Least sys requirements

Okay after tinkering with too many distros, I've come to the conclusion that most of them are far too taxing and/or bloated to run the bare essentials without basically slowing my AAO to a crawl. I'm certain that the kernel requirements aren't nearly that high, yet trying to run Firefox//Abiword // Media player all at the same time is downright disappointing compared to its bloated XP boot running more or less the same things AND AV/FW. Epiphany doesn't quite cut it with its security measures IMO due to lack of extensive addons and everything else that's glitter and gold has been knocked out (AFAIKH).

Something seems amiss with this, or am I simply expecting too much? Or can anyone throw in some input here? Its incredibly frustrating especially when many of them can't even run basics without massive retooling (suspend/usage of SD cards just to name a few). I can probably live with the latter but the serious performance choking is killing me (coming from someone whose running a 5 year old laptop and 7 year old desktop).

 

The AAO does not have high end hardware - its not bad, but its not the fastest etc. If you are running with the SSD version, write speeds can be slow and that can slow system response. Running with 512 megs of RAM will also limit you (if thats what you have).

Newer Linux distros seem to demand memory and processing power - I have fallen back to the Linpus install that came with my Aspire. It seems to be the best for the hardware.

 

1gig HHD version. :|

 

Not sure about other disto's but linpus seems to handle multi-tasking pretty well, have my music playing with vlc, konversation open on bout 7 (active) channels, couple of tabs in firefox 3 and open office word open with a ebook nearly permanently. Runs perfectly and works much better than the xp version I had on previously doing pretty much the same tasks. XP kept freezing my VLC playlist after 10 or so songs...

this is 1 gig ram 120 gig hdd version

 

I believe most distribution packagers have fancy high end workstations and don't subscribe to the minimalist "less is more" philosophy. I pruned down my system and its lightning quick. Its possible, but it takes some work. We live in a supersized world.