Another Linux Lite install

[ptyerman]

First off, sorry for the long post, feel a need to rant and also heap some praise. 
Have spent the last few days exploring various Linux distro's in a end view to install on my living room multimedia PC. It runs Windows 7 x64, but since the meltdown and spectre debacle Windows updates have twice foobarred the OS, the first to a point where it wouldn't boot at all and the second time sent it haywire! Both times required a system restore to return it to a working state, and to tell it to ignore a couple of updates so they didn't install again.
It also happened at a most inconvenient time both times, first time was when I wanted to watch a video and second time when I booted it up to play some music while I got on with other things.
Hence deciding to put Linux on there on a second drive so I always have a choice to boot in to either OS, and I'm not left with a non bootable machine the next time I want to stick some music on to listen to.
It is a pretty old machine except for the case, I purchased a new ATX cube case to build it up in a couple years back, it does look quite nice. The motherboard is a Asus socket AM2 (I was given by a friend who had upgraded) fitted with a AMD Phenom 2.2Ghz quad core CPU (bought off eBay for £5) and 8Gb of Ram, the chipset is Nvidia Nforce 4, that proves how old it is. I also put my old AMD Radeon HD4870 in there along with a Asus Xonar D2X 7.1 PCI-E sound card.
The first distro I downloaded and tried was Manjaro, it installed no problem and everything worked, it also had access to all the latest software. BUT, I don't know what it was for sure but I didn't like it much, it's possibly because I installed the KDE version, I loved KDE back in the 3.xx days but not since. I just couldn't get a feel for it so I continued looking.
    Second was SolydX, again everything worked but it felt quite slow and I moved on after 10 minutes.
I then downloaded and tried Gecko Linux. Well, better description would be tried to try Gecko Linux but it wouldn't even boot the ISO, just continually threw a kernel panic at the Grub boot menu so I moved on.
Grabbed MX-17 and gave it a try, everything worked but it has the most stupid task bar invented by man! Whoever came up with that idea needs to go to UI school, horrible. After faffing around trying to re-configure it for 5 minutes I concluded it would be quicker to download and try something else, so I did.
Next up was PCLinuxOS, everything worked and I know a lot of folk love it but I didn't! Spent half an hour with it but wasn't impressed so ditched it.
Next up was Bodhi Linux. I already have this installed on a PC I have in the bedroom, I have also used it for several years, since the Bodhi 2.0 days on various machines. I do like Bodhi and don't really have anything negative to say about it, but it's not suited to all tasks and I found this was one of them.
Finally I downloaded the 3.8 version of Linux Lite, (already have the 3.6 release but thought I'd grab the latest), and put that on there. Excellent! Everything worked as was expected and it reminded me why I choose Linux Lite in the first place. It just works, it's intuitive, it has sensible defaults, and it's a solid base to build upon and make what you want from it.
I still have to upgrade my main PC to 3.8, that's a job for later this week I think.

Great job guys, my living room multimedia PC is rocking and shaking the walls again!


Again, sorry about the long post just to say thanks. Another sleepless night and needed the distraction!  ;D

[Valtam]

Linux Lite - Home Sweet Home

[tek10]

My living room multimedia PC has been happily running LL since ver2.6, currently on 3.8. Love it and no plans to try any other distros on it!

[ptyerman]

I like to keep my knowledge fresh and see what other distro communities are doing and where the distro is heading from time to time, hence the trying out of multiple distro's on that PC. Since I was intent on installing Linux on that PC there was no better time to experiment.
My next project will involve a AMD 1.8Ghz Athlon XP system so I'll be trying out some lightweight distro's on it. It will eventually end up running Amithlon or X-Amiga, but no harm trying things out first though. 

[TheDead]

[member=5531]ptyerman[/member]
If Linux Lite works on a machine, don't really need to go anywhere else.
One distro not mentionned too often is DeepinOS. It's really beautiful but its like an Exotic car, it's not really useful for everyday use but cool to show off, hehe!

Depending on memory and drive size of your machine LL could be a bit much for it. I already mentioned this in another thread but, next time this happens to me, I'll try PeppermintOS 8 respin2 141MB RAM on boot. My previous low-spec winner was Bohdi at 105MB (but its not XFCE, its less user friendly by a mile and installer/update takes too much ressource to successfuly install).

I'm from the Windows world so strangely enough I feel like Peppermint is like WindowsXP, a bit strange/bare bone and LinuxLite is like Windows7, full feature but uses a bit more ressources.

[ptyerman]

Linux Lite is on my main machines but like Windows or anything else it's not the be all and end all, after all you choose the right tool for the job at hand!
Talking about beautiful desktops, Makulu is really nice. I used it for a while back at Makulu 7 until Makulu 9, after version 7 it became really crash happy though. It's based off Ubuntu so not sure what he had done to make it so buggy!
The developer is also rather dismissive of anything he doesn't agree with, the old forum was full of comments and quite lively at the time, it had a growing user base, but the whole lot got deleted and a new web page and forum were created. After that it lost almost all its users and started moving into obscurity.
I tried the latest version recently in Virtualbox and it sure is a beautiful desktop to look at so kudos to him for the obvious amount of work put into it, still seems to be very few users though.

[TheDead]

Talking about beautiful desktops, Makulu is really nice. I used it for a while back...

I also tried it at version 13 last summer. Yeah its pretty but I tried two of his 32bits distros and was using between 400-550MB on boot.
I don't know why it was using that much ressources but stability was not there either. Pressing delete on that VM was not a hard decision

Cheers!