Answers to: Which linux distro would run fastest in Acer netbook, model AOA 150

Answer by Ron

Ron — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 17:31:12 -0400

Adding onto what kainosnous said.....

I want to not only agree with everything v said; but also second the part about compiling from source. If you installed Gentoo; it's optimized for that exact CPU, hardware, etc.

Answer by Jerry

Jerry — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 17:22:35 -0400

Try LXDE, Its a Lightweight Desktop Environment, is an extremely fast-performing and energy-saving desktop environment. LXDE can be installed with many Linux distributions including Ubuntu, Debian and Fedora.

Answer by Freshmeadow

Freshmeadow — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 01:34:32 -0400

I have been playing with a variant of Puppy called BrowserLinux on my Asus EeePC 701 4G. It is only 78 megabytes or so and comes in a Firefox flavour or a Chrome flavour. It runs from a USB stick and comes with a browser, a text editor, a small music player and not much else. Tiny and fast. Check it out here: http://www.browserlinux.com/ You can also create a file to save your settings and bookmarks on your computer, which BrowserLinusx will find and load up on each boot. Cheers from Guelph, Ontario. :)

Answer by Dale

Dale — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 13:38:12 -0400

I ran across a nice little distro called Netrunner, you can download it at DistroWatch.com. While your there you can also check out all the other distros that are available.

Answer by Dion

Dion — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 10:02:46 -0400

I installed Sidux - xfce version on my Acer One 150 netbook and later installed E17 as WM. Light, fast AND aesthetically appealing. With apt you can very easily add and remove whatever you want and speed up your system.

Answer by rfelsburg

rfelsburg — Mon, 09 Aug 2010 04:21:46 -0400

O'Reilly has an excellent article on this. The fact is that it varies greatly depending on how you set up your system. No one is going to be able to give you a concrete answer, simply because even the default package varies greatly between distros, some include OpenOffice, others simply vi.

You'll need to do a little legwork into this, and look at which packages you want, and which distribution will give you exactly what you want, with as little fluff or bloat as possible.

As the article below mentions slackware is a pretty good minimal install, but you do sacrifice the interface in some aspects.

You should also look into window managers as the smaller ones, ie. xfce, and fluxbox are quicker, but less aesthetically appealing than gnome or kde to most people.

http://broadcast.oreilly.com/2009/03/linux-performance-different-di.html

Answer by kainosnous

kainosnous — Sat, 07 Aug 2010 05:31:48 -0400

The speed of your system depends greatly on the applications which you are running. Therefore, to increase the speed of your netbook, you will want to remove as many unwanted programs as possible without loosing the functionality that you need. That means that you might want a distro that is built around your specific needs.

If you really wanted good performance, you could start with a minimal distro such as Arch Linux and build it up to do just what you want. However, it might be better to simply find one that's suited to your needs and then remove excess programs and adjust it to run faster.

While there may be a benchmark out there somewhere as to which distros run fastest out of the box, that will necessarily change as you install programs. Personally, I run Arch Linux when I just need the basics, which is what you describe. Even a GUI is optional, but can easily be installed. Speaking of GUIs, your choice of desktop environment (or lack thereof) is a huge factor. If you don't need the functionality of Gnome, try XCFE, or perhaps something even lighter