"Best" Linux for 2009-spec netbook?

[GensokyoIceFairy]

Intel Atom N270 @ 1.6ghz (basically the equivalent of a 2001 Pentium 3, or a 700mhz Celeron from 2008)

Intel 945GM chipset family

1GB DDR2 SDRAM @ 667mhz (maybe upgrade to 2GB soon)

Intel GMA950 graphics

Yes. It sucks by today's standards and even the lowest end Android phones are better. Hahahaha, let's make Scarlett feel bad. But I like to keep things alive that most others consider crap, and this is also the only laptop I have.

I tried Bodhi Linux but it has too many problems for me and the interface isn't great (no half decent light style wtf, I can't read dark themes well) and ugh. Gonna try lubuntu but what else do you think? Would it just be easier to use XP offline...?

 

[JellyPerson]

Lubuntu is great. Try Gentoo if you're experienced.

 

[GensokyoIceFairy]

Lubuntu is great. Try Gentoo if you're experienced.

Thanks.
Gentoo and Arch would be nice if I had the know-how to do so and not just learning by copying commands, I feel that's like scripting yourself in a sense (like, you should learn programming etc how you feel comfortable and write in your own style)

 

[AmandaRose]

Lubuntu is great. Try Gentoo if you're experienced.

Yep Lubuntu would be my choice also puppy Linux is really good.

 

[Dr.Hacknik]

Yeah, I'd personally would go with either Puppy Linux or Lubuntu. Kubuntu might work, but then KDE Plasma might be too intensive for GMA Graphics.

 

[GensokyoIceFairy]

How much ram should I be expecting to be using at idle?

 

[Dr.Hacknik]

How much ram should I be expecting to be using at idle?

200-300MB most likely.

 

[GensokyoIceFairy]

200-300MB most likely.

That's fairly reasonable, only about 50MB more than XP at minimum ^^

 

[linuxares]

Alright! Let me ask you a couple of questions.

1) What do you wanna do with the computer? Desktop, Server?
2) How experienced are you with Linux/Unix?
3) Size of harddrive?

 

[Zepman]

I'm on Lubuntu on all my computers, even the new ones
with your config you'll just have to put a light browser

 

[GensokyoIceFairy]

Alright! Let me ask you a couple of questions.

1) What do you wanna do with the computer? Desktop, Server?
2) How experienced are you with Linux/Unix?
3) Size of harddrive?

Desktop.
Experienced enough to know my way around the command line since I run a server powered by debian. But not enough to do stuff like install arch.
150GB.

Also lubuntu is working smoothly, if anyone has other suggestions with a good reason for me to change then go ahead. ^^

 

[linuxares]

Lubutnu is a very good distro, else I would have recommended Puppy Linux or Linux Mint Mate or Linux Mint Xfce.

If you wanna go wild and bonkers, NetBSD or TrueOS.

 

[FAST6191]

Assuming you do want a desktop rather than a server to learn stuff on I will have to throw one in for the XFCE desktop environment. I usually find it less pared back than LXDE but still about as resource light for all but the most extreme cases.

Pick whichever distro has a dedicated download/setup path for it -- I know technically you can swap whatever you like to whatever you like but in reality... no, there will be some tool, some guide, some bit of trickery that if you are having to rewrite in your mind to work for the other and it is a mess. Linux Mint do a decent take on it but most of the big debian based things tend to anyway. Afraid I have not toyed with non debian family XFCE builds for long enough at this point that I can't say with complete comfort what goes.
I don't recommend arch for anybody really, which is to say anybody asking me for a recommendation is not going to get arch back. The only people that should be using arch are masochists or people that don't want to do linux from scratch ( http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/ ) but do want a fair idea of how it all goes together. The arch manuals/wiki on the other hand is great stuff.
Exotic distro wise then unless you know it is a super specialist thing you are needing (there are some nice science distros, a few nice audio/multimedia distros, some stuff in real time computing, obviously some nice hacking and computer fixing distros...) then don't do anything that is not on https://distrowatch.com/dwres.php?resource=major or puppy linux. If some newcomer was really the best thing out there and looked like it had some staying power (there have been one or two that looked like they would be good stuff but burning brightly and very quickly would be how that ended up being described) it would be on that list.

 

[Exannor]

Thanks.
Gentoo and Arch would be nice if I had the know-how to do so and not just learning by copying commands, I feel that's like scripting yourself in a sense (like, you should learn programming etc how you feel comfortable and write in your own style)

It’s not that hard to install arch, difficult on the first time of course, but once you get the hang of the process then you’ll be wishing of a way to do it faster

# wget archfi.sf.net/archfi
# sh archfi

Just for when you need to ever reinstall it or if you want, you can use it to install it, but it’s usually tradition to install it without any sort of help

 

[kuwanger]

Throw in another agreement for Lubuntu/Xubuntu. One nice, if you're interested, thing is trying out various window managers to see which one is right for you. Personally I use icewm, but xfce/lxce are good lightweight alternatives and function as the base for Lubuntu/Xubuntu (all the various *ubuntu depend on a <base>-desktop package that pulls in the desktop environment and a variety of auxiliary programs/libraries/packages). I'd say that's the one big downside--each desktop environment tends to have a lot of duplicate functionality in duplicate libraries/programs that take up space. So, presuming you're also worried about disk space (you didn't mention storage), you'll also want to keep an eye out for more lightweight programs and tend to avoid gnome/kde ones to avoid pulling in a lot of their libraries.