>No-one suggests that old pentiums with 32 or 64 MB RAM can run GNOME well >- it's worth pointing out though, that until recently one of my machines >was a P200 MMX 64MB RAM running Breezy with fluxbox quite successfully >using light apps like emelfm, sylpheed and abiword etc It even played >music well using either cplay or alsaplayer, and the Gimp was usable for >simple image manipulations. It's a question of knowing what to use and how >to set it up, that's all. this just proves my point its a 686 machine and it still can't handle the default installation of ubuntu. Why not improve performance where we can?  In hoary I spent the time to recompile most of apps and everytime there was a 15-20% performance improvement in overall system performance in each app... It's one of the major reasons why Dropline Gnome feels faster on this same box then ubuntu does, they compile all their software to 686 min spec.   I understand that in 3rd world countries its hard to get "modern" machines but a system that is 15 years old isn't necesarily modern but yet still fits on the 686 spec.  If we really cared about sub 686 machines we wouldn't be running gnome we would be running xfce or some other lightweight desktop by default, heck you need at lest 256 mb of ram for gnome to feel semi responsive!