GNU/Linux Advocacy

[chombee]

On Tue, 2007-02-20 at 09:28 -0500, Eric Dunbar wrote:
> Perhaps so, but I find that Ubuntu GNOME is no much less of a memory
> hog (on the low-end machines) than Windows XP, and, compared to the
> earlier stable versions of Windows (NT 4 SP 6, 2K) it actually
> requires more resources to run well. Of course, if you're willing to
> go with a crippled GUI you can manage with fewer computing resources,
> but, then you're also sacrificing desktop functionality.

Am I right in thinking Vista requires 1GB of RAM? Or is that only if you
have the new desktop effects turned on?

I volunteer at a free software lab that does many installs of Ubuntu for
individuals and organisations on old reclaimed machines. Hardware that
other people, usually Windows users, are throwing out because it's of no
use to them anymore. We've found that standard Ubuntu/GNOME will run
well on pretty much anything as long as you can boost it up to 256MB
RAM.

I'm not sure how that compares to Windows XP. But the big advantage of
putting Ubuntu on a machine like this is that it'll continue to run as
well as it did on day one until the hardware fails. Even if XP does run
OK on such a machine at first, it will have crippled it in a few months.
So people really appreciate when we give them a stable, long-term
solution using free hardware and software.

If a machine is really too low end to run Ubuntu/GNOME, I still think
that with Ubuntu you're in a better position. We can setup XUbuntu for
people, or if it's *really* low-end hardware do an Ubuntu server install
and build them a custom desktop based on a lightweight window manager
like Openbox. So there really is a solution for almost any old hardware.
The advantage of using Ubuntu in this way compared to installing Windows
95 or 98, is that the user still gets modern, up-to-date,
still-being-maintained software. They can run the latest web browser,
etc.