Linux on a Notebook
oni_dels
Drunk French CanadianMontréal, Québec. Icrontian
so i recently acquired a shitty notebook to carry around when i go to college, and i installed the latest Ubuntu version on it. it seem to run well on it although very slowly. i can't seem to be able to download Flash as it doesn't find it in the plugins, even when i try to download it directly from adobe website. also i feel like the graphic card is not recognized or wtv. it's an EEE pc from Asus. (it was already laggy with windows and i can't add memory chips because it's a piece of crap.)
i use it mostly for text editing and such, although i also use it for gameboy emulation, which is abnormally laggy.
i can easily listen to music but any video will also lag.
suggestions? (beside throwing it on a wall and get a better one; i'm broke...)
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http://michaelminn.com/linux/eeepc/
That details his particular changes to Ubuntu to help it run better on a EEE pc.
Other suggestions would include lighter weight distros like Linux Mint or Xubuntu.
You asked for just general suggestions, so here's my story. It parallels yours only slightly, only mine worked out:
So, I have an old HPDM1Z that I purchased so I could do stuff on my honeymoon beyond what a simple phone would require. Knowing that netbooks run slow as balls, I decided to stick a linux distro on it, as well.
However as much I like ubuntu (and I do), and however much I realize it's not exactly a powerhouse, I would encourage you to select a distribution that's more pared down. Speaking from a desktop user's viewpoint, it's much easier to build up an OS than it is to pare down what you don't need - Ubuntu especially makes it hard to tell what's going on in the background and what you can do without, and comes with tons of stuff pre-installed, so there's definitely room to pare down.
I'm told Gentoo is a good OS for this sort of situation, though I've never touched the distro. My personal preference is Arch - it's good for an intermediate user, lots and lots of quickstart tutorials out there.
My personal recommendation would be whatever OS you get, go with cinnamon for your gui. It's simple and not particularly graphics intensive.
Advice for some specific problems you're having:
Don't download flash directly from the website. Or, in fact, anything. Linux folks have this BEAUTIFUL thing they refer to as "the repositories," and unless there's some software that can't be found in the repositories or was compiled for a different OS, that's pretty much the one-stop shop for goodies. You'll almost always have better luck downloading things through the official repositories. Ubuntu uses apt, so you should just be able to run apt-get flashplugin-installer and the durn thing'll download/install by its onesies. No idea how it'll treat what you've already done to the system.
Ubuntu uses... are they calling it Unity now? It was gnome when I played with it... as their gui. That's a pretty fancy looking gui. If you have a wimpy laptop, you probably shouldn't be running a fancy gui. I mentioned earlier, I think, cinnamon is pretty sweet.
Emulation is hard on computers. Maybe the laptop just doesn't have the balls to run a GBY emulator?
Whenever I play with Arch, I end up using the generic AMD drivers - which are better than the proprietary drivers for 2D, but worse for 3D applications. Not sure what graphics solution you have in your machine, but I'm willing to bet Ubuntu's using the generic drivers (complete speculation)... which aren't bad and shouldn't give you trouble with your emulator or gui. It's more likely you have a hardware bottleneck than anything.
So I have an Asus Q200 its a reaaly cheap laptop thing. I had a spare ssd laying around so I installed it and since it's small I decided to go with Linux.
At first I tried Ubuntu 14.10 and then the gnome shell version. That was a remarakble failure 14.10 is not good.
I installed xubutu 14.04 and it is super smoothe no problems. Its so fast I accidentally touch something twice and I close two windows. I cannot recommend xubuntu enough for a laptop.
For flash honestly just use chrome it is included in the browser and it can support Netflix without an issue.
I run Gentoo on a ThinkPad X220 tablet and it is quite fast. In your case, if you can stomach the learning curve then Arch with LXDE is the way to go. If not, lubuntu is for you.
EDIT: Regarding Cinnamon, it has GNOME 3 dependencies and is not a good choice for low-performing systems. I use it on my not-at-all low-performing laptop.
LXDE is indeed a delightful piece of software. I actually hadn't been keeping up on it, I thought they forked cinnamon off the ancient GNOME stuff. I didn't do a ton of research on it to be fair, just noted that they were trying to bring users an old-school classic GNOME experience so figured they wouldn't be using anything from gnome3.
Cinnamon is a classic user experience on the GNOME 3 / gtk3 platform. It relies on the same underlying framework as Unity and standard GNOME 3. Contrast with MATE which is legitimately a fork of GNOME 2 with added gtk3 support.
Actually, Unity is no longer gtk3 based. They've moved to QT.
Otherwise, yeah, pretty much this.