quote:
Originally posted by Adeptus
The problem with Gentoo is that, while the result might be great, the installation process is both complicated and likely to take days on a slow machine -- because almost everything is compiled from source as you install it.
partially true. The extra software you want to install on it will have to be compiled on your machine.
The installation of the OS itself however has changed: Stage 1 and 2 are obsolete now, so you don't need to bootstrap and stuff like that anymore, making the installation a lot faster and easier. Also, easier installation procedures are developed so it should be just as easy as any other distro to install.
It will indeed take some time, but not as long as it used to take with the stage 1 and 2 tarballs.
quote:
No matter what distribution you use, you probably should avoid installing either Gnome or KDE and use some lightweight window manager instead.
At this point I totally agree with you. There are enough desktop environments which use far less resources than those 2 you mentioned.
I'd say try Enlightenment and XFCE (though you didn't seem to like it that much, maybe it needs some fine-tuning for that), or search a bit for yourself, because I don't know whether new ones were released recently.
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