1. Arch linux anyone? Distro choices blah blah.

[Daniel Cohen]

I'll second this. Arch Linux was the distro that finally stopped me from 
hopping. The best package manager ever, a great community with 
exceptional helpful irc *glares at ubuntu* and a plethora of packages, 
not to mention all the user made packages in one central place (it's 
really easy to make your own too).

I almost forgot the wiki - like the gentoo one, it's so helpful in 
everything, and gives you simple step-by-step instructions for all your 
exotic hardware needs, though most of the time it's not needed - my 
eeepc worked out of the box :)

On 02/12/2009 19:35, Federico Flego wrote:
> Hi there,
>
> I've being using Archlinux on a Dell inspiron 5150 (Pentium 4 3.06 GHz,
> 1Gb RAM) for a few years. It is very similar to Slackware with a 'user
> friendly' software install manager.
> The main philosophy is it installs basic (really basic) software, than
> you add what you want.
>
> In my opinion, when you want to run Linux on old machines, the largest
> gain is to run a light window manager (I use xfce, heavier than lxde)).
> Changing distribution will give smaller gains in comparison.
>
> Archlinux actually provides you these smaller gains too, since it
> doesn't install and keep running, as several distributions do by
> default, all possible demons and other little programs that constantly
> check everything...
>
> If you need some of these applications, as for example a battery daemon
> for your laptop, you need to explicitly install them. You could achieve
> the same result de-installing/turning off a lot of unwanted stuff on
> other distributions. I prefer to start from little and add on :)
>
> Hope it helps somehow...
>
> Cheers,
>
> Ico.
>