Speed of Ubuntu?

[shrekfx]

Question, I installed ubuntu a few days ago and would have thought that it would run faster then xp... (i'm new to linux).. Well to me it seems like it boots up alot slower.. When i'm in, its running smooth, that i can tell, some hang ups. but not bad..

My system

amd duel core 64bit 5000
4 gig ram
nvidia 8600gt 256 graphic card
umm, what else do you need?

Thanks.

[lovelyvik293]

The system becames slow when you have lot of application running.You can just uninstall the applications which are not required.

[avtolle]

Look in your System>Preferences>Sessions, Startup Programs tab for those applications automatically loaded on start-up. Disable the ones you don't use/want, and see if this speeds up your boot. Also, see if under the Session Options tab the box to remember running poplications (or something like that) on log out is checked; uncheck it if it is, and see if that helps.

[shrekfx]

i dd all that, but only took like 3 apps off the start up.. didnt want to take off anything that is critical.

[stefangr1]

Ubuntu isn't really that fast at bootup on computers with good specs. On older hardware, the fact that Ubuntu uses less resources makes it faster.

Also, antivirus and antispyware software can make bootup slow in windows. When I see my desktop on Ubuntu, and push the firefox button, I will be surfing 2 seconds later. In windows that's not the case. When you're up and running performance is comparable in windows and Ubuntu (even though, again, Ubuntu will outperform windows on computers with bad specs.).

[donkyhotay]

The biggest advantage of linux is the ability to choose. You can choose to do things yourself or you can choose to let others do things for you. Generally linux distro's that are 'newbie-friendly' like ubuntu automate choices that new users may not know anything about. This means that these types of distro's are more general and will have stuff that you might not need/want but will slow up your boot time just by being there. On the other hand if you use something like arch or gentoo you can more easily customize your system into a lean-mean booting machine, but if you don't know what you're doing you can quickly get lost setting it up. It's possible to customize ubuntu but since so much of it is automated to be newbie-friendly it's actually harder to perform this kind of customization. If you are just learning linux for the first time I would recommend sticking with ubuntu and the boot times. Once you become more proficient and comfortable with the environment then you may want to start doing more specialty customization with another distro to get it to run more the way you want it to.

[snowpine]

Ubuntu takes a bit longer than XP to boot because it scans all of your hardware and checks for drivers. You can literally take your hard drive out and put it into a different computer, and Ubuntu will boot just fine. Try doing that with XP! This is why adding new hardware to a Windows machine is such a pain. Not all Linux distros are like Ubuntu in this regard; there are faster-booting distros that are customized specifically for your hardware. The designers of Ubuntu decided a slower boot time was a reasonable tradeoff for full "plug and play" capabilities, given their marketing goals to attract new users from Windows/Mac.