How to choose a more responsive OS

I bought a computer in 2007. It has 2 GB RAM. 2x1.46GHZ. But for some reason it is very laggy.

I want to install an operating system which will work as fast as possible.

What I want to do:

JAVA (Eclipse, netbeans)
OpenOffice, Libreoffice or similiar.
PDF as well.
Films, Music.
NO GAMES, NO GAMES, NO GAMES.
Internet(Firefox or chrome)
Some way of using SSH, SFTP, FTP.
Programs for DB management like SQliteman or MysqlWorkbench or PGAdmin.

Currently I have the latest version of Ubuntu with Unity installed, but sometimes it is so laggy.

Jevgeni Smirnov

Posted 2011-11-18T13:57:58.177

Reputation: 287

What OS are you running now and what OSs are you familiar with ? – Shekhar – 2011-11-18T14:09:00.190

1Is anything seriously preventing you from using XP? I expect you could do what you want (although JAVA dev with 2GB of RAM is probably a bad idea). – tombull89 – 2011-11-18T14:33:26.327

Could also be a hardware issue. My SSD fried not long ago and I had to reinstall XP on a 5400RPM drive. You've never seen anything lag like my setup! Still, XP is rock solid -- and I've tried almost every desktop OS. Good luck! – Jeff – 2011-11-18T15:20:11.223

Um, you are aware that Ubuntu comes with a whole bundle of games in the official repos, right...? – a CVn – 2011-11-18T15:44:13.323

I have winXP on my wifes computer, ubuntu on my computer, macos lion on my wjob computer. And well linux debian 6 on VPS. – Jevgeni Smirnov – 2011-11-20T06:27:04.983

Answers

You really want to just change window manager no need to completely reinstall with a new os.

As the reply suggest you could try XFCE you can just do a

apt-get install XFCE4

restart your X and probably have it as an option there are 100s of window managers these days so if that does suite its worth having a look around. The advantage will be less memory and CPU usage but with less functionality that you may not require.

see here :- http://xwinman.org/

I would argue that you would get better performance from steering away from full blown desktops but it really depends on how happy you are at the unix prompt

Simon

user1041402

Posted 2011-11-18T13:57:58.177

Reputation: 56

I would argue that it's probably pretty difficult to run OpenOffice or derivates on the command line. A light-weight WM such as Xfce4 should make a big difference, though. That, and taking a look at just what is eating CPU and seeing if you can't disable that separately. – a CVn – 2011-11-18T15:43:47.630

Try Xubuntu with XFCE if Unity is too slow. I think you should be able to install XFCE without re-installing the whole system. Also learn what is working slow in your system (check what htop shows).

culebrón

Posted 2011-11-18T13:57:58.177

Reputation: 460