Low-power secondary machine - what distro to install?
Hello all,
my main machine (which I write from right now) is a nice and stable P4, with moderately good specs I won't get into right now. My main OS here is Ubuntu 6.06, which I am very happy with. I also have Windows on dual-boot, but soon enough I plan to get rid of that big piece of broken software and run a clean, lean, Linux machine. That said, I am a Linux newbie, and I'm always looking to learn more about Linux (though I don't really need to get all that in-depth for my day-to-day on this machine).
Anyhow, I just got a secondary machine, much weaker in every way, which I control through a kvm switch (a thingy that lets me use the same keyboard, mouse, and monitor on two machines and switch between them using a keyboard shortcut). Its main purpose is to have a Windows machine around for whenever I need it (since I help my father with his mechanic work, and that usually means I need a Windows machine), but I have oodles of disk space that I don't need there, so I want to use the space to experiment with a different Linux distro on a computer I don't mind harming.
I had install discs for SuSE 9.2 OEM lying around, and I installed them (in GNOME mode) on the secondary machine, dual-boot with Windows via GRUB. The thing is, the SuSE there runs so slow I can't even believe it's just the computer's power (after all, Windows XP runs there reasonably well) and the SuSE there is so slow I've given up trying to upgrade to SuSE 10. Now to my actual question (I know I went on for a bit to get here) - what would be better to install there in a clean install, SuSE 10, or Xubuntu? I mainly ask as far as performance - I know SuSE won't run as quick as Xubuntu, but if it's light enough to run reasonably well, I want it so I can experiment with it, since I can experiment with Xubuntu on my main machine by just loading an Xfce session...
If there's some other distro I should check out, I'm open to the option, but SuSE and Xubuntu are the ones I've put my eye on so far.
I'll be glad for any advice I can get.
Cheers. :)
