Why use Linux?

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Rayven2

Rayven2

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Jul 31, 2014
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So I was playing around the idea of using a VPS, now the idea is to use the least amount of resources so I figured... What better than Linux? Especially after all the great stories I've heard.

However to my disappointment, after installing and reinstalling a few distros (currently on Ubuntu 14.10) by the way the most consuming one. I discovered it actually uses a lot. I idle on about 500 MB of RAM and my Pent D 2.8 Ghz is constantly around 75%.

How is this better than using Windows XP which idles at less than 100 MB of RAM and my CPU sitting at less then 10%? What am I missing people? I still need a GUI to do my tasks.
 
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Most of the popular distributions use, by default, fairly demanding GUIs. Fortunately, there are several GUIs that are designed for low resource consumption. Many of the most popular distributions even have variations that use these UIs instead.

The two most popular interfaces are KDE and Gnome, with the newer versions of KDE being my personal favourite. Ubuntu uses its own Unity interface which is built using the same tools as Gnome. All of these can be fairly demanding.

Next up is XFCE. It's a very nice GUI that puts function over form. It can be made to resemble a Windows desktop quite easily. Ubuntu has an XFCE variant called Xubuntu.

LXDE is a GUI that's designed specifically for resource constrained environments. It's not very pretty, but it's not terrible either. LUbuntu uses the LXDE environment.
 
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There are several Linux distros designed for low power machines. Most of the popular modern distros are meant to be feature rich, and support just about everything (read bloated). The stripped down distros just aren't as popular as most of the "bloated" ones unfortunately. My favorite used to be ZenMini from PCLinuxOS. It was fairly stripped of various applications and then I could load just what I needed. However that disappeared when Gnome 3 came out. These days I run Linux Mint, and don't really care what resources it takes up, my hardware has more than enough horsepower to spare.

If you really want something easy on hardware, why not look at the mini distos? TinyCore for one has a GUI and is only 12 MB? Want something with a bit more features, Puppy Linux is 100 MB?
 
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@Pinheadd Thanks, is Xubuntu anything like Lubuntu? Since it was also quite demanding. Also I didn't select your answer as a solution?... Even tho it was helpful.

@Mr5oh I see, I haven't even heard of some of those. Are they all official distros or peoples side projects? TinyCore seems interesting, it requires a min of 48 megs.
 
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If you're really into Ubuntu (or Debain) for that matter, Canonical just lunched Snappy Ubuntu Core which is a stripped down version of their linux. It requires a 600Mhz processor, 128MB of RAM, 4GB of space (altough it uses about 40MB) and it works on ARM as well as x86 architectures. The problem is that it's so barebones that it will take you some time to install all the applications you need and configure them.

If you're not into Debian that much and want a VPS fast with a moderate ammount of resource use then grab CentOS or openSUSE.

Just remember that most consumer grade Linux distros are not what you're looking for, because of the unecesarry services and programs installed. Some distros even have server versions which don't have a lot of consumer oriented stuff but more server oriented services and features.
 
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In general all Linux distros started out as someone's (or group's) side project. Both TinyCore and Puppy Linux have been around for a very long time (so I would consider them "official"). That being said they are pretty extreme. I think Pinhedd's suggestion of something based off LXDE is a good one. It's light enough to be snappy on old hardware, yet still has enough features to be "functional". I used LXDE for a while when Gnome first released Gnome 3.

Personally I haven't used Ubuntu in years. I got tired of it breaking my system every update. That was years ago though, and I don't think they've had such problems in recent times. Since PCLinuxOS switch to KDE only, I've been using Mint Cinnamon on everything.

DistroWatch.com is a pretty handy site for exploring different distro's.
 
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Both XFCE and LXDE are lightweight desktops and both will be substantially less resource hungry than Ubuntu's Unity desktop.

Someone else selected it, I'll fix that so that you can select one.
 
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@ darthrevan13 Ah ok, yeah it seems like I've mainly looked at the so to speak 'mainstream' consumer grade level distros, I'll certainly have to look into less known ones.

@Mr50h When I say official, I mean I need a stable system and not something to test out especially when money is involved. Thanks for the site I'll be sure to check it out.

@Pinhedd Thanks, I certainly have a lot to look over now. I just wanted the topic open to see what everyone suggested, I don't know who to pick since you've all helped bring me back around to the idea of Linux, I'm still very novice to the whole OS.
 
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