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Within a few months, Windows XP will reach its end of support. Lots of PCs are still running this operating system, and some of them are old or have low resources; a newer Microsoft OS cannot be installed; maybe the owner cannot afford or simply does not want to change the rig.
There's a nice project, named StartUbuntu, which aims to move XP exiles to Lubuntu; it is light and elegant; it has a kind of familiar look for XP users; nevertheless a post-installation tune-up is required in order to install codecs, flash plugin, java, and some applications. Also, Lubuntu will not have an LTS version until the next release.
I remember myself as an XP user one year ago, when I jumped to Xubuntu LTS from XP; the installations of codecs, plugins, packages, ppa - where I wanted more up-to-date stuff - were all some kind of magic when I did it the first time, and I was wondering if there's any distribution that could fully replace XP just via the standard installation.
Looking for such a distro, I found LXLE, and decided to test it in a real installation, for my home tasks.
LXLE’s website says that it is a distribution that’s very light on resources, based on Ubuntu LTS, presents an LXDE desktop, maintains updated software, and works out of the box after installation.
I downloaded the RC 32-bit live image, something more than 1.2 GB in size, and using UNetbootin, like an XP user can do, I prepared an usb stick for my driving test.
The default option of the bootloader brings up an LXDE environment with a beautiful background wallpaper, and an icon in the lower left side of the desktop enable us to replace it with random wallpapers from a very nice collection. Moving the mouse pointer to the left side of the desktop reveals an application bar, presenting the supposedly more used applications launchers; this bar is auto-hiding. On the top left corner is the install icon; on the right side of the desktop a simple Conky widget shows us some system information. On the bottom side of the desktop there's the system bar, including menu, two file managers, a fast app launcher, the work-spaces pager, the taskbar, volume control, network manager, a weather application, and few other goodies.
I've set up an internet connection and launched the installer. The installer is the Ubuntu one, a very friendly and fast installer: I chose language, keyboard, time zone, user/password and the partitions set-up, and within less than 30 minutes – updates from internet included - the new system was ready for its first boot on my hard disk.
The boot is quite fast and we are presented with a login mask, on which we find language options and 5 desktop set-up options: Windows XP, OSX, G2, Unity and Netbook. The first four are very similar in content, but the positions of the various bars and menu vary, and they mimic respectively the desktops in Windows XP, Mac OS X, Gnome 2, and Unity, giving a feeling of a comfortable, familiar look. The fifth desktop, Netbook, is similar to a tablet desktop, with big icons grouped on tabs.
I spent the most part of my testing time on the Windows XP paradigm, the layout we are presented with when starting the live media.
The system load is small even for my Pentium M, 2.13GHz and 2GB ram – less than 5% cpu usage, around 140MB of Ram. Conky takes about 2.5% of the cpu load; by editing the ~/.conkyrc file, I raised the update interval of Conky from 1 to 10 seconds and the cpu usage dropped to under 2%.
Actually no post installation task is required; LXLE comes with a full featured set of tools; we have out of the box codecs, flash plugin and java; the microcode package is part of the installation. We have Firefox, Claws Mail as email client, Filezilla for ftp management, Flush as torrent client, and Pidgin for messaging. There is the movie player Totem and a music player Guayadeque; there's Vinagre for remote desktop. We have Gimp for image manipulation and Shotwell for photo archiving, OpenShot for video editing, and Audacity for audio editing. There's Libreoffice as an office suite, Evince as document reader, FBReader for e-books. We find also a personal finance manager, HomeBank. There's a selection of games, and Steam.
A good collection of system tools is included in the installation, like Lubuntu software center, Synaptic package manager, GDebi deb package installer, Gparted for partitions management, and Ubuntu One for personal cloud storage. LXLE comes also with a handy tool for PPA management, Y PPA Manager, and installs a collection of 100 gorgeous background wallpapers.
To complete my set-up, I installed only VLC media player, not strictly required, but because I like it, and I found it updated at the last version. And VirtualBox, by enabling the official repository from Oracle; Skype is another application that I'm still not able to replace with Linphone in the LXLE standard software collection.
Another smart feature of LXLE is a bunch of PPAs enabled – we will always have the last stable version of some packages; some examples are: Libreoffice, Gimp, VLC, and of course lxle PPA.
I had a very good time on LXLE: nice and responsive, with most of the tools I need ready for me just after the installation was over; the only small glitch was the locale setting – it did not work perfectly on all menus and packages.
Official site: http://lxle.net/ Download: http://lxle.net/download
Summary
I give 4.5 / 5, because localization is not functioning, it could be annoying. However, the objective of being an easy and out-of-the-box Windows XP replacement is fully achieved.
The good: • light and fast: LXDE helps in keeping the system responsive • nice: the desktop looks great • rich: most of the software packages I use were ready out-of-the-box; the huge collection of packages from Ubuntu/Debian is available • stable: I did not run into any problem even if I was running a RC version
The bad: • localization is not perfect: some menu entries and some packages did not change to locale settings; it's a minor issue but could be annoying for newcomers.