Ubuntu vs Lubuntu

The main part of this chapter is complete, previously I suggested Lubuntu, but as a result of testing I found minimal difference between the two and now recommend Ubuntu for the ease of use. What follows below is unnecessary for the instructions, but is here for your curiousity.

I ran some benchmarks inside Virtualbox VM's on my laptop. This is going to give inconsistent results, especially when running a GUI. There are so many variables to running an operating system that I was not expecting great consistency. I was only looking for a significant difference.

I wanted to verify that Lubuntu gives a significant advantage over Ubuntu because of how significantly smaller it is compared to it's competitor Ubuntu. I found that on CPU benchmarks, all three were roughly equivalent. However, on file reading and writing tests, Ubuntu is at 89% of the speed of Lubuntu Interim. These were more consistent results then I was expecting.

However, the GUI on Ubuntu is much nicer for people new to Linux. I decided that the speed decrease is minimal compared to user frustration on a lesser featured GUI, so I decided Ubuntu should become the main recommendation. I've left the Lubuntu instructions archived in the next page for those interested.

I also found that increasing to two cores actually slowed down both benchmarks slightly. However, these benchmarks run on only one core. So while it appears slower, since the test is only on one core the speed actually nearly doubles. I don't know why increasing to two cores causes Virtualbox to have a slightly slower base core speed, but it's there.