Could someone recommend a good disrto for my needs.

[connel]

Hi, I am looking for a distro that will do the following:

• Be light (I am especially looking for a distro that will boot very quickly and be fast when running).
• I also prefer KDE to gnome.

Also is it possible for a light distro to run KDE or is KDE a resource hog? I have heard of KDE lite is this any good?

[benerivo]

I've tried several distros and there really is very little between them in terms of speed. I don't even notice a great deal of difference beetween KDE and Gnome. If you really want your Linux to be very fast, then you will have to go for one with specialised 'lite' packages such as Damn Small Linux, Puppy Linux or similar - or at least sacrifice the desktop and use XFCE. IMO the speed of packages that you run on the OS have a much greater impact on speed and responsiveness than the OS itself.

[oz]

Welcome to the forums, connel!

Take a look at the link in my signature for lots of info about Linux and getting started using it. Be sure to let us know if you should run into any problems, and have fun with Linux.

oz

[connel]

OK so basically its not the distro that makes it fast its the Desktop Environment? Because I don't really want to ditch KDE. I have been previously using openSUSE. I really liked it apart from it was a bit slow(I especially liked its Grub skin) . I have about 384mb of RAM, and a 32bit 2.0 GHz processor and 40GB HDD and it seemed to take ages to boot. I dual boot with windows as well so sometimes when I have openSUSE on my computer as well as M$ my hard drive is kinda full, I don't want to use a live cd however. So which one of the small distros looks the best, has a nice grub, a solid package management and oh and runs KDE. I know i am probably asking for way too much lol.

EDIT

Also I looked at VectorLinux and it runs KDE in the screenshots. Also whats the difference between the versions of VectorLinux? Ones called gold, ones called SOHO and ones called standard. What's the difference between them?

[Thrillhouse]

OK so basically its not the distro that makes it fast its the Desktop Environment? Because I don't really want to ditch KDE.

For the most part that's true. Some distros are a little more bloated than others upon initial installation (Fedora, among them). However, when people talk about distros in terms of speed, they're usually referring to the DE. In my opinion, KDE is a little clunky. It, and Gnome in my opinion, are built more for the new Windows convert who still is trying to get the hang of Linux and would like things to look as familiar as possible. If you're looking for a really fast distro, you should look in to Gentoo or Slackware with a minimalist desktop environment. They both have decent package management systems and would be ideally suited for what you're talking about.

[smolloy]

I found that the basic installation of Ubuntu booted much faster on my laptop than SuSE, so I would recommend that (or Kubuntu if you prefer KDE over gnome).

But the fastest I have ever had was Gentoo with fluxbox. It took 45 seconds to boot compared to almost 2 minutes for suse with kde!

[connel]

OK thanks for all your help

[mdelorme]

But the fastest I have ever had was Gentoo with fluxbox. It took 45 seconds to boot compared to almost 2 minutes for suse with kde!

I'll second that. I tried a number of distros on my new laptop when it first arrived about four months ago. I've found Gentoo to be the fastest hands down. Not even necessarily because of optimizing code or anything like that, but just because it doesn't come with any of the the bloat that many other distros package with their default install.

[BlahBlah_X]

There is something called KDE light. However, it is only used by easys, and unpopular distribution that ranks about 100th on DistroWatch.

I would go with a lighter KDE distro thats less bloated such as PCLinuxOS or Kubuntu.

[oz]

Hi, connel - the "which distro" question is very subjective, so I'm locking the thread. Once you've decided on a distro, don't hesitate to start a new thread if you should run into any problems, or have questions about it.

Above all, have fun with Linux!

oz