On Mon, 13 Oct 2014, Russell Hanaghan wrote: Atom single core, 1.6Ghz, 1G ram, 32bit... Not much difference from xfce to lxde/blackbox, that I can tell. Nice thing about xfce stock menu is that new SW just shows up in the menu... not much of a difference. Unity and gnome session just don't work well enough to run a browser let alone audio apps. This may be more video drivers related. KDE is tunable. But I have found the performance hit with no tuning to be not noticable really. I can run guitarix at 64/2 (USB AI) 64/3 (internal HDA) reasonably well. The major problem is memory, 1G is really not enough, 2G makes a difference. I have not added memory though because I don't use this for audio. I am running xfce and using Jack as the audio backend with pulse for desktop stuff, bvecause I do try some audio bits once in a while. So there is a small step from KDE OOTB over xfce, but unity and gnome session do take a lot more of something that my machine doesn't have. There are a number of people using a P4 single core to run more than I do on this. Like I say the biggest hit is memory. The WM generally is not the whole story, xfce WM is not much bigger than xfwm for example, but xfce generally has a whole pile of extra processes running. Where this is noticable is that i use more than one "workspace". So the systray WS switcher is pretty imortant. I set jack running and do jacl connections in one screen then run Ardour on another. Part way through I need to switch to another WS and so hit the WS switcher..... and find it has swapped out and the audio just dies waiting for swap to finish. Swappiness helps but doubling the memory fixes it. so long as I stick to the one screen, I can run the cpu at 800mhz (half speed) and have not xruns. kxstudio uses kde and ubuntustudio uses xfce, both have live DVD isos so they can be tried without installing. Soft Synths and effects vary rather a lot in what they need for cpu/memory. I did have some things that just didn't run. foo yc20 for example, was just a mess of xruns/noises on this box no matter the DE. Hexter never glitched, it was fine. -- Len Ovens www.ovenwerks.net

On Mon, 13 Oct 2014 14:50:05 -0700 Russell Hanaghan <hanaghan.osaudio(a)gmail.com> wrote: That should be more than enough horsepower for the task... My experiences have definitely been consistent with this, though I haven't used anything besides Fluxbox in ages. If at all possible, swap out the hard drive with a SSD. Most laptop drives are not chosen for performance, so 5200RPM drives are real common and the less performant the drive, the harder the system works to keep up with everything while recording. -- ====================================================================== Joe Hartley - UNIX/network Consultant - jh(a)brainiac.com Without deviation from the norm, "progress" is not possible. - FZappa