Canonical’s Red Headed Stepchildren

My hardware is straining with Ubuntu Lucid's implementation of GNOME. I could and probably should go back to Debian, but in the meantime I installed Fvwm, Fvwm Crystal and Fluxbox. I've already turned Ubuntu One off (it doesn't run at all outside of GNOME anyway).

Now all I have to do is brush up on my Fluxbox configuration skills (OK, I really mean get some of those skills, since I have absolutely none at this point).

Firefox is still a hog, but things are much swifter with fewer services running.

The one thing I kind of miss is automounting of USB devices. It's no big deal to do it with mount and/or add to /etc/fstab, but I'm lazy.

It's based on Ubuntu, but I've found Mint to be much faster than Ubuntu. I have an older (eight years) machine with 512 MB memory and 1.5 GHz processor. Most distros don't run very well, but Mint, using the GNOME desktop, is extremely responsive.

For one of my laptops (also eight years old, 1 GHz processor) I installed Mint LXDE. Nice to look at, plus all the goodies you get with Mint, but really fast.

I am going to test the Ubuntu Netbook interface on my laptop to see how responsive it is. Designed for netbooks, it should require less of the hardware than GNOME.

GNOME's not a slow as you might think. In Debian it's pretty quick. There are other things gumming up Ubuntu. What they are exactly, I'm not sure.