ubuntu 12.10 considered very slow vs linux mint?

[lamenramen]

Hi,

I have a 1 month old, brand new laptop (thinkpad). It's basically the "reference" laptop to have for linux, and I installed ubuntu 12.10, super modern hardware.
I found it to be very slow out of the box. Is it the unity interface? Any way we can disable this completely?
Running calibre, eclipse, and chrome, and thunderbird would result in big time harddrive "thrashing" where there's constant activity.

I was thinking about buying an SSD simply b/c things were so slow.
On a whim I installed linux mint 14 (cinnamon desktop). I am not exaggerating when I say that it is literally 5 times as fast in every area.
I can run the aforementioned apps simultaneously without any problems. It's been a revelation.
My SSD purchase is on the back burner now.

I'm sure that the Unity interface has been a complaint and there's always going to be people who dislike change. Or maybe it's most people who dislike change.
But I found it quite hard as a newbie to know what is installed on the system vs what is not. The Unity interface requires you to know and remember what is on your
hard drive so you know what to search for, but there are many many times when I in fact do not know what has been pre-installed or even what I've installed before.

I know Ubuntu is the most popular distro, which is why I downloaded it first. But the speed issue was too much for me to bear as of 12.10.

[carl4926]

Cinnamon and Unity I would expect to have similar demands.
But Mint is a well put together Distro, no doubt. You know it's based on the Ubuntu release/s.
Did you try Xubuntu?

[slooksterpsv]

Unity does require a bit of a higher-end machine. Cinnamon is based on the older Gnome2 libraries and uses Compiz for it's rendering (I believe Unity does as well). Unity is faster cause Dash does do a lot of caching for apps, documents, music, etc. for "faster" searching. It may be indexing your home folder as to why Unity runs slower; if you're home folder is empty, I know that with Unity alone on my machine it ran too slow for me. I switched to Gnome Shell and it blazes vs Unity; compared to Cinnamon, the 2D version ran fast whilst the regular cinammon used a bit of my graphics chipset to power it. Either way you can try various others UIs such as KDE (which last I ran was too slow for me but is apparently fixed in 4.9 as the Window Manager ate up a lot of resources (not KDM)). It's all up to what you want and feel most comfortable with. Lubuntu uses LXDE which is super light, which is why I've ran it on computers with 320MB of RAM.

[carl4926]

Cinnamon is based on the older Gnome2 libraries

Actually Cinnamon is a Fork of Gnome Shell not Gnome 2

[slooksterpsv]

Actually Cinnamon is a Fork of Gnome Shell not Gnome 2

Ouch, my bad; I thought Cinnamon was a fork of Gnome 2. Thank you for the correction =D

[joemartin]

Go with Xubuntu. XFCE4 is rock solid, extremely fast and not nearly as buggy as Cinnamon. Xubuntu stopped my distro hopping.

[3rdalbum]

Plain and simple, you didn't install your graphics drivers. That's why Unity is running slowly. It requires 3D acceleration.

You don't need to remember what programs you have installed. Open the Dash and click on the little bookshelf icon at the bottom of the Dash. Or right-click the Ubuntu icon on the Launcher.