I have this laptop and, when my desktop is booted, it uses about 230mb ram. The only issue Inhad was with the WiFi card which is a Broadcom card and required firmware, downloaded from the Broadcom site. I run Arch base system with: Openbox, Nitrogen, Tilda, Chromium, Pulse audio, VLC I run this as a second machine now and only upgraded because so wanted a better screen; the performance was fine.

I'm troubled by the obsession with diversity these days. Create equal opportunity (which I think we have in the developed world) but don't obsess about equal representation, because all things are not equal. What about elderly people? What about white people who have short hair or black people with long hair or . We (all people) seem not able to move for fear of breaking some safely law, speak without breaking political correctness and even just use Facebook without being part of an under/over-represented group. Make sure everybody has equal rights, create equal opportunity then concetrate on life, wonder at the diversity, but diversity does not mean neat percentages of every class you can think of, no more than diversity of life on Earth means every form of life having the same numbers.

Apologies, I presumed from the wording that this was not understood. Agree on the coupling and practicality of rolling your own. In the end, with stuff like this, get a decent process monitor and find out exactly what's eating your performance.

Linux !== (KDE || Gnome) Linux 'is' the kernel. KDE and Gnome are desktop environments. You don't need them to run Linux. You don't even need to use the xorg server at all. However I run Openbox and when my system is started, with a desktop, it's using under 300MB of ram and I know what every process running is for.