William "Chops" Westfield wrote:
>> X/KDE/Gnome/XFce and other *nix GUI got the maximum bang of buck
>> since they are free.
> 
> Bang for buck has to include the hardware cost.  A free OS that
> requires 2G of ram and the lasted high-cost graphics card does NOT
> have good "bang per buck", for example (not that I know of a linux
> that does that badly, but the hardware targets under discussion here
> are also "free" to to being otherwise obsolete.

This was already mentioned and maybe it doesn't meet the rather
open-ended requirements ...  Fluxbox is actively developed, rather
lightweight, has a reasonable number of features and is easy to try out
using DSL.

http://fluxbox.sourceforge.net/
http://fluxbox.sourceforge.net/screenshots-dev.php

And of course it'll also run under Ubuntu (or virtually any other
distribution for that matter).  Live CD available here (No personal
experience, buyer beware, heh):

http://wiki.fluxbuntu.org/

I guess if you're actually looking for a Vista UI clone that'll run on a
486, you'll be pretty disappointed.  On the other hand, if your needs
and wants are a little more realistic, you may be pleasantly surprised
at what you can run on hardware that can literally be fished out of the
dumpster.

http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/

50 meg download gets you (straight from the web page):

Damn Small is small enough and smart enough to do the following things:

    * Boot from a business card CD as a live linux distribution (LiveCD)
    * Boot from a USB pen drive
    * Boot from within a host operating system (that's right, it can run
*inside* Windows)
    * Run very nicely from an IDE Compact Flash drive via a method we
call "frugal install"
    * Transform into a Debian OS with a traditional hard drive install
    * Run light enough to power a 486DX with 16MB of Ram
    * Run fully in RAM with as little as 128MB (you will be amazed at
how fast your computer can be!)
    * Modularly grow -- DSL is highly extendable without the need to
customize

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