Do we need Win95/98/Me support?

[Kiith-Sa]

On Monday, 23 January 2012 at 11:42:16 UTC, Kagamin wrote:
> On Monday, 23 January 2012 at 11:15:02 UTC, Nick Sabalausky 
> wrote:
>> Those are "newbie" Linuxes that, by default, use GUIs[1] which 
>> are known to be insanely bloated.
>
> Huh? More bloated than Aero?
>
>> Yea, stuff that isn't 100%-OSS can be a PITA with Ubuntu :(  
>> But I guess it's pretty bad though if that's a problem in 
>> Mint, too.
>
> Well, I doubt the driver installation procedure is different in 
> Mint. From what I understood from readme, one should somehow 
> disable nouveau driver, change runlevel, reboot in console 
> mode, do proper configuration and... I didn't read further.

Actually, no.

You click a "Additional Drivers" button, that will just pop up as
a notification if you have an AMD or NVidia GPU. Then you click at
the driver you want to install, and click "Activate". And maybe 
"Ok"
or "Close" after that.That is the way it works both on Ubuntu and 
on Mint.

It's not easy to miss.

You don't install the driver from NVidia's site - you have the 
newest
driver prepackaged already.

In general, on Linux you don't install software by searching on 
the net,
you use the package manager/software center GUI or do "apt-get 
install program".



That said, it is true that some Linux vendors have gone crazy
trying to "reinvent the GUI". Gnome3 and Unity (Ubuntu) are both 
tabletized
(Win8 is also going in similar direction) and both much more 
inefficient than Gnome2 was.

That said, KDE, which used to be bloated, has been optimizing 
quite singificantly over the last few releases, and seem to plan 
to continue doing it.
KDE however always comes with some useless "Social desktop" 
features enabled
by default, which kill the performance (and make people think KDE 
is still bloated - great PR, KDE!). Anyway, once that is 
disabled, at least on my notebook Ubuntu/KDE is faster than Win7.

XFCE is even faster, and is getting full-featured - it doesn't 
have much
visual flair, though, if you want that.

LXDE is extremely lightweight, but doesn't have many features.

Enlightenment started popping up recently, which is (very) fast 
_and_ looks awesome, but AFAIK written in optimized C and crashy.



 From my experience, OpenSUSE is now both stable and friendly to
Windows power users. Ubuntu/Mint are more oriented towards 
complete newbies
or people who only browse/use office suite.