On Mon, 5 Sep 2011 23:00:26 -0500 (CDT) Yaron <tclug at freakzilla.com> wrote: > > Nowadays, even cheap computers come with more than 2gb of RAM, and nobody > really expects any current OS to work REALLY well with less than 8. If > you're going to run Ubuntu on old hardware (even if it's simulated) you > should try a desktop environment that was actually designed for that sort > of thing. Remember, Gnome (and KDE etc) are being developed to give > CURRENT users a CURRENT desktop environment - and that means a lot of > flashy lights and eye candy and bells and whistles - things that will take > advantage of your 24gb of RAM and your quad-core CPU and your SLI video > cards, etc, and might be kinda sucky without them. > I think that even the most bloated Linux distro should work very well even with considerably less than 8 GB of RAM. It seems so surreal that computers can come with 24 GB of RAM, because it feels like just yesterday that 24 GB was a hard drive. Earlier this year, I gave away an 11-year-old desktop computer with a 4.3 GB hard drive. That said, I'm sure Windows 8 will find a way to take advantage of all 8-24 GB of RAM. I highly doubt that Microsoft will release another OS that's lighter than it's predecessor. > Switch your Ubuntu to Window Maker or FVWM, use Chrome instead of Firefox > (or better yet, get Firefox 3), use Pine rather than Evolution and use an > xterm/aterm instead of whatever abominable GUI-based file manager Gnome > throws at you, and trust me, it'll be a HELL of a lot faster. > Ubuntu with GNOME works at a reasonable speed. I'm just used to running Swift Linux as the host OS with 3.25 GB of RAM on a 2006-vintage dual-core computer. -- Jason Hsu Founder and lead developer of Swift Linux (http://www.swiftlinux.org)