So in the past 2 days I’ve had Mint Linux 9, Gentoo, Debian Lenny, Sabayon, Arch Linux, Fedora and OpenSuse on my ageing PC. By ageing I mean 960mb ram with Athlon 3200+ chip which isn’t quite a 64bit.
It’s safe to say, don’t bother with anything source code build related on pre-dual-core PCs. That write off Gentoo and Sabayon. Arch Linux is just painful, the Pacman system and even the installer just suck. I’m not a newbie by any stretch, but Jesus, put in some effort guys. Mint 9 is ace, comes with everything from Flash through to MP3 codec wise, the way it should be, but it’s dog slow.
I thought I’d go back to the base, Debian. Ah yes, I do love Debian, but then I realised that stability came with seriously out of date packages and I do like to be a bit slitting of the wrists on the app front. Fedora, er, no. Simple.
That leaves me on OpenSuse. I tried a net install and on 2mb broadband (I’ve been kicked back from 10mb at the moment for abuse) it’s slow as arse to install at 2hrs. But, it looks good, it’s stable and you can customise heavily. I’ll post back how I get on.