[Chronos]

So, after the announcement a couple months ago of the stable E17 release, I decided to give it a try on one of my older backup laptops. Bodhi linux (based on Ubuntu) is the most prominent distro that uses E17, so I went with that.

I am really quite amazed -- it uses less memory than my lightweight Fedora LXDE spin (machine is using 80-something mb of ram after boot), is super-fast, and is really beautiful with more customization options than you can shake a stick at. Visually, it looks like something that should be hogging half a Gig of ram and seriously slowing the machine, but it's just the opposite.

One thing that remains a deal breaker for switching to Bodhi on my main system is that there is no easy way to get a fully encrypted system at install. I also just prefer the Fedora package management to the Ubuntu style. I will definitely be playing with this and learning it, though, in the hopes that Fedora releases an E17 spin.

[Chronos]

A few screenshots (not mine):

[Chronos]

A little update on the off-chance that someone might find this interesting... Fedora had been projecting to incorporate E17 into Fedora 19, but the feature list has now been updated without it. So now probably about a year before one can expect E17 to show up in Fedora 20.

This was a bit disappointing to me, so I just wiped a Fedora LXDE spin from an Atom-based netbook that I carry around fairly often and went to Bodhi and E17. The system now uses 70-some mb of ram after boot (i.e. less ram than a single open instance of Firefox by itself), and programs come up significantly faster. For example, Firefox had been taking ~17 seconds to come up in Fedora/LXDE (which had been a rather annoying wait time), and now comes up in ~7 seconds.

This is similar to independently reported performance gains over stock Ubuntu -- one test had GIMP coming up in 11.1 seconds under Ubuntu and 4.7 seconds in Bodhi (though I don't know the hardware on that test).