Fedora LXDE, Linux Mint LXDE or Lubuntu... is there a difference?

[tacosdebirri]

I was wondering if there is a big difference between this three distros. (I'm talking about the current and the next release [the april release] of this distros) (For the Linux Mint, i should say that it would be a Linux Mint XFCE with a LXDE DE installed)
What are the differences?
Which one of them use less resources and have better performance?; why?
If i have a potato for a PC, which one i should use?

Thanks.

[bapoumba]

Moved to Ubuntu, Linux and OS Chat.

[PondPuppy]

My two cents, worth a bit less than two pennies nowadays -- Lubuntu and Mint can use Ubuntu software packages. They're both based on Ubuntu. As far as I know, Fedora uses a different package management system. It's developed by Red Hat, and is the open-source development platform for Red Hat Enterprise Linux. All are good solid distros, I believe.

[tacosdebirri]

But, is one of them better for old PC's? do i get more performance improvements if i use one instead the others? or all of them will have the same requirements, boosts and improvements because they all use LXDE? If this is the case, what should i use? should i try them all and see if i stay with one of them? any suggestion to start with?

[lykwydchykyn]

Usually the big differences between distros come down to:

- Quality of packaging (dependencies, compile options, default configuration, etc)
- Development and release cycle
- Community
- Specialty packages unique to the distro (usually config/management tools, e.g. Mint's software manager, Suse's YAST, etc).

On an average computer you're probably not going to appreciate a significant performance difference between any two distros with the same packages installed.

[Ralph L]

I have an old Compaq Presario 2100. The only system I could get to run on it was Xubuntu. I managed to get Nautilus to run on Xubuntu, which I needed to support Access Control Lists. I use Ubuntu 12.04 on my other computers with Gnome Classic desktop. So if you have trouble with an old computer give Xubuntu a try.

[monkeybrain20122]

I dual boot Ubuntu and Fedora, I am not short of resources and both run fast (Unity for Ubuntu and gnome shell for Fedora, this is a very modest refurbished laptop that costs a little less than 300Cad) However, I would say graphic drivers and multimedia stuffs work significantly better in Ubuntu, both in terms of availability of packages and performance. I have done that on machines with different specs and this experience is quite consistent (Nvidia and intel cards, with intel I can get the latest mesa driver from Ubuntu through ppa, there is one in Fedora but it is a mess).

I may be biased but so far I have encountered nothing that I can do in Fedora but not on Ubuntu, however there are things that I can do easily in Ubuntu but not in Fedora (e.g pipelight in Fedora seems to be consistently broken on two different machines, kazam works beautifully on Ubuntu but barely works on Fedora,--may have to do with gnome shell, and packages I compile easily in Ubuntu is a pain in Fedora due to the absence of certain libraries) I think that are things you can do with Fedora but not Ubuntu, like enterprise things which only support Redhat (e.g revolution R) but I have no need for them on my desktop.

Also if you try Fedora make sure you look up the options in Selinux. By default it blocks a lot of things for 'security' so many things either won't run or get flagged constantly. e.g I got security alert everytime I opened chrome in F19 and google talk just wouldn't run,--and froze up the browser to boot -- until I disabled selinux (though I think that was fixed in F20)

In terms of package management I would prefer apt-get to yum. Fedora's delta update is a much talked about achievement, it may be technically very nice but in practice I don't find any advantage. But there is nothing in the yum world that works like autoremove as far as I know. Fedora also doesn't have anything that works like synaptic (yumex is the closest but it is still vastly inferior in terms of searchability and flexibility. Yumex is not default though, Packagekit is, it should be removed immediately upon installation IMO)

Fedora is in general quite stable for delivering the bleeding edge.--as oppose to the mess that is Debian unstable,--, but when a bug hits it can hit you really hard. I have reinstalled Fedora 20 several times for various reasons. First akmod didn't build for the Nvidia driver, then somehow in an update (of systemd?) machine hanged on boot because it was looking for IPV6 connection(?!) while there wasn't any. Maybe I am just lucky, but I have never had to reinstall Ubuntu for something like that (except for the times I broke my system because of my own faults)

While I like to multi boot different Linux distros, when I set up Linux for not very experienced users I will never put Fedora on their machines. These are of course just my own two cents. I am sure others would disagree.

[tacosdebirri]

... So if you have trouble with an old computer give Xubuntu a try.

I gave it a try before i moved to Lubuntu, it wasn't my taste.

... I have reinstalled Fedora 20 several times for various reasons... Maybe I am just lucky, but I have never had to reinstall Ubuntu for something like that (except for the times I broke my system because of my own faults)...

It seems that Fedora it's not my best option then (I have broke Ubuntu so many times that, to what you say, in the moment i put my hands on Fedora, i will break it.)


Doing a little investigation, it seems that Mint is more stable than Ubuntu, though ubuntu have better tools and many other stuff... Which one i should go for then, Lubuntu or Linux Mint LXDE? (I don't talk anymore 'bout performance because it seems that there is no difference between this two about it.)

[fantab]

Enlightenment is another light DE and you can try it with BodhiLinux, which is again based on Ubuntu LTS versions.

[Rob Sayer]

As mentioned, fedora, mint & ubuntu with LXDE would perform similarly.

Need to know the specs in more detail. There are a number of new members here who want to install ubuntu on an old machine with 64-128 megabytes of RAM. None of the above full distros will work very well on that. They're looking at a modern but more primitively featured distro.

I don't have nearly as much experience as some of the above posters but I've used all 3 distros mentioned on my netbook. Only actually ubuntu with LXDE but there are real differences between them irrespective of the DE.

I agree that Fedora isn't something I'd recommend to newbies. The software repositories stink compared to ubuntu/debian ones. It comes with no codecs at all. There isn't any package manager like Synaptic. The terminal package manager is powerful but at least in fedora 19 it was broken. And their support forum is full of pompous asses who act like it's your fault because you didn't read the bugzilla report first.

I could accept that from Gentoo linux. Not fedora. Never again. I consider it RHEL beta.

I wouldn't recommend Mint to new users either. There's nothing wrong with the distro or desktops I've seen per se but the tech support on their forums is just awful. It's as bad as ubuntu's is good.

Linux works a hell of a lot better than windows but it generally requires more configuring. Novices don't know how to do this so they need tech support. No one else comes close to here or askubuntu.

If the computer will run it, I consider ubuntu the only one for real linux newbies.