my Dell E6420 along with Win10-Pro. Should have done this 12 months back.
Guess what I have installed, visitor rating 8.7 (Wife; Maggie uses it too for banking - emails etc; we are both OAPs) - just to see how fast it is, before checking out Parabola - based on the Arch distribution, Parabola is a complete, user-friendly operating system, suitable for general “everyday” use, while retaining Arch’s “power-user” charm. Or some other Arch distro perhaps…?
Thanks for the good fun - take extra care to stay safe
Edit: Just dived in to repeat the ubuntu test with Trisqel v9 on the same Dell E6420 laptop…
As ALL can see 1.0GiB RAM (ubuntu 1.7GiB) so ubuntu grabs 70% more resource and 15% av CPU with ubuntu 20%.
This confirms DistroWatch’s findings - ubuntu is SLOW whereas they found Trisquel was highly responsive. As for ease of use there is just no comparison…
My dear @Andy2 : You got me completely wrong. I want the forum to be as newcomer friendly as possible. It is simply a fact that most new users start their journey into Linux with Ubuntu or Mint without being aware of their similarity.
In addition, I still find it disturbing how you constantly describe the great and mostly voluntary effort of people to create user-friendly distributions as “pile of crap”. Whilst it is fine to point out the strengths of other people’s creations, I don’t consider these kinds of comments to be in accordance with the spirit that should keep the FOSS community together.
Hi Mina - I trust that you did actually read the review this time…? You did so…! Well; as you and I have clashed before on reviews by this very experienced unbiased tester - I can’t understand your reasoning at all - It takes a certain amount of arrogance to dismiss his findings as Akito does with mine…! Without a shred of evidence so far…
Just substitute “what a pile of Cr4p for a beginner to contend with…?" with the very experienced author’s “distribution does not feel polished or smooth once it is installed - lot of little problems, distractions, and glitches too. I’d recommend passing on this release and hoping things get ironed out in time for Ubuntu 21.04. Further he notes “Software would consume 100% of my CPU endlessly, even after 20 minutes of waiting for a result.” - However, clicking the Livepatch icon brings up a message saying Livepatch is not available for this release. Which I suppose raises the question of why it was included in the menu for 20.10."
I think I called out this ubuntu quite correctly - you do not have to put up with any of the crap above when using Trisquel…
Perhaps this explains DistroWatch’s user rating of just 7.5 for ubuntu and 8.7 for Trisquel? There again I suspect you two know better…?
When potential Linux users check out it’sFOSS to find what to use - first up they get ubuntu - no bias or bad advice here then…?
1 ubuntu … quote “Easy to use” - Surely the funniest advice on the web…
2 Mint… quote “Performs great with older hardware” what a joke…
At least I try to redress the current imbalance and provide some good advice (AFAIK)
Then, when they install default ubuntu-20.10 - to be confronted with all that crap listed above - it will put some newcomers off for life. Surely we can do better than this…?
Wo…! Shock Horror it’sFOSS has never heard of NSA’s compliant mega dollar Mzoft tied up with Canabolical…? Wo! never heard of IOM registration for tax avoidance - F1 champ has… he buys his jet aircraft from there. Get real - give me a break - who are you trying to kid…?
bless.
"being as newcomer-friendly as possible…” 
ubuntu newcomer-friendly as possible… 
priceless… 
