emperor_aniseed wrote: Essentially you'll get more mileage out of non-3D DE's in VirtualBox and for some reason the last time I tried it Xfce it was not so hot either. Really, I'd recommend LXDE, which includes openbox, or pure openbox, for VirtualBox.
This is the sort of advise I need, and why I posted here
The only reason I was drawn to Linux Mint is that it appears to be gaining in popularity and most give it thumbs up.
However I have in fact now dropped the LMDE and xfce varieties of Linux Mint: On those, a tool I need called 'glade' crashes with segmentation fault.
It does NOT crash on the MATE version of Linux Mint.
I just wish I could understand why there even are all these different denominations of Linux... IMO it's a counter productive dissipation of effort.
LXDE is targeted at low power cloud computing which in a way is similar to what I want but has a lot of stuff I don't need:
[*] power management to conserve the battery - mine has no battery.
[*] security and multi-user capability... - mine should just run as a generic guest on the assumption that whoever is using the host has already been authorized
[*] all sorts of pre-installed packages - i will only want one tool set on any particular machine. ATM I want one for building apps from source.
[*] International packages - honestly I'm quite happy with just English I may make a machine specifically for testing i18n/l10n issues, but in general won't need it.
Immediately I am confronted with choice: which LXDE I should try.
[*] Debian GNU/Linux 6.0
[*] Fedora LXDE Spin
[*] Lubuntu 12.10
[*] openSUSE 11.4
I could try them all, but look how many days I've already wasted setting things up on LMDE before discovering that it simply doesn't work properly
What is there to recommend Fedora over SUSE for instance?
I won't touch Ubuntu with a barge pole having previously had major problems when they bring out a new release and this was also my concern with Linux Mint being based on Ubuntu but at least they got rid of the Unity thing. I like the 'rolling release' principle of Debian and the fact they release when it's ready and not to an arbitrary schedule... bug fixes and new add-on packages is one thing but I really don't see why we need all these never ending releases. So I'll give the Debian version a try and if it segmentation errors then I'm sticking with MATE... warts and all