"best Linux distro" Part Two

Ok, Ubuntu Then

Right, first-off you are hit by a strange "African sounding" name. Then version of the distro have stranger terms ...... alliteration of adjective and rare creatures I guess. Anyway when I downloaded Precise Pangolin, I decided to install it on a different machine. Just to recap, here's the hardware that I own/use:

1. "Desktop" or tower, home made with 4-cores and loads 'o' ram
2. Toshiba notebook, 2-cores, 2GB ram
3. Compaq notebook 1-core, 2GB ram
4. Dell netbook with 1GB ram (no DVD/CD drive)

Machine no. 2 (Toshiba) was chosen mainly because it is a little more powerful than the Compaq I tried putting Zorin distro on (reasoning: Zorin is a derivative of Ubuntu hence will need more computing power than the Compaq has - see Part One). Now to make it a little more challenging, I wanted to dual boot Ubuntu with an existing Windows 7 already on the Tosh. Warning (newbies): Hey if you want to dual boot, be ready to re-install existing or new OS a few times! Or at least you might need to "repair" the OS's bits that boot it up. I'll have a future post on dual booting.

There are tons and tons of Ubuntu reviews so I'm not going to add to it. It runs Unity as a windows/desktop manager or at least the Precise Pangolin does. Let me digress. Linux in the past was obsessively Open-Source oriented. So much so that it would not run on any hardware! Unless you can find a .... say graphics or sound card that has an open-source driver. Or other essential hardware would also need open-source support. If you moaned about this, the Linux geeks would tell you "go and write a driver instead of moaning". Jees, I just wanna run a PC - not go and get a degree in coding!! NOW, things are a-changing. Slowly these snotty old geeks are fading away (but not gone,unfortunately) and suddenly Ubuntu bursts on the scene supporting hardware straight out of the box (to cut a long story short). Not being precious about open-source means non-geeks can use it.

So what happened next? Well Ubuntu runs quite nicely on the Tosh, but no faster than Win 7! Perception is a funny thing, but I might have been expecting too much of this Linux distro. The Unity desktop was different, but I quite liked it. But don't forget, I've been spoilt by a Quad-core Intel with 16G ram and Win 7 on it is very quick. Anyway my mind wandered to the little Dell netbook and started Googling to see what would be go better on it than the installed Win XP that's very sluggish on it.

So, Part Three will look at whether Peppermint Linux is fast enough on machine no.4 - the Dell netbook.