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Would you use Debian on a desktop or laptop PC?

ByGarf

Editor’s note: Things have changed since this article was published. Today’s Debian installer is excellent and many of our desktop and laptop machines now run Debian “stable” branch. We have also found that in many cases Debian runs faster on old hardware than Ubuntu. Currently the editor’s own laptop is running Debian “testing” branch.

Yes and no! Debian is great but there are other Linuxes that are easier for the end-user to configure. My current favourite is Ubuntu.

In fact if you have an old PC lying around, say a Pentium c/w 256MB or more of RAM and a few GiB of hard disk space then you could do a lot worse than installing Ubuntu on it. I’ve done this for several friends, who have all found it perfectly adequate, 100% reliable – and totally Micro$oft free! The live CD is particularly nice because you can boot & run Ubuntu from the CD to see if you like it before you install it on your hard drive. Obviously it is rather slow running from CD. But at least you can see what it looks like. If you like it, then you can install it.