Stella Linux (CentOS 6.5 + multimedia remix)

[Rainmaker]

Has anyone seen and/or played with this yet? I came across it quite by accident while setting up CentOS 6.5 on my new VPS.

Stella is basically straight CentOS 6.5 but with Flash, codecs and OpenJDK etc already set up on it. The extra repo for multimedia goodies doesn't touch the Base packages and so it's 100% CentOS compatible, and doesn't interfere with regular packages or updates.

As CentOS is still on Gnome 2 it's way faster on my older desktop than most modern distros, and yet fully patched and will be supported for years to come. For browsing, torrents, and light multimedia use it's perfect and, obviously, rock solid stable.

The last time I remember a full fledged DE running with Firefox open, yet RAM usage being under the 400MB mark, was in Debian 4 lol Just thought I'd toss it out there for those who might be interested in something to play around with.

 

[Rainmaker]

I think you may have missed (or overly complicated) my original point mate. When I talked of multimedia I simply meant the codecs, Flash and other basics required for someone to use the internet and PC for a day without running into issues. So YouTube, Facebook, games, and video playback all work etc. I wasn't referring to specialist audio/video equipment or anything else of the sort.

While Fedora does indeed have MATE available (and virtually every other DE and WM), F20 uses twice as much RAM as CentOS 6.5 / Stella does running the same release of MATE. So while I run F20 personally, I stand by my original post in that Stella offers an interesting alternative for the niches it's aimed at.

When setting up older machines on Linux for friends and family, I want something rock solid stable that's lean/fast/light while still offering everything people need for daily driving. I stay away from Ubuntu (Unity) and even Mint (too heavy) for older machines, so tend to load up Zorin Lite or SolydK (Debian based). Stella 6.5 offers an interesting compromise. It's as light as Debian, fully featured and doesn't need setting up out of the box. It's like running a modern day Fedora 8 - light, solid but does everything you need.

I didn't intend the OP to be a 'hey everyone, you should switch over'. It was merely to share my finding a niche little distro that had some appeal for me in that it crosses over between enterprise stability and desktop usability while keeping out the bloat.