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Comment by zokier | Hacker News Reader

Could anyone comment on using Fedora on small screen device, such as my 1024x600 netbook? My current installation, Linux Mint 12 needs upgrading, and doesn't handle the low vertical resolution well. Many dialogs are too large and/or are positioned partly outside the screen, and the two horizontal bar layout is not optimal.

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Fedora ships with support for several desktop environments, which are easily installable, such as XFCE, LXDE, Sugar, and several others (including, of course, KDE as well!). Fedora's default is Gnome 3, but that doesn't mean it's your only choice. The other options might be more suitable for a low resolution display.

Through 3rd-party packages, other environments might also be available, such as Cinnamon and MATE.

I'm not sure about MATE but instructions to install the unofficial packages for Cinnamon on Fedora 16 and Fedora 17 are available [1].

[1] http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?t=274611

Ubuntu. Ubuntu Unity is designed for tablets, netbooks, etc. One of the biggest complaints right now is that it's too designed for small screens, and lost too much utility on desktops (multimonitor especially).

Especially if you're coming from Mint, an Ubuntu derivative, everything will still work more like what you're used to than Fedora or other non-Ubuntu/Debian derivatives.

I've been using Ubuntu on both my 10" Asus EeePC netbook and newer my 12" HP dm1 4050us for the past two years, no complaints.

I think that the Gnome 3 UI works really well on a netbook.

Really? I've been pretty unhappy with it on mine. The large, permanent top bar, the enormous window chrome, combined with the miserable vertical screen real estate on my netbook are all... aggravating. The performance on Atom's GPU is also erratic and often multi-second laggy (though it's much better than 3.0 was).

I wound up switching to KDE, which has... strange characteristics, but window management is butter smooth, like you might hope for in 2012. About as smooth as it was before everyone switched to compositing.

Are we talking about the same Gnome 3? Mine has a thin toolbar for the clock, and all the other UI is hidden unless you mouse over the top left corner. It works extremely well on the comparatively small MacBook Pro 13", to the point that I'm now seeking the best linux distro to offer as close to vanilla Gnome 3 experience as possible.

Given where most of the Gnome developers work, I'd choose Fedora

The vertical space occupied by the top bar and title bar on my box (not a netbook) is 58 pixels. Honestly I suspect that's the lowest vertical overhead among mainstream desktops, though I don't have a copy of Unity running next to it to check. Certainly the OS X Dock and Windows 7 start bar are much bigger.

I just measured! Gnome 3 is about 58 pixels, KDE is about 50. But the bar is on the bottom and hides, which means in practice there's just 20px of chrome in the way.

I am using Fedora 17 on Acer 11.1 network, AMD 1G dual core it works so far the best in speed - compared to the mint 13 (both Mate and Cinnamon), ubuntu 12.04 that I tested. Everything works out of the box: suspend, wireless ... Initially Selinux stops the dropbox to work, but I found the tweak online to go around it easily. Used to be a huge fan of ubuntu, but the divided states of unity, gnomeshell (for some reason gnome shell under ubuntu works too slow on my machine), MATE, cinnamon ... kept me away (for now) from my favorite debian based distribution ...

I've used Fedora with KDE on 1280*800 without any significant problems. It has a dedicated netbook mode, but I just used it like this: http://i.imgur.com/wmzzY.png It's an old screenshot, I don't have that setup now, but you can spot one window of the browser on the right side and see that it's pretty slim height-wise. KDE allows you to get rid of decorations pretty easily or make them small if you want them for certain applications. And I believe that with a bit of work you can make it nice as well.

I use Fedora on my netbook. I use the Xmonad tiling window manager, that maximizes the space used by windows. It is really great for small screens.

I was surprised when I installed Fedora 16 how well Xmonad integrates with Gnome. It comes with a Xmonad-Gnome session that has the advantages of both worlds (at least for me).

I get it from a third party repo, but Awesome works great with Fedora on my eeepc.

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