Why has Ubuntu become so "heavy?"
First off let me admit that I'm using a ten year old Dell Dimension 8300 -- kind of shabby on resources, I know.
But it seems like ever since Lucid Lynx was released, Ubuntu has gotten progressively more resource hungry. Natty and Oneiric just come right and tell me that I don't have the hardware to run Unity. I have a fresh install of Oneiric that just struggles along.
But here I sit on Ubuntu Forums via Mint 12 RC on Virtualbox 4.1.6 hosted with Mint 11 ME -- and they are both running close to as well as I've ever seen an os run on this machine (with the exception of Lucid Puppy, of course) while equally sharing 1 GB of ram.
What is it that Mint's devs to Ubuntu do that results in its Gnome being so much lighter than Ubuntu's? Or Super OS? With the latter, one can add a Super OS package to an already running Ubuntu and give it muscle! Why doesn't Ubuntu just do what the Super OS devs do? Maybe it's a matter of Canonical being polite and not stepping on its derivatives' toes.
So why bother with Ubuntu at all? Super OS and Ultimate Edition are still Ubuntu configured elsewhere. Mint has improved on Ubuntu and contributed enough of its own innovations to be considered more than just Ubuntu. In my mind, Ubuntu is like a beautiful woman without make-up, designer clothing, manicure, or trip to the hairdresser. Sort of like Alec Wec standing at a London bus stop just before she was "discovered."
I've just downloaded a version of Oneiric for virtual machines, so I guess it'll behoove me to delete the one I have written to physical disk and use that space to expand my Linux /home partition.
HP Z400 Workstation, Xeon 3680 hexcore 3.33 GHz, 18 GB ram, 2TB hdd; Windows 10; Ubuntu 18.04/Mate; Deepin 20/Beta (doesn't boot)//,160 GB hdd; Ultimate Edition Oz Unity Star Sapphire.