Was lying around at a relative's place so got it to tinker Specs of the netbook - Acer Aspire One Happy Cpu - Intel atom N455 1.6 ghz Ram - 1gb Hdd - 320 gb Screen - 10.1 inch It came with Windows 7 Starter which by default used 450 mb of ram and was lagging quite a bit. Chrome and opera both lagged a lot. Then I tried of lot of linux distros and these are my results Linux lite - UI lagged Mint mate/cinammon - Same Manjaro,Antergos - Both just showed a blank screen with a cursor after installing , although both worked fine in live session Zorin os lite - 2nd lightest and easiest to use , but the interface is perhaps too shiny with lots of animations Lubuntu,kubuntu - UI lagged Xubuntu - The winner. UI is smooth , uses only 150 mb ram when booted , chromium runs a lot smoother than windows and other distros. I havent had to to do anything in terminal to get going.Everything works great, and i could find options easily of things I wanted to do. Tried a few os on virtualbox on my pc Solus budgie - probably my favourite among all the distros I tried, but this would have lagged a lot on netbook so didn't try Debian - the site is extremely confusing and it took me really long to find out what to download from where , and the interface of debian is really ugly Opensuse - again ugly deepin - meh Mint xfce - Working fine in virtualbox , so if I have problems with xubuntu may switch to this Mx Linux - Have to try this yet , any other light distros I can try ? With decent UI , no horrible looking distros like puppy please Also 1 last question - How do I backup ? With windows I am using Aomie backupper and I can easily switch back to windows with it in a matter of minutes. Anything like this for linux ?
@ReverseGear - Am I correct assuming that all of those Linux distros that you tried were 32-bit versions? Re your backup question, I may be wrong but I don't think Linux has an equivalent to Windows VSS to support 'hot' system-image backups! (many backup programs can perform a 'cold' image backup of a Linux system).
How distros like Debian and Opensuse are ugly when they use other DEs that can be used in most other Linux distros? xfce, gnome, kde etc. ?! For backup- there are several free and open source tools for backing up linux systems, one tool that I remember that should suite your needs and has a GUI is fwbackups. You can simply google something like 'linux backup' and you'll get lists of several FOSS software for that task. You may also try few other distros that are known to be extremely light for very limited systems, I think Puppy linux can be on top for that, it requires a minimum of 333Mhz processor and 256MB ram. You can also use it from DVD/USB and it loads directly into RAM so it should be very fast. Another one that is worth a try is BodhiLinux, which is also very light as it requires minimum of 500mhz processor and 256 ram. It's based on Ubuntu which means you get to use Ubuntu repositories.
@Scott W Yes most of distros have explicit 32 bit versions. Except for manjaro and antergos which had x64-x86 combo iso. @lofac Debian and opensuse both have gnome as default which i didn't like. Opensuse anyways has minimum requirements way more than my netbook. Kde was heavy with other distros. Will look at fwbackup or any other I find , Thanx. Puppy I already mentioned has a horrible gui so not gonna try that. Will try bodhi.
Both gnome and kde are considered to be the most resource hungry DEs for linux. Xfce offers a great balance between lightness, visuals, and usability. You can always install-uninstall any Desktop environment you want as long as it is supported, like on debian and opensuse you have lots of different DEs to choose from, in other words, you are not forced to use gnome or kde just because they are the defaults on some distros.
@ReverseGear, I asked because (as you're likely aware) your netbook's 1GB RAM does not come close to justifying the use of a 64-bit OS (i.e., greater 'system overhead' than a 32-bit OS). Btw, if you use your netbook mostly for surfing the net and web-based apps, I suggest taking Peppermint 8 (32-bit) for a spin!
@lofac Yes I know. Opensuse only has gnome and kde I think. Will try debian again , I had some other problem as well with it I think, apart from the horrible website. Thats why I am trying mostly xfce desktops as others were bogging down the netbook. @Scott W Yes I know. Yes I am just playing with the netbook as of now and surfing is the only priority. Will try peppermint too thanx.
If you try debian again use it with xfce it will run fine on that netbook spec. I agree Debian's website is a mess as is their documentation.
Opensuse has Xfce as well as, MATE, Enlightenment, Cinnamon and LXQt. Opensuse is probably the easier to install a DE on it due it its unique yast, which is a GUI tool to control your system, which also lets you install or uninstall desktop environments with few mouse clicks.
On a netbook, you want a light resource DE like LXDE, XFCE or MATE. The main problem is the X86 processor feels underpowered. Quad core X64 processors can be had on Android tablets for little outlay, so it would make more sense to upgrade the hardware than just the OS.
I have a similar specced netbook, Like you - Xubuntu worked well, As well as Manjaro and Elementary OS. If you haven't already, it's worth checking out TLP
I have now tried several months lightweight desktop environment called Lumina version 1.3 (https://lumina-desktop.org/) and been quite happy. It's lighter than LXDE and if I understand right, uses fluxbox as window manager.
