K20.04 on my wife's Acer A0521 notebook

[GreyGeek]

worked reasonably well when I first installed it back in January. My wife has used it probably less than a dozen times in the last 6 months. I had it set for automatic updates but would do a manual update about once a month.

My wife fired the 521 up last week and asked why it was so slow. She was right. It was a turtle. It checked out OK but KDE has gotten too heavy for that 10". 3 minutes to boot. Another minute to load FireFox. The only thing she did was use FireFox to do gmail and to browse an occasional website. But, KDE was making it painful.

So, painfully, I decided to replace K20.04 with Lubuntu 20.04. It wasn't much faster, setting up the DE was not intuitive, and it was way to complicated for her to run. So, I went off of the reservation looking for a replacement and found Bodhi.

It installed very quickly and booted in less than a minute. Setting up the DE was easy and it uses the dpkg manager and apt from a terminal. FF starts up very quickly and runs fast as well. She's happy so that makes me happy.

[jglen490]

Pretty low spec machine, so I'm surprised it ran well at all!

But the move to Bodhi is actually a good move. It's a nice distro, and the devs pay good attention to it. I had it on my old Toshiba A135 laptop for a while, but that machine is my curiosity platform

[GreyGeek]

The A0521 was made in June of 2010, and I bought it for her in the fall of that year. I've put Kubuntu on it from the beginning but I've been expecting Kubuntu to outgrow it so I wasn't surprised that recent updates bogged it down. I was surprised that the Lubuntu DE, LXDE, was such a dog. It is not very intuitive or obvious and my wife wouldn't have faired well on it. By contrast, the Bodhi desktop is a joy to use and very quick. I'm going to configure it with automatic login so that she'll have only two buttons to learn to use: FireFox and Shutdown.

[exploder]

Did the WiFi feature work out of the box for you? I like Bodhi but the last time I tried it I had no WiFi. I could use a wired connection on the machine I tried it on but that is not an option I have now. I use public WiFi...

[oshunluvr]

I used Bodhi for a bit on an HP Mini laptop I was given in a version promo. The E17 desktop was very advanced for the time (like 2006-8??) and it ran well on that little thing.

[jglen490]

The current Bodhi is Ubuntu-based, so first it's a Kubuntu cousin, and second whatever works in *buntu or whatever can be discovered and used in *buntu will work and appear in Bodhi. That includes wifi, music players, office suites, gparted, synaptic, and the list goes on.

[GreyGeek]

Did the WiFi feature work out of the box for you? I like Bodhi but the last time I tried it I had no WiFi. I could use a wired connection on the machine I tried it on but that is not an option I have now. I use public WiFi...

Yes, it did, both in the LiveUSB mode and after I installed it. We have 500Mbps fiber optic and her A0521 wifi chip connected at around 128Mbps. Her system now boots very fast. Bodhi is a very pleasant surprise.

[GreyGeek]

The current Bodhi is Ubuntu-based, so first it's a Kubuntu cousin, and second whatever works in *buntu or whatever can be discovered and used in *buntu will work and appear in Bodhi. That includes wifi, music players, office suites, gparted, synaptic, and the list goes on.

That's one reason why I chose it. I didn't want to learn a new package manager and I can use all my terminal kung foo to add, remove and/or update packages.

[jglen490]

Yep! I've almost talked myself into re-installing it

[chimak111]

... I was surprised that the Lubuntu DE, LXDE, was such a dog. It is not very intuitive or obvious and my wife wouldn't have faired well on it. ...

Lubuntu 20.04 uses LXQt, not LXDE. The default window manager is Openbox and the default display manager is SDDM. But both can be changed to something else by the user.

BTW, https://lubuntu.me/taking-a-new-direction/ has this, whatever it means:

... but we decided that going forward, we need to adapt for the current state of the market. Therefore, our main focus is shifting from providing a distribution for old hardware to a functional yet modular distribution focused on getting out of the way and letting users use their computer.

In essence, this is leveraging something we have always done with Lubuntu; providing an operating system which users can use to revive their old computers, but bringing this to the age of modern computing.

As for the rest, it does take some "getting used to"! I keep it updated in a VM.

[mr_raider]

Lubuntu 20.04 uses LXQt, not LXDE. The default window manager is Openbox and the default display manager is SDDM. But both can be changed to something else by the user.

BTW, https://lubuntu.me/taking-a-new-direction/ has this, whatever it means:

As for the rest, it does take some "getting used to"! I keep it updated in a VM.

Been running it in a VM for a few weeks and it's pretty nice. Throw in compton compositor and it looks cool too

[GreyGeek]

mmm .... The image you show of your LxQt desktop (my bad memory thought LXDE) doesn't look anything like what appeared on my wife's 521.

Doesn't matter, though. Bodhi is working great and is easy for her to use. That's all that matters.

[mr_raider]

mmm ... The image you show of your LxQt desktop (my bad memory thought LXDE) doesn't look anything like what appeared on my wife's 521.

Doesn't matter, though. Bodhi is working great and is easy for her to use. That's all that matters.

Fresh Lubuntu 20.04 install. Not the lightest distro IMHO. A clean KDE Neon is almost within 100 megs of Lubuntu.