Old laptop for the workshop

I said "will not work >well< with that much ram"

you would need to go back as far as 6:10 edgy which is no longer supported to get reasonable speed that would not drive you insane within a few days,

"As recently as September 2010 the Xubuntu developers claimed that the minimum RAM Xubuntu could be run on was 128 MB, with 256 MB of RAM strongly recommended at that time."

apparently the later Unity is not too bad.

But I am happy enough with default Gnome 2..

a GUI is just a quick way to load programs as far as I am concerned. Sod eye candy. And clever tools.

not met Gnome 3 yet then?

Yep - HD upgraded some time back to 40GB.

Rob

Agreed, although I found Gnome (and KDE) a bit too bloated; currently I'm using xfce on a couple of the heavily-used machines, and it seems to do everything that I need without wasting memory (disk I'm less concerned about)

Thankfully no.

That's worth knowing

Inst that a mint standard?

f a similar spec to yours, runs it well. No issues with installing software= either, as Nick states, it is a simple operation.

That's about the minimum spec I'd put mint on

NT

Too low spec for mint, try puppy or antix. I much prefer antix.

NT

I have an ancient laptop (500MHz) that's happily gained a new speedy lease of life with Puppy Linux. The supplied browser is a bit basic, but I've been looking at sticking FF on it. I'm pleasantly surprised how well equipped PL is, though. Since I only use it once in a blue moon, and only for accessing the net when I'm away (duties the smartphone does just as well, if not better) the only reason I stick with the lappy is for the larger screen it affords and PL does rather well in a general OS sense.