Since it is a Lite edition, would you expect it to perform well on the systems that I have access to?
The newest is a laptop with 32-bit Intel T2250, one gig of ram, and Intel 945GMA (I think) shared-memory graphics. I thought this one was really old, but from recent checking I think I might have purchased it in late 2006, so not so old after all. I thought "performance" on it was hopeless until I tried Mint 14 with the Xfce desktop on it, either the newer components used in distros these days (I had been using Ultimate Edition 3.0 - installing an OS was always hit&miss as far as whether the thing would hold together long enough to get through it, lol, so I didn't install new every single time one came out - so a lot of the code was probably outdated) made a world of difference as that one uses Quantal as a base which came out in October, or else maybe it was the fact that it doesn't use a lot of memory (I checked one time about two minutes after booting into the desktop and it showed 159 meg of ram being used with just the usual stuff, desktop, extra "fancy" menu with favorites set up on a second panel bar, system load applet, cpu speed applet, cpu changer applet (had to have one for display of frequency and one to change that speed, lol), network traffic monitor applet, system temperatures applet, fancy weather applet, a mail checker, a separate logoff/shutdown/etc. applet, battery, connection-picker, update checker, time/date display, calander display (part of Orage or whatever it's called, IDK if that would be considered an applet or not); the most I managed to get the ram usage up to was 645megs and that was with thunderbird running, the radio tray app playing, a .pdf loaded (whatever app Xfce uses, I can't remember, had a computer service manual open), and Firefox with I think 112 web pages displayed in tabs. But that was before the laptop's fan failed in a rather noisy and vibrating fashion, lol, so lately the ram usage has been closer to the bottom as I only use it when I can take it outside in the cold and that only for email and basic minimal forum reading/posting.
The next older computer is an Athlon XP2200+ @ (almost) 1.8gHz with either a gig or 1280 meg of ram (I forget) and an nVidia FX5200 AGP video card that I've been having trouble figuring out how to make work together even though I downloaded the newest 173 nVidia driver and its release notes clearly state that it works with the newer xorg1.13 (reason they released the update, actually
), so as you can imagine, it's not performing all that well right now with messed-up graphics. 
The oldest one is an HP ze5200 laptop, I'm not sure when it was made, I've heard various report from 2003 back to 2000 but the newest BIOS update for it is dated Feb. 2004 so it was probably made in 2002 or 2003 at a guess. It's got an Intel Pentium 4 (4-D? 4-M?) running at 2.53gHz, 768 meg of (shared) ram, and ATI IGP340M/RS200 shared-memory graphics. I cannot seem to even find out which graphics driver I need to install that will work with the OS (currently Mint 14 Xfce) and provide the best (or, well, any) graphics performance, which is sad because after the owner told me I was welcome to try taking it completely apart to clean years of "yuck" out of it to stop it immediately shutting down due to overheating because they want to sell it soon and I did so it stopped overheating - and it's even sadder because another friend brought their Windows XP disc over to try that and we were actually able to watch a movie on Netflix in Firefox... But I am having serious trouble believing that good(ish) graphics performance is worth being forced to use Microsoft's OS, as you can probably understand.
So... How will the new Lite Ultimate Edition perform on the above systems? Mainly on the loaner HP laptop (oldest) because I am forced to keep a working installation of Mint 14 Xfce on one working computer in order to support someone that is brand new to computers who recently purchased a nice new laptop and is old enough that he, well... is past the age of easily "figuring out all this computer stuff," at least until he feels comfortable enough with basics that I can in good conscience tell him that if he still wants me to be able to mirror his setup at my house (to understand exactly what he's talking about when he calls me every day or two with a question/problem, lol), that I'm going to have to change his OS to Ultimate Edition (I suggested exactly that recently and he said, "Wait until I can get through a week without having to call you and ask you how to do simple stuff."). But after that day arrives, I'd certainly be open to putting Ultimate Edition back on my desktop, too.
And I have one other question: I read that this 3.4 Lite version has GNOME 2.x on it. At first, my thought was, "YAY!!! Awesome." But then I started wondering. While I'm still happy that a major - and powerful - OS still supports "old faithful," I do find myself wondering what, exactly, that support entails. IOW... Since the GNOME team has decided to drop 2.x like it was an infectious disease, lol, are you going to be maintaining all the packages (or whatever the process is called, forgive me please, I'm ignorant) so that whenever we install a new app or receive an update to something already installed, we won't have to worry about getting into the situation of something no longer being set up to work in a GNOME 2.x environment due to changed component requirements (is that what they call "deprecated?") and the like? That seems like an admirable, but rather tall, task. Or are you going to be "freezing" all or a lot of app/software/? versions so that our things will continue to work but we will not have access to the latest features (and possibly bugfixes?) and updates? There's not necessarily anything wrong with the latter, of course - I am not positive, but I believe that might be what Debian does with its "stable" branch and, while I've heard jokes about the social security checks some of its apps must be receiving by now, lol, it is certainly said to be stable.
I'm just curious about all of the above. After all, if this is to be your Long-Term Support version for the years ahead, you have probably thought all of this through (and I am really hopeful that it will be a viable/useful replacement for Ultimate Edition 2.6 which I kept on my desktop until recently - well, I switched to 2.7 when one of the 2.6 updates killed my display/graphics and I could no longer use it, but 2.7 was based on 2.6 so I guess it was LTS too, wasn't it?
Sign me cautiously hopeful (and glad that your website is back up!),
Driver
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