XFCE might be too heavy for such a weak system. This ICEWM setup is much snappier:
http://xubuntu.wordpress.com/2006/07/18/current-screenshot/

I found this link very useful for setting up printing:
http://xubuntu.wordpress.com/2006/08/09/howto-print-from-one-ubuntu-printer-to-another-with-xubuntu/

I daresay the biggest limitation on that via is the lack of RAM. I don't know what kind of harddrive youve hooked up to it, but with 256mb youre probably doing a lot of swapping which slows everything down immensely. 1Ghz is a fine speed for a linux box, provided everything can run in RAM (there are even people who run ubuntu on G3 macs (yes, three!). If possible, see if you can expand the memory, it's about time someone wrote a "omg ive got a 1ghz cpu and a gig of ram and everything runs great' article.

Don't compare 1Ghz chip of Mac with 1Ghz chip of x86. It's like comparing who is stronger a crocodile or a bear - what defines the victory is the ground. Have u ever tried running mac on x86? That's it. There's a price for compatibility. It's a long story but you better stay off comparing these two things.
Nowadays it's pretty hard to buy a pc from a store with only 256 memory, hey! it's 2007! And you want nice working with large images on such lows specs?? it smells masochism.

The motherboard on this thin client maxes out at 256 MB -- I'm, of course, much more comfortable with 512 MB. I recognize that the memory limitation is a problem, but part of my testing concerns older hardware and what can be done with it.

My argument over Ubuntu vs. Xubuntu is that once you've got 512 MB of RAM and a 3 GHz processor, you'd BETTER be able to run Ubuntu with GNOME without problems -- and if you can't be comfortable with Xubuntu and Xfce with specs that are half that, then what's the point of Xubuntu in the first place? In the gap between Damn Small Linux and Puppy Linux on the low end, and full-blown distros like SUSE, Ubuntu and Fedora on the high end, what's happening in the middle? And IS there a middle?

While Windows has the virus problem, the cost problem, the package-management problem (i.e. there isn't any) and the Microsoft problem, some of the decision to switch to Linux has to be based on raw performance on the desktop. And with the flexibility available in Linux with its many desktop environments, the opportunity exists to tune the system to your needs and the hardware in question ... at least that's the theory anyway.

As far as printing goes, the instructions from the Xubuntu users guide, which are for version 6.10, helped greatly. Once I used CUPS via the browser, all became clear (although, to be honest, the whole CUPS experience is NOT ready for the average user). And only after that did I realize that the printer configuration utility in Xubuntu is simply a graphical front-end to CUPS with not only NO additional information, but with LESS information than you'd get by using CUPS directly.

Services like CUPS can be quite the memory hog (on a 256mb ram system, anyway). If those 256mb RAM are a hard limitation I'd make sure to have a large swap partition for storing such infrequently used files. You should check the services that you have running, ubuntu likes to set up both cups and hplip, so you may be able to recover some RAM (bluetooth may be on too).

According to what is written on the Maxspeed there is a possibility to upgrade the amount of RAM. However, given the cache limitations on that chip, loading of and switching between tasks is going to be slower and these are exactly the areas that a fast and slow desktop distuingish themselves on.

According to the maxspeed website some of the maxterms allow for memory expansion, if that's possible on yours that'd be the one upgrade you can't go wrong with.

"And when it came to image editing, Xubuntu offers the GIMP, which though part of the GNOME office suite..." Actually, if you don't like The Gimp, Xubuntu offers you about every other open source graphics program as well. So just install what you like. Give it a try, open a terminal, type: "sudo apt-get install xpaint" or do the same with gpaint, tkpaint or whatever you like.
Oh and by the way: "without working up a geekish sweat (translation: no command line needed, no Synaptic Package Manager," If installing software with the Synaptic Package Manager is too geekish for you, then you might want to rethink using a computer at all. Really.

Nice review, can't wait for the comparisons :D

It's hard to tell one Maxspeed Maxterm from another -- most don't really even have recognizable model numbers on them. This one has a mini-ITX motherboard with a Via C7 Samuel 1 GHz CPU and PC133 chipset (I've had a hell of a time figuring out who even made the motherboard -- motherboards.org didn't have it). It has one PC133 RAM connector, and it definitely maxes out at 256 MB -- I've tried a 512 MB module, and it was "no go." Of course, in the world of thin clients, who'd ever thought you'd need 512 MB to make it run. If I used it as a true thin client with a LTSP server, it just might perform great.

I do know, from what experience I do have, that just about EVERYTHING runs better with 512 MB of RAM. In Puppy Linux, going from 128 MB to 256 MB really made a difference, and I suspect that 512 MB is what you need to be really comfortable with most Linux systems. But with 256 MB and a swap partition, Xubuntu has been performing really well -- I have had no crashes, and the only trouble I've had is Internet Explorer 6 crashing in Wine, and that was due to problems with the Web applications I'm using with IE6. Otherwise, I've found Xubuntu to be surprisingly robust. I am able to demand more from the system than I have previously.

As far as slowness of loading the GIMP and loading large images into it, I think that's a function of CPU speed -- and why graphics people always want to upgrade their systems to the best available. Regarding the "geekish sweat" comment, Synaptic is pretty easy, to be sure, and the add/del program app that Ubuntu also has is even easier. In fact, with detailed instructions, installing from the command line isn't that hard either. And I downloaded and installed a Debian package on Xubuntu -- and that was surprisingly more like installing an application in Windows than any of these other methods. So other than compiling from source, I think Linux app install is quite easy. The only thing that makes Synaptic "geeky," is the large number of utilities and other packages whose purpose eluedes the average person (me included).

Regarding xpaint -- I think I've used that one. I really did like GNU Paint, but it wouldn't resize images, and I really like mtPaint -- and it installed and now runs flawlessly. It's a program that I think Ubuntu should strongly consider adding to the Xubuntu distribution -- and as a supported package in general.

Overall, while some things are very easy (and other only doable) from the command line, if Linux is ever going to challenge Windows on the desktop, there must be GUI helpers for EVERY bit of configuration a user would need to perform. That's just the way it's got to be. Not every distribution needs to have this, but the ones that really want to gain traction with non-geeks have to move and improve in this direction.

I use xubuntu on a celeron 300A (yes, just 300 MHz cpu!) and it loads GIMP in about 1 minute. Loading large images into it is another story, of course. Perhaps your PC has some configuration problems...

Xubuntu is fairly fast and it fits most home/small office users needs IMHO.

I've been looking for something to install on my Pentium II MMX 333 MHz. I couldn't get the Xubuntu live CD to boot on it, but maybe the alternate install will work.

On my 1 GHz box (256 MB RAM, so it's no powerhouse), Xubuntu and regular Ubuntu run about the same. I don't notice any kind of speed or performance improvement with Xubuntu.

I just installed Xubuntu on my P# laptop, 500MHz with the maxed-out RAM of 192MB. It runs decently enough, although I just started yesterday and so I've not put it through any paces.

However, compared to ArchLinux running KDE 3.4 from a few months ago (it was fast!), I would say that the *buntus could definitely use some improvement in their speed, somehow.

I went with Xubuntu against my better judgment because i wanted access to apt-get/synaptic for installasions of software. We'll see how well it fairs and if I do indeed go back to Arch or start anew with Slackware.

Are there any mid-level Linux OSs? That I don't know. I ran SimplyMEPIS 3.3 on an P2/233 and it worked amazingly well, at the time (2003 or so). The trade off seems to be: good apps or fast OS. This is a shame! I want the good apps to run as fast as a PuppyOS or DSL, with the OS tools of Debian/Ubuntu. Nothing there yet, that I know about.

I don't see what your trying to prove by editing large images on a old, crappy desktop. It's going to be slow no matter what OS you use, hell, if there was a way to edit images without an OS running, it would still be slow. Any program that is designed for modern computers (ie gimp) is designed to run on at least 512 mb of ram. It's not 1998 anymore where fancy GUI's and features had to be left out if the software was going to run reasonably on the average computer. Xubuntu is not designed to be an image editing/video editing operating system. It for your old computer that is sitting in a box in the basement. It's so you can breath new life into it and give it to your grandma to use to check her e-mail and do some internet browsing. And i'm sure that Xubuntu could do this on a 200mhz 64mb ram system.

First of all, the desktop environment or window manager being used doesn't, for the most part, hamper which applications you are able to run if you have the proper libaries and dependencies installed. And the GIMP can run in XFCE as well as it does in GNOME. Hell, it can run in Fluxbox or JWM as well. And image editing is nowhere as intense as video editing. In my case, it's CPU and memory restrictions that are hampering applications, and the desktop environment is just a bit of additional overhead.

In the past month or so, I've been using Xubuntu quite a bit, and while there is a slight speed improvement over GNOME, it's very, very slight, and it's no quicker than a well-tuned KDE system. It's been my experience that most window managers/desktop environments won't run at all with 64 MB of RAM, do poorly to adequate with 128 MB, work fairly well but are not foolproof at 256 MB, and are extremely comfortable at 512 MB.

And ... the whole raison d'etre, as it were, of Xubuntu being for "lower spec" systems does not hold a lot of water for me. If you can't run GNOME on it, XFCE isn't going to make a dramatic difference in performance. A slight difference, yes, but it's no savior of the underpowered system. For that, I think you have to investigate IceWM, JWM, Fluxbox and the other less-complicated window managers.

That said, I happen to like XFCE, and I wouldn't hesitate to run it just for that reason. The Thunar file manager and Orage calender are pretty good, and I think that the Xubuntu setup maximizes the usability of Xfce with all the Ubuntu tools.

And I suspect that a pure Debian system with XFCE runs even faster than Xubuntu (based on my Debian GNOME desktop, which is much snappier than regular Ubuntu).

And the GIMP comes standard with Xubuntu. It's funny that the "GNOME suite" of Abiword, Gnumeric and the GIMP is complete in Xubuntu, but not in Ubuntu (although you can easily install any or all in any version of Ubuntu). I think that the relative "lightness" of Abi and Gnumeric beg for an equally light image-editing program. There is a light GNOME image viewer, but nothing as powerful as mtPaint, which isn't in any Ubuntu repositories -- you have to download the Debian package and install.

Regarding GIMP and memory, I agree with you. I much prefer mtPaint for simple photo editing with less than 512 MB of RAM. Also, even with 512 MB, it's not a good idea to open too many images at once in GIMP because you'll initiate a lot of swapping, which really slows things down.

if all you're doing is resizing images, check out imagemagick. you can execute one command then go take a nap

Hello,
when use Win2000 or an other Windows try the software "portable apps". It's free and good. URL: http://portableapps.com/
I use this software on my usb-stick.
If you want to use Linux on your desktop-system try the distribution Dream Linux 2.2 MM GL. It's very fast and slim.
URL:http://www.dreamlinux.com.br/english/index.html

Have fun! Greetings from Germany.

Being a new user of Xubuntu and having read the comments here, I have some of my own. For one I see nothing wrong with trying out different apps to see what kind of performance you get from both Operating System and Door-stop computer, as it were. Curiosity and experimentation is what made most of us switch to Linux in the first place. Not to mention the price...

And as for comparing Apple processors to IBM compatible processors, I say, Why not? They did, and decided Intel processors were superior in both speed and coolness, which is why ALL of the new MACs tote Intel processors in their bag of tricks. Gigaflop or Gigahertz? Who cares?
And although Xubuntu uses XFCE you can still implement both KDE and GNOME packages, which is where some of your performance can hit an all-time low. Personally, I think it's a fairly decent go-between for older computers that want an alternative to a GNOMISH UBUNTU. (Which I like UBUNTU with GNOME very much, thank you) Are there faster out there? Yes. Are there slower out there? Yes. Would I be able to connect to my Motorola Surfboard via USB without visiting hundreds of forums and using sudo nano blah blah in the terminal and still getting my permissions denied in root? Yeah, probably.

But at least I wont have to wait on hold while I get charged for the phone call after paying over $300 to activate it!
Hurray Linux!

I installed feisty on an old laptop, and when I say old I mean it has a windows 95 sticker on the bottom of it. It has 256M ram. For surfing, instant messaging and word processing the speed is more then passable. Even surfing youtube was not choppy. I don't think I would reccomend doing any rendering on it though.

I think the thing that impressed me most was that it immediately recognized the 802.11b card when I put it in. There was none of the wrestling that I went through with ubuntu 6.x, fedora or SuSE. I just pluged in the card, opened the network tool, clicked "configure" and put in the password and I was good to go.

If it can run a machine that old this well, all I can say is "GREAT JOB XUBUNTU!!". This will come in handy for some refurb machines I'm getting on eBay for my kids.