I was reading the only Xubuntu themed blog I have ever come across, Living With Xubuntu, and there was a link to a reddit thread about why people are switching from Ubuntu to Debain. The general theme from the thread was one that I’ve heard many times before: Ubuntu is bloated and Debian or Arch or Gentoo is lighter and better and you Ubuntu morons will see the light one day and switch to a real man’s distribution. And not once have I seen anyone mention that Ubuntu can be as light, if not lighter, than every distribution suggested. The trick is not to install the 700 mb GNOME Ubuntu turd that is their main edition, or even Xubuntu (which is a great distro/spin, but is a tad on the bloated side), but install the frickin UBUNTU MINIMAL CD . There’s a reason they call it the minimal cd, it’s only 12.7 mb. You want to avoid bloat, install a 13 mb system.
You want a lightweight functional Xfce system? Install the ubuntu minimall cd and then run “sudo apt-get install xfce4″. That’s it. You get an absolute bare bones Xfce desktop and all the goodness that comes with Ubuntu. Like drivers, tons of packages and a huge support system of forums and blogs. And if you want a GNOME free login manager to round it out, just run “sudo apt-get install lxdm”. And as a free bonus, you get LXDE as well! For all of 9 additional mbs! Not bloated! You get two bloat free desktops, on a system that actually frickin works out of the box.
Stay GNOME free by adding NetworkManager, Chromium, Pidgin, Parole, Aqualung, Mousepad, etc. It’s pretty easy to check and see if you’re “bloating” up your system: after you run “sudo apt-get install whatever” look at the list of dependent packages and the total size of the install. If there are a ton of packages that start with “gnome” or “libgnome” try to find another application. And there you go, a lightweight Ubuntu running a full featured Gtk desktop. This may become more common if the Xubuntu team blimps up their spin at the same rate the Unity team did with the main edition.
Yeah, right. I just installed this “ubuntu minimal CD”, with 13mb download, but more than 650mb after install. I reached 1G after installing xfce4, 1.1G with lxdm. What’s your point on fooling people?
The problem with these fat distros is not the size of the installation disk, it’s its final size in MY hard disk, and the memory use.
What is the memory usage? In LXDE mine boots up to a whooping ~85 mbs, and in XFCE a staggering ~95 mbs. I didn’t check the size of the install after adding Xfce4 and LXDM, and since then I have put on TeXLive, so I have no idea what it was. But unless you’re using a cellphone, who cares about 1 gb of disk usage? I care about what starts up and what runs in the background, and this feels as fast, if not faster, than SliTaz did on the same box. And SliTaz is a frickin awesome distribution fyi.
I really like the Minimal CD installs, and enjoyed my Maverick a lot. Unfortunately, I couldn’t get the Natty to work, but I forget what it was about my weird system (nVidia chipset, ATA drive for OSes, SATA drive for data) that caused it to gag.
I just installed the Debian Netinstall, which is the same kind of bird, and it works very well. I couldn’t get Cairo Dock to work right, but the XFCE dock is good enough.
I used GDM for the login manager, but next time I’d like to try LXDM.
I can’t tell from googling whether LXDE and XFCE do different things or are just alternatives of the same thing. Maybe you can ‘splain it to me.
Recently came across your blog and really feel your pain. I went through a lot of the same stuff. The bottom line for me with Mint, Ubuntu, etc. is they just load for too much junk for me and it makes it their system and not mine. I played with Crunchbang and PClinux (I am an XFCE guy and had been using Xubuntu and Lubuntu before that) but the load and all the excess was still to much. By chance I read a blog about Aptosid and decided to give it a whirl. I have been absolutely amazed. My overhead is minimal, there is nothing on the machine except what I want on it, the install took 3 minutes to have a working X and it was incredibly easy.
It’s a Sid distro so you do have to take care but I have put it on 3 different machines of varying age with no issues. One is a dual core, one is an Acer Netbook and the last an old 386 machine. They all worked virtually out of the box. The manual is very well written and walks you through about anything you might encounter and with a short tweak or two you can have things the way you want them. A very active community and developers who are in the forum all the time. I really can’t say enough good about it. I would liken it to having an Arch setup with an easy to use graphic install and without the pretentious community. I have been using Linux for about 20 years but am not a guru, this distro just works and is really thought out from a users perspective. Best of all it has ended my distro hopping.
Thanks for reminding me about Aptosid! I have an install of Aptosid/KDE in one of my partitions, and it was a nice KDE experience.
My current favorite is Debian Business Card / SLim / Awesome / PieDock. The last is a cool program-starter that I’ve come to really enjoy.
I’m going to download Aptosid/XFCE and give it a look. Xfe is my file manager of choice with any distro, and Xfw is OK.