Ideal OS for EEE PC - REVISITED

As a follow-up on a very old post I thought it’s worth providing an update. Despite it’s age (& only costing $350 at the time) my little Asus EEE PC 900 it is still a useful device. It has turned out as one of the better IT investments in my lifetime. However it’s not (and was never) the fastest kid on the block and recent OS upgrades have become increasingly resource hungry.

With the recent Ubuntu 12.04 LTS upgrade I was in the process of upgrading a few other notebooks and noticed that the release schedule for some of the Ubuntu variants (Kubuntu, Xubuntu & Lubuntu) has been brought in line with the main OS branch. So while waiting for the installs on the other machines to finish I thought about updating the EEEPC as well. I tried Xubuntu at first, but did not like the interface (and the default apps pre-installed) and there were hardly any performance gains.

But installing Lubuntu was a different story. I am very impressed by the LXDE desktop environment and the UI performance. The responsiveness of the UI is remarkably better than other desktop managers on a small netbook. And you still get the underlying strengths of the Ubuntu (Debian) based package management in it’s latest revision. That means most applications come packaged and there’s PPA’s for the rest.

Looks Lubuntu’s the new favourite. Hat tip to the Lubuntu maintainers and LXDE developers – excellent work in producing a no-frills but very functional, decent looking & usable desktop environment for devices that are getting a bit older … !

• Linux
• Lubuntu
• Netbook