Help finding a distro for netbook please

[Fixer1234]

I ran into problems with Lubuntu due to the Ralink WiFi (lacked driver so no way to connect to the Internet). Also, the LXDE desktop is extremely Spartan, a big step down from XP.

With the super-lights like Puppy, you will run into tiny browsers (old versions, stripped down), which won't handle a lot of the multi-media web material. If you don't need that and your computer needs are basic (think MS Works and Outlook Express), something like Puppy will knock your socks off. There are a number of variations; I found Precise the most complete and capable. Surprisingly, it had drivers to handle all of the hardware, which many of the big distros did not, and includes a lot of plain language, context-sensitive help for critical things, which many other Distros don't.

Xfce is a good fit (LM is great except the menu system is broken in the Xfce release). Previous mentions like Linux Lite, SolyDX, or Xubuntu are alternatives. At this level, you will generally get a full-featured application suite.

However, the machine has enough RAM to run LM Mate, which would be a step up from XP. It's hard to beat Mint's utilities and repository and LM 17 Mate has been able to handle everything I've tried it on out of the box in terms of drivers (and it is very stable and non-buggy). After trying several dozen distros on a desktop with hardware similar to your netbook, I settled on LM Mate. It's faster and better that the original XP.

[Jedinovice]

For what its worth, I am running Mint 13 KDE edition very happily indeed on a single core atom 455 1GB RAM netbook.

I love(d) that machine. It was so good, ran so well, that my wife used it once and I never got it back! That goes to show how friendly KDE is and, contrary to popular opinion, that KDE will run quite happily on minimal hardware. Just go into system stettings and turn off ALL desktop effects and restart. Effects CONSUME power and KDE has them on by default. That's one reason KDE gets a bad name for being slow.

That's of course, if KDE is really wanted as you seemed to suggest. I've successfully run KDElive (video editor) on the little box - though it does sport a 160GB HD. If your HD is limited you may want to reconsider but KDE still takes up less room on a drive than any version from Vista onwards.

Frankly, anything with 1GB RAM and >= A P4 will run almost any Linux variant. It's what you do with the machine that decides what power you need. Example: I have a Atom and a Celeron laptop both running Mint 13 KDE. Both run as the same speed for most basic functions such as Libreoffice, facebook (wife) and viewing photos and the like. But when processing multimedia (say, changing the speed of an audio file) or OCR the atom was up to five times as slow.

So it's what is needed rather than the OS, If the machine is going to be used as a general purpose netbook by a non-techie user who is familiar with WIndows then Mint 13 is highly reliable and KDE or Cinnamon will run fine. Mint 17 I have not been able to test on the atom due to my wife grabbing it but Mint 17 KDE appears to be more RAM hungry on the aged Turion laptop but I can't really tell.

Cinnamon under Mint 13 (LTS) is a bit weak while KDE is nice, developed and handles the RAM. You can backport Cinnamon 2.0 to Mint 13 but not version 2.2.
Cinnamon under Mint 17 (LTS) is more developed, I understand, while KDE has little change from 13, though I think uses more RAM. I can't be sure though.

But, generally speaking, you can running anything on a netbook. Just remember, with any GUI, if it seems slow, look for how to turn off the desktop effects, especially 'transparency!' Then you complete freedom to go with anything. Bear in mind most techie users prefer ease of use and familiarity to speed. (A lot of Linux users are keen on optimisation, hence the popularity of XFCE! Fair enough but I find some can forget that speed <> everything.) For the record, while I am a fan of KDE, a man's desktop is his castle and should be chosen according to the user's need/taste. I just like to point out that the 'big' GUI's such as Cinnamon or KDE *will* run fine on an atom as long as you have the RAM and 1GB will do it.

Opps! I've just remember! Cinnmon REQUIRES a screen res of 1024 x 768 to start with! KDE 4.8 under Mint 13 will run in 1024x600. Not sure about 4.11 under Mint 17.

Have fun! I love taking mininmal hardware and making it sing. My company has been forced to subconctract me to a horrible, horrible school where abuse is assured. NO choice. I have set a number of conditions including I get one of the old P4's they have just replaced so I can play!

[Fixer1234]

Very interesting. I had been running Mint 17 KDE (the Mint implementation was stable and great, but I switched to Kwheezy because too much of the applications software originating from the Ubuntu repositories was buggy). SolydK is a "barebones" KDE implementation with most of the eye candy disabled by default; not sure of the real life RAM requirements, although it is theoretically supposed to run on a 1 GB machine. It was one of several KDE distros I tried on the old XP machine and it went into la la land, stuck in permanent swap file fugue soon after booting up. Testing a liveDVD that uses KDE is a problem. Maybe the key is to install it first on a thumb drive and get everything stripped down on another machine before using it to boot a low-resource machine.

[Jedinovice]

Very interesting. I had been running Mint 17 KDE (the Mint implementation was stable and great, but I switched to Kwheezy because too much of the applications software originating from the Ubuntu repositories was buggy). SolydK is a "barebones" KDE implementation with most of the eye candy disabled by default; not sure of the real life RAM requirements, although it is theoretically supposed to run on a 1 GB machine. It was one of several KDE distros I tried on the old XP machine and it went into la la land, stuck in permanent swap file fugue soon after booting up. Testing a liveDVD that uses KDE is a problem. Maybe the key is to install it first on a thumb drive and get everything stripped down on another machine before using it to boot a low-resource machine.

Hmmm. Dunno. If the XP machine did not support PAE you could have hit trouble. As I say, I have not been able to test Mint 17 KDE on an atom but it runs run on an 8 year old Turion x2 with 1.5GB of RAm - hardly state of the art.

I tried SolydK and liked it but it was agony updating software. With Mint I can force a respository and always have the latest rendering of kdenlive!

[scryan]

KDE is actually not much heavier then mate, once you turn off kwins composite stuff.
Or at least that was my experience trying both KDE and Mate on an extremely old xp laptop that has 512mb ram. I used arch linux and mate is decent where kde is just a little too uncomfortable. It was close enough that I considered it, but I didn't see enough upside KDE vs mate to be willing to put up with the lag that was there.

I think though if I were going to try and set something up for a netbook I would either run KDE with compositing off, or no DE only i3 (or some other tiling window manager that can easily resize windows and makes efficient use of display space). The choice would basically be performance vs "friendliness" (although I don't really think i3 or some other tiling WM are unfriendly... but I like a command prompt too.)