cya ubuntu.....

[gammyhand]

I have finally had enough. I have tried to get on with ubuntu for about 5 months now as my sole operating system but oh my dear god it is SLUGGISH!!!

I mean, I am not exagerating at all here. An 800mhz P3 with 384mb ram at work runs windows XP faster than my athlon 64 3500+ with 1gb ram can run ubuntu. It is laughable.

The interface is constantly playing catch up, mouse clicking is terrible. Really appalling. You know what I mean...you are in totem for example and you want to click and drag to a new part of the film. It usually takes several clicks to actually get the thing to move like you want rather than just jumping.

And bluefish html editor. I nearly cried. It actually takes over a second to register a tab. a TAB! My dear god!

How people use this OS on a daily basis continuously will baffle me until the grave.

I really tried to get on with Ubuntu but I am going to buy a new copy of windows and be happy that I won't want to smash my keyboard through my screen on a daily basis.

[aysiu]

You know what I mean...you are in totem for example and you want to click and drag to a new part of the film. It usually takes several clicks to actually get the thing to move like you want rather than just jumping. Actually, most people who wouldn't know what you mean--that's why we're using Ubuntu. Why you stayed with it for five months is a mystery to me. I had a few distributions not work for me. Guess how long I stayed with those. If you're well-intentioned and sincere, you're an idiot for staying with something so long that doesn't work for you. Otherwise, you're just a troll (who's been here an awfully long time), and you won't stop other people from using Ubuntu.

[josebalius]

It's really sad to see you talk about Ubuntu like that. I installed it and its 10 times faster than Windows XP, hell even with the Live CD it was faster.

[pmj]

I understand where he's coming from. Ubuntu is way slower than XP for me too. I'm hoping Breezy will be better.

[tfc_generalkmk]

what version did you download if you upgraded to breezy the instability might be whats wrong

or you could be using 4.10 and therefor it would be too old and getting the slowness of an older system i am using ubuntu on a p3 128mb ram system and it runs faster than xp did

[Skatox]

For me it is faster than XP, first you have to install the kernel for your processor, for example k7 for AMD athlon and i686 for Pentiums IV. That makes faster de pc, if its not enough try to compile your favorites software and use Prelink to make them load faster.

[gammyhand]

Actually, most people who wouldn't know what you mean--that's why we're using Ubuntu. Why you stayed with it for five months is a mystery to me. I had a few distributions not work for me. Guess how long I stayed with those. If you're well-intentioned and sincere, you're an idiot for staying with something so long that doesn't work for you. Otherwise, you're just a troll (who's been here an awfully long time), and you won't stop other people from using Ubuntu.
It should be obvious I am not a troll. And I wish Ubuntu did work for me. I have stuck with it because a) I think it is a better OS in general. b) I like the community support. c) I was hoping I could figure out just what makes it so sluggish. d) It starts off quick when first installed and just gets slower and slower. Even typing this message has some delay on it!!

It's a shame but I am going to have to let it go. And I would have let it go a lot sooner I imagine if I used my home PC for anything other than surfing, budgeting, and accounting.

[DJ_Max]

How people use this OS on a daily basis continuously will baffle me until the grave.

Because other people don't have the problems you have, simple as that. I can't believe that baffles you. Do you honestly think Ubuntu is normally slow???

[noelferg]

I have had some difficulties getting upgrades to do everything right, but a clean install of Breezy has given me a great system - faster & more customisable than XP :D

Looking forward to final Breezy - will install on more machines then !

[KingBahamut]

Im sorry to see you go Gammy....what did it for you , really? what didnt work?

[Perfect Storm]

Did you optimize ubuntu, like the right Kernel, installed the graphic card properly etc.?

Also you could try another Linux Distro. There's 100s of them out there.

[christooss]

Im sorry to see you go. Breezy is faster than WinXP. And like sad its more costumizable. Add/remove programs finnaly has a meaning. in win you can only REMOVE programs.

I say goodbye but I hope to se you soon :)

[David Marrs]

It could be memory leak from a dodgey application, if stuff gets slower and slower. Otherwise, it sounds like a hardware compatibility issue, or a bug in a driver. It's certainly not normal behaviour for Ubuntu.

[Kyral]

Yah, its all about optimizing the Kernel. I noted the 1 GB RAM thing. I have heard (since I only have 512MB) that the default i386 kernel can only pick up about 512 MB w/o recompiling whereas the i686 and K7s can. Also like people have said, activate the proper GFX acceleration for your card (nvidia-glx and flgrx respectively). I know X is slow as hell until I pop the NVidia driver into it. Oh well, here is hoping you will find your way back EDIT: Just saw the post above about the memory leak and it reminded me that gDesklets has a nasty one. It will gradually take up more memory. So if you are using gDesklets, check how much memory its using from time to time...

[gammyhand]

So is it worth trying a breezy install before I depart? Should I install from scratch? Or just upgrade?

[gammyhand]

In regards to what has made me want to leave ubuntu behind. It's sluggish. When you click on the corner of a window to drag it quite often doesn't pick it up. And then when it does it's jerky to resize.

Firefox is awful. You can't drag up and down a page until the whole page has loaded or it just stops every 3 inches.

When you try and drag things around the desktop it's really sluggish as well.

I thought it was P2P so I stopped using that and no difference.

I am using xinerama for dual screen display.

Maybe it's just bluefish editor that is so crap.

I just find it's not responsive enough.

And what really, really annoys me is that highlighting text is so hit and miss.

[Kyral]

In regards to what has made me want to leave ubuntu behind. It's sluggish. When you click on the corner of a window to drag it quite often doesn't pick it up. And then when it does it's jerky to resize.
I actually never noticed that...but then again I tend to "set" a size and maximize it when I need to see more...


Firefox is awful. You can't drag up and down a page until the whole page has loaded or it just stops every 3 inches.

Use Epiphany? Seriously unless you are on dialup it shouldn't be a problem. Also note that this should be taken up with the FireFox devs, not the Ubuntu ones


When you try and drag things around the desktop it's really sluggish as well.

Nope, nothing like that here.


I am using xinerama for dual screen display.

I know nothing about Duel Screens, sorry


Maybe it's just bluefish editor that is so crap.

Now you know why I use Emacs :D

[Vectrox]

Maybe you just have to install a clean of Ubuntu instead of upgrading.. Only a thought..

If you still think that Ubuntu is bloated and slow maybe you should try an another distribution -->> http://www.distrowatch.com.

[hiperactive]

I mean, I am not exagerating at all here. An 800mhz P3 with 384mb ram at work runs windows XP faster than my athlon 64 3500+ with 1gb ram can run ubuntu. It is laughable.



I face the same problems than you, I have been using Ubuntu for one week and find that WinXP runs faster on my machine: menus, aplications start and behaviour, audio and video, FPS in ET, etc. Another annoying thing is when I play more than one sound file at the same time, it seems the quality of sound decreases noticeably. Besides the system constantly crashes with no reason, for example, after doing some clicks and open several aplications quickly, I am just able to move the cursor but the keyboard and the system isnt responding at all, I have to reboot the computer manually. It happens too often. After playing ET, which crashes often too, the next aplications I start crash in the same way. Besides the mouse acts weird time by time, it seems to lose control and do whatever (clicks, movements) during about 5 seconds. Well I have found another annoying things that really makes me think windows works better for me.

As you did, I am still using ubuntu trying to find out what ¡s wrong or what can I do to make it better.

[AgenT]

You are making very silly statements. Just because it is "slow" for you does not mean it is for anyone else. To all those people that tell you to optimize your system by compiling this or prelinking that, don't listen to them. They are wrong. Unless it is to fix something instead of "optimizing". What you describe seems to be a major problem somewhere in terms of performance that is NOT normal (optimizing will not help, first you have to fix it!). Notice the "NOT normal" part before you whine and say Ubuntu sucks this or that.

Your problem seem to be either hardware (bad memory or power supply, for example - Linux is usually more picky than sloppy Windows), a software issue (you have some program turned on with a major memory leak or something to that effect), you are having a "driver" problem, or you have something misconfigured.

With such a high post count as yours it is a surprise that you seem so uninformed about your own problem (that is, what is causing your problem).

Because you are not being very helpful to anyone in explaining your problem, it will be difficult if not impossible to help you. Now, as someone above explained, if you have a 386 kernel loaded, it will most likely not use all of your memory. It maxes out somewhere between 512MB and 1GB. This should not be your major issue, although you may want to look into it.

You should probably post a complete list of all processes running (along with CPU and memory usage). Even better, wait until your computer is "slow" and then do it.

[WirelessMike]

My first guess would have been graphics drivers, too. X is really picky that way. I understand your frustration. I've felt it many times with this or that application, and MANY times with Windows. Drivers, however, can change everything (as well as bios updates-- especially on amd socket mobos).

Perhaps if you install xfce and allow it to assign drivers automatically. See if it's much faster. Xfce is lighter, anyways, but coupled with new driver assignment... Well, who knows? It may change the whole thing. If it does, you can narrow the problems down to X, which might, indeed, be solved with a fresh breezy install after final release. As strange as it may sound, it's possible even kde, if installed from scratch, may provide a faster x. Have you tried a live cd?

Oh well... I'm just feelin' your pain a little, I suppose. I know what it's like to build a machine based on the fastest benchmarks, only to have software and drivers leave you wondering what the heck you spent all that money on. I wish you luck and I hope some suggestion (not necessarily any of mine, just any) may leave you with a more pleasant experience, even if it leads to another distro.

[pmj]

If anyone says that it's not normal that Ubuntu is sluggish, you probably don't have much to compare it to, or you're here arguing only because someone dared to say that Windows is faster.

Something people have talked a lot about on this forum is that Metacity is slow and Nautilus is horribly slow. And that is exactly my experience. It makes the whole desktop slow compared to Windows. Sure, you can get a massive improvement in responsiveness if you ditch Metacity and Nautilus and use something else instead. However, doing that is a lot of work (especially for a newbie) and when you're done it's not standard Ubuntu anymore.

[krusbjorn]

If anyone says that it's not normal that Ubuntu is sluggish, you probably don't have much to compare it to, or you're here arguing only because someone dared to say that Windows is faster.

Something people have talked a lot about on this forum is that Metacity is slow and Nautilus is horribly slow. And that is exactly my experience. It makes the whole desktop slow compared to Windows. Sure, you can get a massive improvement in responsiveness if you ditch Metacity and Nautilus and use something else instead. However, doing that is a lot of work (especially for a newbie) and when you're done it's not standard Ubuntu anymore.

The behavior he described, for example when using totem or when resizing windows, are not normal in Ubuntu, if things are working as they do for the vast majority of us.

[noelferg]

So is it worth trying a breezy install before I depart? Should I install from scratch? Or just upgrade? I have one box running a clean install of Breezy - very fast, none of the problems you have had. On another machine I did a dist-upgrade & it has taken a lot of time to get things right again (X not working, auto login not working, poor page rendering in Firefox, slowness, mouse problems). When Breezy final is out I will do a clean install on this one. A clean install from scratch is the way to go.

[brentroos]

*

[pmj]

The behavior he described, for example when using totem or when resizing windows, are not normal in Ubuntu, if things are working as they do for the vast majority of us.
And if people had said that "Totem shouldn't be that way" instead of "You're wrong, Ubuntu is much faster than Windows" I wouldn't have said anything. But people DID say that Ubuntu is faster than Windows, without specifying in which way, and I disagree. So I argued back.

And if you're interested, seeking in Totem works fine for me. Resizing windows however is slow, and moving around windows leaves nasty trails of which I can easily fill the whole screen with just by quickly moving the window around. I know, this can be fixed with the reduced_resources key. Reason I don't use that is because I can't stand looking at the ugly, flickering grid that shows the new window position.

[poofyhairguy]

Personally, things get a lot faster when I have the official drivers for my video card installed.

[jdong]

As others have already said, most of us here are unable to relate to your stories of Ubuntu being slow. For me, personally, Ubuntu is significantly faster than Windows, especially when doing large amounts of multitasking. I can't get any trails to show up while resizing or video lag, or that kind of slowness, not even on my 600MHz P3 w/ 256MB RAM and 4MB integrated Neomagic video.

However, crappy video cards and crappy drivers (misconfigured or otherwise) are typically responsible for extreme GUI lags, which though rare, still happen today. If you'd like to investigate on the slowness some more, please provide us with more information about your hardware.

[vayu]

I can relate to the frustrations. I spent two weeks learning and tweaking Ubuntu for my computer. I stayed up till 2am every morning until I was almost disfunctional during my normal daytime activities. I got it to where it was working really well and I was digging it. Then that computer crashed, and I have been trying for another two weeks to get it to even run on my other computer. I have installed Hoary at least 8 times and Breezy about 4. Everytime, same procedures, different problems. I have at times been ready to throw the computer out the window. I just miraculously got Hoary working, only I can't tell you why it finally took (still no Breezy).

I'm not trying to ditch windows because I think Linux is better. For me Win XP is fast, powerful has tons of software and support. Everything about it is polished, the way menus work, keyboard commands. I rarely have a piece of hardware no matter how obscure, that I can't get working with it. Why shouldn't it be. It enjoys over 80% of the desktop computer user population's efforts. Everytime I see someone say windows is slow or spyware and viruses are a problem I think, that's far from true for me.

I wan't to become completely free from windows because of the problem of corporate dominance and money orientation in our society. The state of where we are at right now is as sick as anything Hitler has ever dreamed. We ruthlessly kill as many people and are doing our best to the plant and animal kingdom as well. The average American doesn't even realize how they are entirely corporate pawns. They eat poison food, live in a carcenogenic world and spend their lives surrounded by asphalt, steel and slick advertising. A society based on Open Source principles in all areas is what I want. So I'm going to start with sacrificing that my windows don't resize gracefully, drag and drop and context menus are not as developed and I have to learn a hell of a lot about configuration files before I can things working. It's not that much of a sacrifice. What is there now is impressive. It's got everything the multi-billion dollar Windows world has. It's just a little bit less refined, but it's all there. (and some areas are better)

I'm almost there now that I've got about 3 weeks invested in getting the OS to work. Now I just have to figure out the GIMP, and a way to upload files to a Frontpage extension enabled web server without crashing the extensions :)

I hope I'm not ranting too much. I'm just understanding the frustration some people are experiencing. I'm loving Ubuntu and this community.

...

[xequence]

XP takes FOREVER to change the background for me e.e And I use a stripped down version of it, supposed to be really fast. It was like a 200 MB iso file.

Though XP starts up and shuts down much faster. I mean MUCH faster.

[Qrk]

I found Ubuntu to be horribly slow untill I installed the nvidia driver for my graphics card. I had all of the problems described... including windows that would leave trails across my desktop when moved. When I got the correct driver, it was a night and day difference.

Thats a possibility, I'd try installing it before you do anything drastic, like switch to a different distro or even upgrade to breezy.

[najames]

Sumpin is REAL wrong here if speed is your concern. I have the several computers here at home and have been testing many distros.

PLEASE run the "top" command (no quotes). CNTRL C will get you back to a prompt. It will show you the main processes running and taking the most CPU. Maybe cut and paste the the results here for help. Others here can perhaps help you with it more than I can. If you want to see all the processes running try the "ps -ef" command. Notice the process IDs, If there is something strange/hung you can run the kill process id command to stop them, but be VERY careful if you kill stuff.

I installed both K/Ubuntu 64bit versions and they are certainly faster than WinXP-32bit. I also have Mepis 32bit installed on another AMD64 3000+ box. It is noticebly slower than K/Ubuntu, but very stable and works well, fairly fast. I have settled on Suse10 64bit for this PC, which my wife will use. Suse 10 is maybe a little slower than K/Ubuntu, but is extremely stable AFTER I installed Nvidia divers. The nv driver crashed exactly like it did on k/Ubuntu, but the Nvidia driver was not stable on K/Ubuntu either, hence the switch. If it crashes my wife is not going to want to use it. The only issue I have with Suse 10 RC1 is that the audio isn't working for XMMS, it does work fine for system and included games.

[mstlyevil]

Except for initial boot up, I can see no difference between the speed of Ubuntu and XP. Ubuntu boots up a little slower, but not enough to complain about. As far as how my apps run, there is no difference whatsoever.

[jdong]

I found Ubuntu to be horribly slow untill I installed the nvidia driver for my graphics card. I had all of the problems described... including windows that would leave trails across my desktop when moved. When I got the correct driver, it was a night and day difference.

Thats a possibility, I'd try installing it before you do anything drastic, like switch to a different distro or even upgrade to breezy.


1) NVidia 3D versus nv 2D indeed makes a HUGE performance difference in the graphical environment!

2) There are problems with "nv" and Geforce 6xxx's crashing. Install Nvidia's 3d drivers.

[jdong]

. Everytime I see someone say windows is slow or spyware and viruses are a problem I think, that's far from true for me.

For you is simply the key term. I can somewhat relate to that. At home, I still have two PC's running XP -- they've both remained spyware-free and virus-free, despite not running all that realtime monitoring and scanning crap. The correct choice of software combined with good habits prevents most of the crap from coming through.


However, at school, I help administer 2000+ Windows XP workstations, and I can tell you in this application, Windows XP is a royal pain in the you-know-what. Fresh images last less than a week before bootup time increases 10-fold (sometimes taking 5 minutes to reach a login prompt), popups dominate the system, and slow down P4-2.8 HT w/1GB RAM's to a crawl.

So, XP's performance is really pretty weak in the area.


And UI-wise, open up 10 windows and then try to tell me that GNOME isn't easier to navigate ;). I find doing research papers to be a extremely counterproductive in Windows, since I spend 3/4 of my time fighting with ALT+TAB.

[mstlyevil]

I turn off so many services that I do not use in XP and I use msconfig to disable most of the startup programs. Because of this my XP installation is smoking fast and stays spyware free.

[Stormy Eyes]

In regards to what has made me want to leave ubuntu behind. It's sluggish. When you click on the corner of a window to drag it quite often doesn't pick it up. And then when it does it's jerky to resize.

The fact that Metacity sucks is not Ubuntu's fault. Blame the GNOME people. There are other window managers you can use; even Fluxbox should work better for you (just don't ask me about Flux; I favor Openbox).

By the way, Totem sucks too, but that's also GNOME's fault. Use vlc instead. :)


Firefox is awful. You can't drag up and down a page until the whole page has loaded or it just stops every 3 inches.

sudo apt-get install epiphany-browser epiphany-extensions ought to take care of that.


]When you try and drag things around the desktop it's really sluggish as well.

Like what, icons? You actually have icons on your desktop? How strange...


I am using xinerama for dual screen display.

And you make no mention of what sort of video hardware you're using? Oh well.


Maybe it's just bluefish editor that is so crap.

Invest a little time and learn to use a real Unix editor. There's emacs, but if you want something leaner and meaner than Bruce Lee on crack, use vim. I do, and it's a bat out of Hell. It's already installed, so just use this tutorial (http://newbiedoc.sourceforge.net/text_editing/vim.html).


And what really, really annoys me is that highlighting text is so hit and miss.

Then experiment. You don't have to settle for the defaults. I don't.

[Goober]

Hrm. I found Ubuntu to be about as fast as XP (Of course, I have installed all kinds of needless stuff for Ubunmtu, like Firestarter, ClamAV, Nessuss, etc., etc., etc., which probably slows it down, and I upgraded from Warty, and had a bit of trouble with it, which probably didn't help.)

But I have yet to see Ubuntu be slower then XP. It hasn't crashed, and it doesn't do the XP thing where it randomly slows down. And it multitasks. In fact, if my computer had worse stats, I bet Ubuntu would work much better on it.

Try talking to someone who knows more about Ubuntu for help, or a re-install. It shouldn't be slow . . . unless you are using Breezy . . .

[Ubunted]

I see lots of people reccomending the other kernels... he says he was running Ubuntu on an AMD64, so chances are he used the AMD64 install CD. Now I've never used AMD64, but I would imagine the 386/686/k7 kernels wouldn't even be available for the AMD64 build, right?

Anyway, a swap to the k7 kernel, installing nvidia-glx and sometimes manually entering "nvidia" instead of "nv" into xorg.conf does the trick for me. It may not boot as quickly as XP did but for day-to-day things it's nearly as fast.

[GeneralZod]

Resizing windows however is slow, and moving around windows leaves nasty trails of which I can easily fill the whole screen with just by quickly moving the window around. I know, this can be fixed with the reduced_resources key. Reason I don't use that is because I can't stand looking at the ugly, flickering grid that shows the new window position.

I've had this on every distro I've tried, but never under Windows on lesser hardware. It only really happens if I'm dragging/ resizing over a Firefox/ Thunderbird window, though, so it's probably they who are to blame.

Athlon 2200, 512MB. FX5200 with binary drivers, by the way. I personally always found Windows XP to be faster than any distro + decent window manager(gentoo included). I always use KDE, though, so maybe that's part of the problem.

[digitalmouse]

gammy - i did notice a few bits of sluggishness with ubuntu 5.04 (Gnome), but that disappeared with I switched to kubuntu 5.04 (KDE interface which i am more accustomed to) - go figure. and my box is an AMD 1.3Ghz with 768MB RAM.

and a fresh install with Breezy (in my case the kubuntu version) on a dual-boot laptop showed a marked improvement over Hoary - and certainly as fast, if not faster than the pre-installed Toshiba-centric WinXP Home already there.

a little patience and perseverance will go along way in getting you up to speed i bet.

[poofyhairguy]

By the way, Totem sucks too, but that's also GNOME's fault. Use vlc instead. :)

If someone told me this I would think they were lying, but I see it myself:

Breezy Totem kicks rear.

[Tinuz]

Sometimes it sluggish for me too, but as far as compiling goes, its hella fast*.
Perhaps you have a bottleneck somewhere, i have exactly the same config and very few problems.

*I cant think why it should be faster than windows when it comes to compiling(Both directly use the processor, no overhead is being generated as far as i know)

[nocturn]

I have finally had enough. I have tried to get on with ubuntu for about 5 months now as my sole operating system but oh my dear god it is SLUGGISH!!!

I mean, I am not exagerating at all here. An 800mhz P3 with 384mb ram at work runs windows XP faster than my athlon 64 3500+ with 1gb ram can run ubuntu. It is laughable.


Hello Gammyhand

Most people are not experiencing the slowness you are referencing (I'm running Ubuntu on an Athlon64 with 512 MB ram and it is extremly fast, it even works on my old PII laptop, but using XFCE as window manager).

My best guess would be that it has something to do with your graphic card.

If you post this as a question, I'm sure myself and the community can help you out.

[manicka]

In regards to what has made me want to leave ubuntu behind. It's sluggish. When you click on the corner of a window to drag it quite often doesn't pick it up. And then when it does it's jerky to resize.

Firefox is awful. You can't drag up and down a page until the whole page has loaded or it just stops every 3 inches.

When you try and drag things around the desktop it's really sluggish as well.

I thought it was P2P so I stopped using that and no difference.

I am using xinerama for dual screen display.

Maybe it's just bluefish editor that is so crap.

I just find it's not responsive enough.

And what really, really annoys me is that highlighting text is so hit and miss.

Gammyhand, as others have said, it seems that you aren't using the correct drivers for your video card. I hope you get a chance to sort this out and see how good Ubuntu can really be before u leave it behind.

[nocturn]

I understand where he's coming from. Ubuntu is way slower than XP for me too. I'm hoping Breezy will be better.

It depends on how you view it. The graphical interface is a bit less responsive (but not that much) because the Windows GUI runs with realtime priority.

That said, I have WinXP at work and when Outlook is syncing my mail, everthing freezes up for a second, when I open an app, I can still clikc the GUI, but tasks take ages to finish. My Ubuntu system seems to distribute the resources more evently and syncing my IMAP inbox locally and even filtering SPAM does not slow it down.

What I also have to admit is that Hoary is slower then Warty, I really noticed this on my old laptop (PII), I do not know the reason for this and I hope Breezy is faster again.

[jnoreiko]

And bluefish html editor. I nearly cried. It actually takes over a second to register a tab. a TAB! My dear god!

Weird.
I found Warty faster than Windows 2000 on my old 800Mhz machine, and now Hoary boots faster and feels more responsive on my Athlon.

Bluefish makes me cry for other reasons... its interface is awful.

[Ampersand]

I see lots of people reccomending the other kernels... he says he was running Ubuntu on an AMD64, so chances are he used the AMD64 install CD. Now I've never used AMD64, but I would imagine the 386/686/k7 kernels wouldn't even be available for the AMD64 build, right?

Anyway, a swap to the k7 kernel, installing nvidia-glx and sometimes manually entering "nvidia" instead of "nv" into xorg.conf does the trick for me. It may not boot as quickly as XP did but for day-to-day things it's nearly as fast.

There's k8 and xeon kernels available in the AMD64 version. I recently moved from generic to k8 and noticed programs opening slightly faster.

[Mandor]

Hi, I just installed Unintu (Breezy) on my home machine and I can say that it is really slower on starting apps, but after that it's quite responsive. My mashine is Athlon 1.8+, 512 RAM and I use the default kernel and drivers - I haven't installed anything else than the updates.

Besides, my installation is supposed to be overloaded, because I first installed Kubuntu but completely didn't like it (don't want to insult the Kubuntu team, but it can't compare to the SUSE's KDE) and after that installed gnome-desktop. Everything works fine and I haven't had any crashes. The Gnome desktop is really nice even not customized. I don't have much free time now and I suppose I will wait for the final realease and then make a fresh install and customize kernel for AMD and Nvidia driver. Anyway I'm pretty happy with Ubuntu even now.

Finally, about slowliness in some moments - it's a tradeoff, and a favorable one IMO.

[bob_c_b]

Sorry you are having issues, I find Ubuntu to be faster than XP by a decent margin and overall performance very good (Celeron D 3.06, FX5200, 1GB RAM). I used to run Mandrake/driva on an Duron 1800 w/GeForce4 Ti4200 w/512MB RAM and it was also pretty snappy. As others have mentioned, this is not typical of any Linux distro, sounds like an app with a poor compile or some driver incompatability.

I'm extremely demanding of interface performance and I find Ubunutu to be quite snappy, but I have read several times of people with themes that caused a lot of lag and high CPU usage? Maybe you should switch to simple theme and see if you can rule that out?

[thorhr]

I installed Breezy on this laptop - IBM 700 mhz P3 384 MB ram -it runs faster with this OS than with anything else that I have had installed.It had windows 2000 when I bought it what a slow os.Then I tried most of the main Linux operating systems the only one that came close to Breezy was Linspire.I will never use Microsoft again because I am not going to help Gates rule the world.

[Astrophobos]

I use ubuntu since october 2004 and I must admit that it fell slow for me too.

Like Gammy I use a dual display with xinerama. I have a amd athlon 3500+, 1Gb of ram and a nvidia geforce 6800. I use the default nvidia proprietary driver from the ubuntu repo.

I also try special feature twinview from nvidia and it was the same thing.

I don't want to leave ubuntu because of that, it don't annoyed so much. Before using ubuntu I was on fedora and it's was slower with twinview. I also try windows xp with dual display and it's true for me that it's was quicker then any distro I try. I'm pretty sure the problem is not ubuntu, fedora or any other distro but it's certainly related with nvidia linux module vs windows driver on dual display.

Trying single display certainly help show how ubuntu is quick.

[dguitar]

Personally, I don't understand why like every post has something about it booting slow. Who cares if the system can stay up indefinetly?

I have 2 Ubuntu pcs sitting at home. 1 Breezy and the other Hoary(development webserver), also have a FC3(Production webserver) and other pc's with other distros. My FC3 box has an up time of almost 5 months, and my Hoary machine had a few months until yesterday, when I crashed it, but that was SQL's fault, hence why development servers are around.

For me, I put every pc I have to the test and the xp pc I have needs to be rebooted all the time. So if I'm rebooting a PC every few hours or every day, it better load up fast. If I'm booting up a pc every few months or even weeks, what do I care if it takes more than a few mins?

[GeneralZod]

Personally, I don't understand why like every post has something about it booting slow. Who cares if the system can stay up indefinetly?


"Laptops".

[tseliot]

I have finally had enough. I have tried to get on with ubuntu for about 5 months now as my sole operating system but oh my dear god it is SLUGGISH!!!

I mean, I am not exagerating at all here. An 800mhz P3 with 384mb ram at work runs windows XP faster than my athlon 64 3500+ with 1gb ram can run ubuntu. It is laughable.

The interface is constantly playing catch up, mouse clicking is terrible. Really appalling. You know what I mean...you are in totem for example and you want to click and drag to a new part of the film. It usually takes several clicks to actually get the thing to move like you want rather than just jumping.

And bluefish html editor. I nearly cried. It actually takes over a second to register a tab. a TAB! My dear god!

How people use this OS on a daily basis continuously will baffle me until the grave.

I really tried to get on with Ubuntu but I am going to buy a new copy of windows and be happy that I won't want to smash my keyboard through my screen on a daily basis.
Can you check this thing for me?

Open System Monitor and check the cpu usage (when you haven't any application running). If the percentage is high (40-50% or above) then your computer might be slowed down by the (annoying) DOUBLE CLOCK SPEED BUG.

Here is my guide to solve the problem:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=53094

[gammyhand]

Thanks for all the advice. I will go through it when I get home from work.

[dguitar]

"Laptops".

Ah, didn't even think about that. My laptop stays on all the time. lol

[mrtaber]

"Laptops".

Is this because hibernate isn't working? I'm thinking about springing for a Linux laptop (I have a 17" PowerBook, and I never reboot that thing...). More toys, more toys! :)

Mark

[GeneralZod]

Is this because hibernate isn't working? I'm thinking about springing for a Linux laptop (I have a 17" PowerBook, and I never reboot that thing...). More toys, more toys! :)

Mark

I gather it's quite hit and miss; mine mostly works except that upon resume, a sound is played back continuously, which is rather annoying :) I'm guessing this can be fixed with some suspend-and-resume-scripts-hackery, but I don't really know how to go about it.

It any case, it creates a bad impression (as evidenced by the comments in this thread!) and is fixable with some work - check out the "initng" project!

[Perfect Storm]

Thanks for all the advice. I will go through it when I get home from work.

Great that you havn't given up! ^^

[poofyhairguy]

I use ubuntu since october 2004 and I must admit that it fell slow for me too.

Like Gammy I use a dual display with xinerama. I have a amd athlon 3500+, 1Gb of ram and a nvidia geforce 6800. I use the default nvidia proprietary driver from the ubuntu repo.

I also try special feature twinview from nvidia and it was the same thing.

I don't want to leave ubuntu because of that, it don't annoyed so much. Before using ubuntu I was on fedora and it's was slower with twinview. I also try windows xp with dual display and it's true for me that it's was quicker then any distro I try. I'm pretty sure the problem is not ubuntu, fedora or any other distro but it's certainly related with nvidia linux module vs windows driver on dual display.

Thats why I use xcompmgr most of the time with my Nvidia dual display.

[wrtpeeps]

ubuntu is like 10 times faster than windows for me. I have a 900mhz duron and it runs ubuntu great. I can't reproduce your mouse click problems, maybe it's your mouse?

[DancingSun]

Before you ditch Ubuntu, try this how-to:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=53094

It sounds like this might be the problem you're having.

Edit:
Just saw tseliot's post urging you to try out his how-to. In anycase, do try it out first!

[tray02]

poor soul, you have gone to the dark side

[rejser]

To see all that are recomending installing xfce and other lighter software are a little funny. With that hardware he shouldn't have to, there is the problem.
Hope he tried the double clock thing posted above.

[Paulus]

Thats why I use xcompmgr most of the time with my Nvidia dual display.

is that the xcompmgr -n command u use?

is that supposed to speed up gui drawing?

[poofyhairguy]

is that the xcompmgr -n command u use?

is that supposed to speed up gui drawing?


That xcompmgr -n command will speed up things, but its not what I use. I use

xcompmgr -fF

that both speeds up things and gives me a Vista style fading effect (with some crashing).

[Ibuntu_52]

when I first tried ubuntu I found it to be slower than windows xp.

Then I installed fluxbox.The windows and menus popped up ridiculously quick.

Then I swapped out gnomes metacity with openbox, imo not quite as fast as xp but darn close and that was close enough for me.

I also ditched firefox in favor of epiphany.To me it seems quicker than opera after a little about:config magic.:D

[christooss]

You should try New firefox. 1.5 beta. yes its beta but its fast like hell.

[darkmatter]

You should try New firefox. 1.5 beta.

Or 1.6 alpha 1. (NOTE: alpha - you have been warned)

[BoyOfDestiny]

I have finally had enough. I have tried to get on with ubuntu for about 5 months now as my sole operating system but oh my dear god it is SLUGGISH!!!
I mean, I am not exagerating at all here. An 800mhz P3 with 384mb ram at work runs windows XP faster than my athlon 64 3500+ with 1gb ram can run ubuntu. It is laughable.
The interface is constantly playing catch up, mouse clicking is terrible. Really appalling. You know what I mean...you are in totem for example and you want to click and drag to a new part of the film. It usually takes several clicks to actually get the thing to move like you want rather than just jumping.
And bluefish html editor. I nearly cried. It actually takes over a second to register a tab. a TAB! My dear god!
How people use this OS on a daily basis continuously will baffle me until the grave.
I really tried to get on with Ubuntu but I am going to buy a new copy of windows and be happy that I won't want to smash my keyboard through my screen on a daily basis.
Give it time, you'll be back. Enjoy your "new" copy of windows (although, I guess if you count the service packs it's new)

[christooss]

Or 1.6 alpha 1. (NOTE: alpha - you have been warned)

Yes thats why I suggest beta :P

[brentroos]

*

[Muhammad]

Easy, Get yourself a new Mouse!