Peter Ross <Peter.Ross@bogen.in-berlin.de> wrote:
BTW, our computers here retire after five years, and before that we try to use them effeciently. My work computer is 2-3 years old, and not extremely low spec. (Intel i5@ 3.33GHz with 4GB RAM)
Mine is six years old now (two Xeon 5140 CPUs at 2.33 ghz, 4GB RAM) and still more than adequate. The boot time is undoubtedly helped by the SAS drives. If I were buying a new machine, though, I'd consider an SSD. Incidentally, I bought it used, at a very large discount and the SAS disks were a surprise.
Windowmaker makes it usable in less than 10 seconds even with traditional harddisk. I used Gnome and KDE before - and I cannot say that I miss anything of it (yes, I use programs from other environments but not the desktop).
I only ever use the desktop to run whatever X application I want; I do almost all of my work from the shell, so it wouldn't much matter to me if it were Gnome, XFCE, LXCE or anything else, except for braille/speech-related accessibility issues. I think XFCE 4.10 could be an option in this regard but I haven't tried it. It would be interesting to know whether distributions based on Systemd achieve much of an advantage in boot times. (I know improving the boot time is far from the only rationale for systemd. I also know that some on this list don't like Systemd, but let's try to avoid recapitulating that discussion).