chiefjim wrote:Q4OS runs amazingly fast on my old machines. The Trinity DE it uses is like a trip back in time to Win 95 days.
While LXLE ran pretty reasonably on my antique (
) laptop, my interest was piqued by your comment... did a little research - Q4OS is a brand spankin' new distro (less than a year old - its first distribution release was v 0.5.18 in 9/2014). The main focus of Q4OS seems to be KISS and stability. It hasn't even cracked the top 200 at DistroWatch... But I went to their website and did a little reading... I thought it was interesting enough to D/L the (32 bit) ISO... it was
339 MB!!! I burned it to a
CD, loaded the disk and booted my old laptop expecting a Live session - similar to other "modern" distros - WRONG! The ISO is an
installation ISO - no Live session to "test drive"!... I eventually decided to dive in (leap of faith) and installed it wiping LXLE. The installer is text/character based and somewhat crude by Mint standards... but it works well. The installation itself took longer than expected (I expected it to be fast considering the ISO size) and used/required no internet connection. After the installation, I rebooted...
Q4OS is based on Debian Stable - the current version is Q4OS 1.2 "Orion" based on Debian Jessie and it is an LTS edition with 5 years of support. They call their default Desktop Environment "Trinity" and it is a streamlined (stripped down?) version of KDE. It runs with good performance considering the anemic hardware that is underlying the installation. I think the performance of Q4OS is better than LXLE on my machine. YouTube video performance is still not great ("framey" play back) but otherwise, everything is good. The interface (Trinity) is significantly different than I am accustomed to (Cinnamon/Mate) and I am still learning where everything is and how it all works... The default desktop is plain/clean/efficient and effective. I learned that the ISO is so small because
there is very little included by default in the base installation. So far, I have added Google Chrome browser, Synaptic, Libre Office, and inxi. Gimp is next on the list...
The good news:
1) Everything seems to work OOTB on my old hardware - WiFi, sound, video, & touch pad are all up and running without any effort on my part other than finding where and how to input my WiFi password (interface learning curve).
2) Performance (other than video) is good - almost "crisp" on ageing hardware.
3) Adding software, while a bit different than I am accustomed to, is easy.
The not so good news:
1) "Different" DE presents a learning curve
(for me). Organization/layout and interface are different requiring "exploration" to find where and figure out how to accomplish common, previously familiar tasks.
2) "Different" environment seems to be missing some of the functionality that I have grown to love although arguably, I have less than 1 hour experience with the environment so I might be mistaken...
The bad news:
- none -
<other that a somewhat clumsy install routine - not exactly multiboot friendly>
Conclusion: I think that Q4OS is going to become my new favorite distro for
aging hardware... I might even try to install it on my experimental (modern) laptop if I can figure out how to accomplish an EFI multiboot installation! <to be continued?>