ndowens

I wouldn't install a heavy distro like that on a computer with that little ram, I have a Arch desktop running openbox, at 128mb of ram and it is slow, but I believe firefox causes it to be that slow.

You may could try Arch Linux, I dont use vmware or anything like it, so I wouldnt know personally, I'd recommend running the arch linux net-install under the virtual emulator and get arch installed in it and install what programs you want, then you'd still have a fairly small distro, atleast compared to some distro's. Anything that you can download the minimal version and then install what you like would be the best way in my opinion, you chose what you want, not the distro distributor.

I say Mac even though it is higher because you can't seperate hardware from OS, which IMO is stupid! Mac would dominate more market share if you could just install Mac OS on other computers than just their own systems, but anyway. the reason i say go for Mac is because, it is based on BSD, which was at one point derived from UNIX, you can read more on it on wikipedia.org surely lol. Because it's based on BSD it is gonna be more stable than windows and less prone to viruses as well, but from what i read some time ago, mac's do get viruses but still beats the amount of viruses windows gets.

I personally hate windows. I moved to Linux when i was in my teens, even though I am only 24 now but I was in high school when I finally discovered Linux. I bounced distro to distro after a while, but currently found my home with Arch linux. My reasons of leaving windows is: 1. Not free, cost too much. 2. I dont want to pay for a memory hog OS nor one that gets infested with bacteria(viruses) 3. More software is free for linux, it is hard to find something decent that is free for windows, because most developers wants to make money like MS, which i know, who dont want to make money, but why not create good software that is free.

I would say Arch Linux, I have tried many distros: redhat(before fedora), mandrake, suse, slackware, gentoo, debian and of course Arch. I use to hop from distro to distro, but now I don't. The benefits of Arch is 1. You can make it as minimal or as fat as you want. 2. Compiled for i686, so if you are running a fairly new processor then you may notice some speed difference, some will argue it don't, but I believe it does help. 3. Pacman is great, Like I said i've used Debian and Gentoo, I would compare pacman as being somewhat closer to apt then portage. It does a nice job, it will check to see if other packages needs what you are wanting to uninstall before you uninstall a program. 4. Arch has AUR. Which you can create packages and upload them to share with others. I currently do it, not as active as i was, I have over 100 something packages in AUR. If you like bash scripting then you'll like AUR, because it is kinda like bash scripting in a way. Though Arch isnt as ppl say, "n00b friendly" but it certainly is a nice distro.