Trying out Lubuntu 19.04

This isn't a full review of the distro, just a quick walk-through of a distro I was using  over a few years.  I moved off to AntiX last year as I wanted to cut back  the number of distros I was running at home to make it easier for me to manage my home network.  Lubuntu was OK, but, I was looking for a lighter and faster distro for my eight year old netbook and AntiX worked quite well.

With the latest one I wanted to see what it looked like and how it worked.  The installation went quite well using VirtualBox.  I tweaked the setup a  bit.  I changed from 1 gig to 4 gigs of memory (the netbook has two), 2 CPUs (matching the netbook) and the default screen from 800x600 (netbook) to 1360x768 (making it readable on my WIN10 machine).

The initial profile works quite well and is responsive on the machine as set up.  It feels snappy and doesn't use a lot of system resources. 

As you can see above in a shell and Htop it doesn't use a lot of memory when it starts up and I am fairly sure I can tweak the startup to use less by turning off processes I don't want or need.

One of the first tweaks I made is to change the double-click mouse to single-click.  I have been using that for years and that is what I am comfortable with.

Using the Muon package manager was quite easy and is close enough to working like Synaptic that I didn't notice a big difference.  The only difference is when you search.  In Synaptic you type in the word(s) and press [SEARCH] and in Muon it searches as you type.

I did a 'Check for Updates' after install and installed the few updated packages that were there.  The process was quick even in the VM and while it was doing that I launched Firefox and tweaked the settings there while the system updated.  The one package I hoped was there is PaleMoon.  I use that to play Runescape Old School on my other Linux boxes as it still supports the Java Plugin and Firefox doesn't.  Palemoon does have a Linux download option and that is something I need to explore later on and the JRE.  For that I will look at the netbook for the packages I have installed and mirror that setup in the VM.

My next step is to burn a USB stick with the distro and see how it launches and runs on the netbook and my main Linux box.  If that looks good I may convert the old media box from Vista (shudder) to Linux and the wife's laptop also.  AntiX is good, but, so far Lubuntu looks pretty good too.

Overall if you have an older machine this may be a distro to check out if you don't want to go to AntiX..