Some time ago I gave (believe it or not) Xubuntu a try on a PIII found in somebody's trash (not
that one, this was a few years ago, before the "global economic meltdown"). I had Vector on it, and it worked fine except the onboard ethernet wasn't detected. So a few months after I found it I decided to throw something else at it, to see if I could determine whether it was a software or hardware problem. I had heard that the *buntu family had hardware detection and configuration that was as good as anybody's so I installed "Intriguing Ichthyosaur" or whatever it was.
By the way, you know that show "
Hoarding: Buried Alive"? That's me, except with old computers and computer parts.
Anyway, it was a hardware issue, I'm pretty sure. Along the way though, I tried out Xubuntu. I have to say, it wasn't bad. You could definitely tell you were using Xfce with some GNOME stuff added on, and there some things I didn't like and would have changed if I had left Xubuntu on there (the overuse of "sudo" for example), but overall it was a pretty pleasant experience. Once I'd turned off a bunch of daemons, it wasn't noticeably slower that VL. Anyway, it's Linux. I know that it's kind of the popular thing in the rest of the Linux community to
bash make fun of Ubuntu, but I think it's all right.
Vector is still my favorite distribution by far, though.