I've switched...

[Dapper Dan]

Those of you who've known me on these boards a long time know I've been a huge fan and champion of CRUX Linux, my chosen distro for a good while now. I've had a lot of good times with CRUX over the years. It has forced me to learn much but I've reached a crossroad.

For most of my work machines, I've used Ubuntu but have always kept CRUX as my home box distro for these reasons: It's very fast (maybe the fastest distro out there), it's very light, easy on resources and forces me to keep my command line skills fresh. I never know when I'm going to need to crack a terminal when working on my other Linux machines.

One thing about CRUX... the payoff is a lightening fast machine but, being source based, it does require a lot more time to configure, compile packages and maintain than Debian based distros. I just don't seem to have that time or patience any more and have decided to go with a much easier distro for my home machine... Mint LXDE which I'm using now.

This is not to say I won't ever use CRUX again as I still have it on two other machines. In fact, I'm chomping at the bit to get my hands on 2.8 which should be along shortly. For now, I just need an easy distro for myself and my family. So far, Mint is fitting the bill nicely.

[jayd512]

It can happen... I had 2.6 rolling along, and then I just didn't have time to properly configure 2.7. So I switched to Ubuntu 10.04.
While Lucid is far from slow, and isn't what I would call a resource hog, I do miss the lightweight speed of CRUX.
Right now, I could probably get the time in for 2.7, I think I'll wait.
I've made up my mind that when 2.8 does go live, I'm jumping on it!

[Irithori]

Similar here.
A few years ago, I used gentoo on my workstation and even for a bunch of servers.
We needed the flexibility and up-to-date (not to say: bleeding edge) packages,
and it was/is also a fun system to have.

The downside was the time consumption for compiling and maintaining the systems.
Even with distcc and pre-compiled ebuilds.

So now we run a plain centos as a basis and have created our stack of needed software with about 300 RPMs

[Haze]

Hi

I've used your post as an opportunity to check Linux Mint myself. And the first impression is "wow". It looks very clean, fresh and modern. The gnome version looks very good as well as the lxde version. I ran it in a VM, but I think I will go through it a little bit more detailed after an installation on my laptop.

Thanks for that!

Br
Haze

[cynwulf]

If you want something lighter and without the extra "bling 'n bloat", you might be better off with regular debian, rather than mint or butnut...

[oz]

I've played around with (and enjoyed) CRUX and Gentoo as well, but found them to require too much time and extra effort, so made the move to Arch almost 7 years ago. I've been happy there ever since, but while I've never tried any version of Mint, the LXDE version does indeed look like it might be fun to play around with, so I might give it a go on one of my upcoming weekends.

[Haze]

If you want something lighter and without the extra "bling 'n bloat", you might be better off with regular debian, rather than mint or butnut...

I'm with deb since years

[elija]

Mint XFCE user here. Like LXDE, it is now based straight of Debian. Unlike LXDE it doesn't try to be particularly light-weight providing as it does full fat applications such as Libre Office. If you want a more upto date Debian without the *fun* of the testing repos, then you should consider switching to the LMDE latest repo. (See the Mint blog for details).

I always liked Debian but it was too much hard work to configure and set up (Yes I'm lazy) and LMDE seems like the perfect compromise. Debian (stable) would be my first choice for a server though.

[Dapper Dan]

So far, I'm really digging LXDE. It's similar in appearance to my beloved IceWM, which I might install yet. LXDE is pretty straight ahead to configure but it and Mint aren't as responsive as IceWM on CRUX as I knew they wouldn't be. It's a trade off though.

My eight year old son is really into gaming and there are a lot of decent Linux games out there now. Before, it would take a while just to get TuxRacer or SuperTux or FrozenBubble going properly, what with the dependencies and libraries and all that source based stuff.

Now, games are just a simple install via the software manager as was LibreOffice that I must have for work. I had six Linux games up and running for my son this morning in the amount of time it used to take me to compile and configure one under CRUX. Screens to come.

[elija]

It appears that LXDE isn't based of Debian; which is a shame as it would really fly! I'm sure I read that somewhere. Ah well, senility is on it's way.