Freya and the Hydra: The decendent of the Ubuntu 14.04 LTS on some old, heavy iron.

As you all probably know I don't think that there is any one solution to almost anything you care to name - the reality is that most solutions are local optima, not revealed truths and this applies to OSs as much as anything else. So - moving away from the badass to a more "mediated experience" in the next few days I'm trying out Elementary OS Freya popularly said to be said to be the Next Big Linux Distro.  It is based on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, which was released in April 2014.and the final version of Freya was released on 11 April 2015.

So Freya is going onto my multi screen control center PC, Hydra - an old but sturdy four headed workhorse that I use to monitor multiple projects in parallel in the Adstock Labs. Of course I've always had different metrics from other reviewers or tech pundits - I'm interested in outcomes, not processes. So the fact that my lightly loaded i7 chipped MacBook took 27 seconds to respond to a mouse input is more important than the IT nerd's response that I need to think of how many operations the bloatware needs to do that and how many other processes have priority over user input. So Freya is up for a much bigger challenge with me than with most reviewers.

The original plan was to move Hydra to Lubuntu but since they share derivatives of the LightDM is X display manager there is a reasonable chance that Elementary will match Lubuntu as a fast, low-maintenance platform and, as always I have underlying reasons for this experiment.

This is a post that will evolve over time but here is the current state of play.

1. The Elementary download starts by trying to ask you for $10 but since I don't actually know if this is going to work I have to go back - set up a donation and come back again to get the iso.
2. Next it turns out that the iso is 893 MB - too big to fit on a CD and I've been phasing out DVDs for some time now and don't have any blank ones.
3. On to EBay to get a bootable CD sent out and to get some extra hardware so I can run this from an old SSD http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/261377510900  
4. More soon when the CD and SSD arrive
5. Should be easy to start rolling as the installer is Ubiquity, the default installer for Ubuntu and most of its derivatives. Legacy hardware support will be an issue though as Hydra as certainly legacy.