As a follow-up on a very old post I thought it’s worth providing an update. Despite it’s age (& only costing $350 at the time) my little Asus EEE PC 900 it is still a useful device. It has turned out as one of the better IT investments in my lifetime. However it’s not (and was never) the fastest kid on the block and recent OS upgrades have become increasingly resource hungry.
With the recent Ubuntu 12.04 LTS upgrade I was in the process of upgrading a few other notebooks and noticed that the release schedule for some of the Ubuntu variants (Kubuntu, Xubuntu & Lubuntu) has been brought in line with the main OS branch. So while waiting for the installs on the other machines to finish I thought about updating the EEEPC as well. I tried Xubuntu at first, but did not like the interface (and the default apps pre-installed) and there were hardly any performance gains.
But installing Lubuntu was a different story. I am very impressed by the LXDE desktop environment and the UI performance. The responsiveness of the UI is remarkably better than other desktop managers on a small netbook. And you still get the underlying strengths of the Ubuntu (Debian) based package management in it’s latest revision. That means most applications come packaged and there’s PPA’s for the rest.
Looks Lubuntu’s the new favourite. Hat tip to the Lubuntu maintainers and LXDE developers – excellent work in producing a no-frills but very functional, decent looking & usable desktop environment for devices that are getting a bit older … !
I too have used Lubuntu on my Acer Aspire One netbook. The performance is quite good. I’ve since tried other distros as well, and the one I keep going back to is Zorin OS (Another Ubuntu derivative). I’m using the full blown 5.2 release (based on Natty), there is a ‘Lite’ release as well, and they’ve recently released Version 6.0 Lite, which is in line with Ubuntu 12.04. But agree, Lubuntu works well on the smaller form factor. But go keep Zorin in my mind, I believe this distro is worth a look. So much so, I’ve standardised on it across all my machines.
I have an Asus 901 that originally ran Win XP, but after a complicated series of events in which I borked it beyond repair (to the point where I couldn’t even reinstall the OS), I gave lubuntu a try. Damn, it’s good. Exactly what I need.
By the way, I go into my own experiences here:
http://www.noahjdchinnbooks.com/2013/07/05/desperate-times-call-for-linux/
and
http://www.noahjdchinnbooks.com/2013/07/08/adventures-in-linux/
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