![]() The installation comes complete with the full LibreOffice suite, Thunderbird, and Firefox. If you want a desktop environment that stays out of your way, Xubuntu featuring Xfce is definitely a great fit. The one thing that jumps to mind is minimalism (at its finest). With the test environment and methodology established, it was now time to put each distro to the test. Virtual Machines Specs: Configuration Fileįor an exact set of specifications, here is the XML configuration of the virtual machine. Simply put, the virtual machine was created with the following set of attributes: CPU The greatest RAM amount and greatest hard disk size were chosen from the recommended system requirements of the 5 distros to be tested to ensure that the greatest common factor (GCF) was considered. The specifications of the virtual machine are shown below. Using virt-manager, I created a virtual machine which would be the installation target and testbench for each distro. Since I was testing for lightweight efficiency, a virtual machine seemed to be the best medium on which to test each distro. The sizes of the ISOs differed significantly (sorted below in descending file size order). I downloaded the latest ISO file directly from the respective website for each distro. Thanks to some useful criteria, it is a lot easier to test 5 distros as compared to 20 distros. Finally, revert the virtual machine back to the snapshot (no OS installed) and repeat for the next distro. Then, measure the results at an idle state of the running distro. Install a distro to the virtual machine using the default settings whenever possible (avoiding the option to install additional drivers and media codecs). ![]() Create a virtual machine with no operating system installed and take a snapshot. ![]() The procedure for this experiment is quite simple. However, it does highlight the lack of modern distros that are lightweight and based on something other than Ubuntu. Interestingly enough, all of the qualifying distros are based on Ubuntu (although this was not the intention). The Shortened List of ContendersĪfter applying the criteria above to the list of contenders, the list was refined as follows. I didn’t want to run into a short-lived distro and repeat my past experience with Antergos. So, a track record of routine and regular updates is preferred since it builds more confidence in sticking with the distro for a longer period of time. I don’t want to end up with a distro that is a one-hit wonder or has a short run. ![]() Simply being “modern” isn’t quite enough. A “modern” distro, as defined for this experiment, is one that has adopted systemd and has a kernel version that is greater than or equal or to the last 2 major LTS kernels (5.10 and 5.4). It can be a very vague term and interpreted as meaning different things. For my own needs, I wanted a distro that is: (1) modern and (2) updated regularly. Some qualifying criteria would definitely help in pairing down this list. With a list this long, it is difficult and impractical to download the ISO and perform a test run for each and every distro. The values provided for the “RAM” and “Disk Space” columns are the preferred/recommended system requirement values (not the minimum system requirement values). Whenever possible, the most recent stable release of each distro was chosen. The distros which were recommended most commonly have been compiled into a list of contenders as shown below. Needless to say, the number of returned results was staggering. So, I began the online search and found many articles recommending copious distros which claim to check the boxes for the aforementioned requirements. ![]() It would have to be good enough to deploy as a daily-driver on my main machine. In the end, only 1 would be chosen as the lightweight Linux distribution of choice. As a Linux user, I was recently in search of a Linux distribution (distro) that is lightweight and runs efficiently on a virtual machine or a physical machine using minimal resources. ![]()
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