User Feedback :: DSL is my primary OS

I just figured I'd shout out loud that DSL 4.4 on a 512 MB pendrive is my main system for general web use and a little light weight gcc work. I use it almost exclusively with WiFi, and only have to use Windows for some very restrictively formatted web content.

Every time I try out a new distro, I notice how much more work it takes, and how many more resources it uses just to get going.

I eagerly await DSL core, or 5 or what ever it is called, but I may end up using this same install for the lifetime of this laptop.

Thank you
ivan

I, too, have had it with other distros. Even ones billing themselves as lighter and smaller really aren't. They fall prey to accommodating the fashion police and to all the worst practices that make Windows dangerous: root-only, auto-start and auto-run nonsense (I'll leave auto-mounting out of this discussion, but it's on my s*** list of really bad behavior).
http://lucky13linux.files.wordpress.com/2008....ale.png

I've gone through a lot more "de-crudding" Vector Linux to make it run more reasonably than its installed defaults than I've ever spent setting up DSL with newer libs and applications. DSL uses lua and shell scripts; VL59 installs disparate languages, some of which are used for one or two tools/applications. Etc. The happiest day of my VL59 life was when I replaced their f'ed up configuration of Xfce with KDE from Slackware's repositories -- according to free -mt, Slackware's KDE used less RAM at cold boot than Vector's "lighter, smaller" Xfce. Not only that, I could actually see the font in Konsole because VL chose some blurry crap for Terminal. Not sure why they chose the blurriest one considering half the damn distro is international fonts (wonder if they ever noticed in their international font madness which of their apps were compiled without fribidi and nls, heh!).

While 'core isn't yet ready as a replacement for a desktop-oriented distro, an ambitious person could certainly make it one. And the work to build it into one would take about as much time as unbloating anything else.

dsl has been running on this HP laptop pretty much all the time during its three year life. I scale the cpu down to 800Mhz mostly (gets too hot). I avoid rebooting, occasionally have to into Windows or Fedora to do something I can't do in dsl.

original here.