For everything you described i suggest "Xubuntu" it has the smallest footprint and works the best out of the all... beyond that there is Linux Mint (running MATE interface for best performance) i personally run Mint on my desktop and Xubuntu on my netbook bot have tons of games.. my Mint system runs games up to unreal3 level fine using PLayOnLinux and an older wine version.. as for my netbook i only play dos games

My Xubuntu is so light on resources i can run VM's on my netbook and responce is like its a native OS.


Peppermint two - light and fast, very clean interface
XFCE for Fedora - the glory of redhat and dpkg but in a 'yum'my interface :P

Unity is built on Gnome 3.

IIRC, Torvalds had historically hated Gnome. Then KDE 4 happened and he fled to Gnome 2. Apparently the Gnome designers saw the chaos of that transition (KDE 3 --> 4) and were inspired. Gnome 3 happened. Torvalds did not appear happy about this and made comments to that effect which were reported far and wide*. I believe the poor guy is using XFCE these days. ;)

It is my understanding that Gnome shell and Unity are difficult to make coexist on the same system (do any distros support this?). As such he may have never used Unity. Regardless, I really doubt it would be to his tastes.



*Torvalds is very famous in *nix land. His opinion will always get reported even in cases where it doesn't carry much weight.

the new wine is crap drop back to 1.2


as for an interface XFCE then LXDE then MATE in that order for the most pleasant exsperiance...

Well it'll either get you fired or a new notebook :-p

I have quite a good experience with openSuSE (KDE) as a just-works distro. The default install has all the important things (libreoffice, firefox, etc), it's stable, has a lot of extra software in additional repos - I'm using it daily and can certainly recommend it if you haven't tried it yet.

I also use OpenSUSE. It's (more than) a bit bloated, but it's a solid platform for KDE.

The Linux desktops I use daily have OpenSUSE (KDE) and CentOS (Gnome).

For me, Ubuntu is satisfactory only as a server OS, and there CentOS and FreeBSD (yeah, I know it's not Linux, it's better) are superior; as a desktop OS, it is a case of too many cooks spoiling the soup.

Well I got Linux Mint standard edition with Gnome 3.2 up and running on the laptop without any significant problems. I have experienced a couple of desktop crashes but it has otherwise been fairly stable. For some reason, gedit of all things seems buggy as hell. I was just writing a little file of notes about Linux games to check out and the cursor kept jumping to odd places in the file and a couple times it hung altogether. You'd think after all these years that little app would be rock solid but I guess not for whatever reasons. Another time while navigating around in Firefox I was suddenly treated to an all white screen and no keyboard input would be accepted. I had to shut the machine off and turn it back on. Who knows what was going on there, whether it was Firefox, Gnome 3 (probably?) or something else.

Anyway, I relocated the machine to my other desk in this room now that it has wireless connectivity and I'm taking a little break from fooling with it further. Despite my earlier comments about KDE I am considering giving it another whirl because the bugs I've seen in Gnome 3.2 bug me. I might come to like KDE just fine if it is first and foremost STABLE! We shall see. I do have a live CD for openSUSE as well as a KDE Mint live DVD to try out again.

On a brighter note it looks like I'd have no shortage of games to play on the thing. The software manager is nice in Mint. I found some games there that looked interesting including Wesnoth, Warzone2100, Freeciv and Nexuiz. I also own most of the ID games that can be run natively along with UT2k4 and NWN. Then there is DOSBox for some of my GOGs. Last but not least I own a good number of Windows games that are listed as platinum on WineDB for running with WINE in Linux. That's a lot of stuff for a machine that's really just for backup use and the occasional trip. It looks like Starcraft, Diablo II and Warcraft III all run well with WINE too which is very cool.

A funny thing happened while playing with Linux over the past couple of days. The geek in me started coming out again and I began to think about how it might be cool to have Linux on my desktop PC. I must be nuts as Windows 7 is working fine and I shouldn't fix what ain't broke but the thought came and went a number of times. I think I will play it safe for now though and do my fooling around on the laptop as I investigate the other distro options I mentioned as well as getting some games to run in DOSBox and WINE.

Woohoo, I finally found where to launch the installed games on Ubuntu Unity! I had to click the link to list all the installed apps (Dash Home => More Apps => Installed => "See 90 more results..."), by default it had them hidden. They seem to be also under "Media Apps", I didn't try that link before because I thought it is referring only to media players etc. The freeware platform jumping game, Frogatto, seems pretty good, better than I expected.

I still think it is harder for me to use effectively on desktop than old Gnome 2, but I'm still learning I guess... I'm able to cope with Win7 UI, so I guess I could learn to live with Unity as well (but then, what's the point if I don't necessarily have to).

Considering the crashes you seem to be getting with various Linux distros, has anyone suggested a HW failure with your old laptop? Or are you trying out the very latest, maybe even experimental, Linux distros (e.g. you chose Ubuntu 11.10 instead of the latest LTS release, albeit I guess 11.10 is considered stable)?

Apart from Fedora which in my eyes is beta software, Linuxes have been rock-solid with the various PCs I've tried. Fedora wasn't, back when the Fedora release which I tried (Fedora 12 I believe, ie. a couple of years ago...) was still quite new. That seemed to hang or crash every now and then, but later it got stable... and at that point Fedora's support was nearing its end, and I was supposed to update to next Fedora release, so I gave up on it.

I personally leave new Windows machines (with Windows 7) untouched, ie. no Linux (replacement or on the side). For me Linux is a great replacement OS for older PCs which are running some old POS OS that is not secure anymore (I guess XP is fast becoming one, especially when the support ends in two years ? or so).

In the meantime, VMWare Player is certainly a very nice and convenient way of getting a taste and trying out different Linux distributions (or even Windows 8 Preview). I think I'll have to try out Mint Linux, whether it is a good replacement Linux since Ubuntu Unity is what it is.

Go on, do it! You'll have fewer problems, not having to deal with poorly/unspecified wireless cards which require proprietary drivers.

If you want a really professional, stable and secure distro I'd suggest Debian. You can download it as a "netinstall", which I believe comes with no DE, allowing you to install whatever DE suits you (or none at all!).

I wouldn't install it if you use your machine for a lot of gaming. The novelty will soon wear off. It's nice to play with but you don't want it on a main pc really. You could always run it in a virtual OS though or a live copy off of a usb drive.

Thanks to those that recommended Linux Mint... after all the issues I ran into with Ubuntu on my HTPC I now just have XBMC on it's own (yes I know it uses Ubuntu) and Linux Mint.... finding mint much more user friendly and it actually makes it look like Linux could one day be a valid competitor to windows for the average user market... if only they could get around the issues of games but I'm guessing that's largely down to Microsoft owning all things direct x.

I second this. Spend a week with Linux and there's almost no going back. If you want a minimal distro, as suggested, I'd also recommend Debian Netinstall or Arch Linux (The AUR is simply wonderful).

Before you do, make sure the games you want to play are compatible with Wine (I've personally never had a single problem with wine.)

edit2: Just wanted to say how glad I am to see Linux not getting random hate any more since Ubuntu has popularised it. It's really heart warming to see and perhaps soon it won't be so mysterious in the desktop market. :)

Interesting to read this. Have not used Ubuntu in a while, so didn't know that they had gone so wrong with Unity.
Been using RHEL for a while on my work laptop. And it works like a charm, but of course not really free. The odd game I've tried through Vine have worked flawlesly as well..

Someone above questioned the possibility of hardware problems with the HP laptop I've been using where I've had various crashes and issues which they haven't seen. It's a valid question but I think the hardware is fine with one possible exception. I have been using a USB wireless mouse by Logitech while I've been doing this stuff and it seems to work fine too. However, at the same time the trackpad on this laptop remains active too.

So I have wondered, could having two devices competing for cursor control be causing crashes, etc.? Maybe. I've never done any programming in this area at all and am clueless about how this stuff actually works so I wouldn't claim to know. But it does seem possible to me that perhaps at times I may inadvertently activate the trackpad with my hands near it typing while at the same time perhaps a signal is coming from the mouse. This is the only thing I can think of that is a little unusual about this particular PC.

My conclusion after considering this stuff is I would need to test with one device removed, the simplest choice being the mouse, and observe again whether I seem to have issues with the same relative frequency or even at all. This is at least a start in looking at what if anything might be an issue with that machine. I too am surprised I'd have seen this much trouble with these well known Linux distros so I don't rule out the possibility at this point that something else might be in play here.

As another little test, all four CDs/DVDs I have are "live" ones so I am going to try booting those on the desktop PC and try to deliberately recreate some problems I saw and see if I can or not. This little exercise may be telling as well.

I would be happy to find that the issue is the usb mouse. I could then do some homework to learn how to disable the trackpad and solve the problem as I prefer having a mouse to use, particularly for gaming.