MEPIS Community Forum

A few weeks ago a discussion here prompted me to pull this old Dell 700MHz/512MB laptop out of the closet where it had been for at least a couple years and load it up with Kubuntu 11.10. Initially I was quite impressed, but over time found that Firefox was just too darn slow and there were random freezes and a few other niggles that took the luster off it.

Yesterday evening I loaded it up with M8. I'd forgotten just how nice and well polished M8 was. It also reminded me why I was as reluctant as I was to move to M11 as my workaday desktop install.

Of course, I'm not advocating that anyone use M8 as their default install, but for this situation, with decade old hardware, it's hard not to sing its praises. The install went flawlessly, wireless was detected and enabled out of the box, and setting up network printing was a piece of cake.

I've got a newer (but still pretty dated) P4-2.8GHz/1024MB laptop that runs M11 well, but I must say that strictly from a general gut feeling standpoint, this dinosaur is its equal, performancewise.

Pretty amazing, actually, to have something this old be made perfectly usable.

You're talking about the computer. Aren't you?

Of course. The user is freaking useless.

Heck, I still use M8, and hadn't installed either 8.5 or 11. It's kind of a combination of M8 working just fine and me being lazy. I keep telling myself I ought to put M11 on another hard drive and play with it, but I never do. Maybe I'll get around to it when 11.5 is released...





Talk about useless...

I share your sentiments. SM 8.0 and 8.5 have been as solid as the Rock of Gibraltar for me and everything runs just flawlessly on these platforms. SM 11 is also very good, but it's just not as stable as 8.x IMO (desktop settings tend not to stick, some peculiar video artifacts randomly make appearances on the desktop, Wine doesn't work well for some applications, and I was bitten by the fstab bug). Although these issues could probably be resolved with enough time and effort, I just don't see the point in struggling with them when I already have a system that works so well. Like you, I intend to install 11.5 when it's released and hope to see improvements.

I tend to adopt every other release as my main platform: 6.5 --> 8.0 --> 11.0. I'll load up new releases on spare partitions and on my laptop to see what's new and shiny, but don't usually make a full transition without being pushed. My move from 6.5 to 8.0 came after a catastrophic hardware failure required me to start from scratch; I moved to M11 when I finally bit the bullet and did a long-overdue hardware upgrade across the board. I suspect I'll skip M11.5, and make a full transition to the next release afterwards, which will presumably come late this year or early next and be based on Wheezy.

I adopted an "If it works, use it." approach. Last version I didn't use was 6.0. It just didn't like my then brand new Intel 965-based motherboard. Before that I go back to the 2003.10 version.

Warren releases it, I install and use it, every release since 2003.10.

Yeah, but we all know how you guys like livin' on the edge.