Hi all,
I've run various distros of Linux since about 1994, starting with slackware back then. Red Hat in 1995, Fedora, etc.. and have enjoyed them all, even though I don't consider myself very technically-savvy in any of them. Lately, I've been running current flavors of Ubuntu, Lubuntu, and Linux Mint, when I don't *have to* run MessySoft Windows. I have three laptop machines, and this one is an old (circa 2003) emachines M6809 which I'm typing on now. It is fairly resource-constrained, and I was running Lubuntu on it, which runs pretty well. But I wanted to look around for a distro that is usable but even lighter on system resources. I heard about Vector Linux, and thought I'd give it a try.
Other than a bit of a problem initially getting the graphical interface to run (this ATI Radeon 9600 wouldn't come up by default; even though the radeon module was being loaded during bootup, I had to do some twiddling with vxconf), VL x64 Light runs great on this laptop! I have 1.25GB RAM on this system, and a Mobile Athlon 64 CPU. Using Lubuntu and Firefox, the memory was all used up if I opened more than a couple of tabs in the browser. Lots of disk activity causing severe slowdowns with the virtual memory usage, etc..
But on VL, using Xombrero, I can have 4 or 5 tabs open, and a couple other apps running, and memory usage is only 500-600 MB; very little swap file usage, and the system remains responsive. CPU load is generally lower in VL than Lubuntu, also. I've been monitoring system resources with HTop, a very useful program. So I have to say, this distro of Linux is excellent for older, CPU and RAM-constrained hardware. All of the system hardware was detected and configured correctly during setup, other than the video, including the Broadcom wireless card (!). And I like the fact that most of the settings are visible and easy to get to.
So, I've come full-circle-- slackware in 1994, to a slackware-based distro in 2017.. :-)
--Doug