Hi Everybody. Please don't consider this a flame on Ubuntu. I love it and I hope the best for it. I am a Debian and Linux from scratch user for a year now. After all the good talk about Ubuntu on the net, I decided to install it and be a Ubuntu developer if I liked it.
Well, It seems a huge work from the community, I really loved it.
I have a Dell D505 laptop with a:
* Pentium-M 1.5 GHz, 1MB L2 cache
* 512MB 333MHz Ram
* 1.5 GB swap space
* Integrated 64Mb i810 video card
As you see it's not too old. I think Ubuntu should work with a good speed on it as LFS, Debian and XP do. But really Gnome shipped with Ubuntu is bloated. Here's the results:
* Nautilus takes about a second to view any folder, even if the folder has files with no thumbnails.
* when moving any window above the desktop icons, They got erased and redrawn after a while.
* Any program even a small game like Nibbles takes about 2 seconds to load !
* Gnome menues takes a while to load icons when viewing the menu the first time
* Rythimbox and totem takes about 3 seconds to begin playing a song.
* Moving any big window above a smaller window erase the small window (becomes totally white) for a while
* Moving a window quickly makes it move in pieces. (moving it slowly activate the new metacity option of tilting the lower part of the window a little as XGL do)
As you can see, The overall speed of the system is very low. Comparing above results with the latest Debian Stable (Gnome 2.6) and LFS (Gnome 2.14) I use.
* Nautilus takes no-time to view any folder even if the folder has a lot of pics and videos (displaying thumbnails).
* Most of other programs opens in no-time except OpenOffice as all the community know.
I even tried to disable displaying pics/videos thumbnails, disabling location bar and the "trackerd" daemon in Ubuntu's Nautilus. But it's still bloated.
To be fair, I also tried Ubuntu 6.06 on a new friend's laptop.
It's a Lenovo 3000 N100 with Intel Duo and 512 Ram. I was very surprised!, It has even been much slower than my old laptop and Nautilus takes a long long time to view folders. Even gedit takes time to open !.
anyway, Iam tryin to track the problem and fix it if I can. (The Open Source way ). I thought it's a problem in the i810 Xserver module but direct rendering is working fine with 700 Fps in glgears!.
Bottomline: Ubuntu is too sexy and easy but it's much heavier than other distros (I know it's much better than them) and even heavier than XP.
Love u all.
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Edit:
Strangely Enough, I've found that Xorg uses the vesa instead of the i810 module. Using the i810 module, All the bad graphical effects mentioned above disappeared.
Code:cp /etc/X11/xorg.conf /etc/X11/xorg.conf.backup sudo sed -i 's/vesa/i810/g' /etc/X11/xorg.conf
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