13.04 should be dedicated to performance.

[Mikeb85]

While Ubuntu performance isn't on par with SUSE, Fedora, Arch, or Debian, it's still better than Windows... The Valve developers even admitted such.

Ubuntu isn't slow, it's just slow compared to other Linux.

That being said, Ubuntu 12.04 with 3.5 kernel, Brtfs filesystem is pretty quick, a whole lot quicker than Windows...

[SeijiSensei]

For those of us who don't play games, what exactly is the performance issue? I'm running Kubuntu 12.04, and I don't see what the fuss is about. I don't really care about desktop eye candy; I hardly ever look at my desktop. Right now I have a full-screen Firefox window open. Even when I have multiple desktop Windows, moving among them, copying/pasting, etc., doesn't feel slow.

I have Kubuntu 12.04 running on three different machines. This one has a Q6600 and an NVIDIA 9500GT. Another is a 6-7 year-old Dell Inspiron 640m laptop with i945 graphics and a dual-core Pentium. The third is a dual-core Atom with an NVIDIA ION for graphics. For CPU-intensive tasks I might prefer the Q6600 machine. Otherwise I see little difference among them in terms of daily tasks like these:

web browsing (Firefox)
email (Thunderbird)
shell sessions (local and remote via SSH)
office applications, primarily spreadsheets and documents (Open/LibreOffice)
audio (Clementine)
video (smplayer)
graphics (GIMP)
statistics (gretl)
VMs (VirtualBox)

What am I missing out on in terms of performance?

From reading postings here over the past couple of years the things I think require the most work are:

suspend/resume
hybrid laptop graphics like Optimus
wifi drivers
installations that don't run afoul of nomodeset
transparent interoperability with phones and iThings
convenient multi-language support
residual audio problems with pulse/Jack
support for various peripherals like webcams, fingerprint readers, etc.
printer installation

Performance doesn't appear anywhere on that list.

[AllRadioisDead]

While Ubuntu performance isn't on par with SUSE, Fedora, Arch, or Debian, it's still better than Windows... The Valve developers even admitted such.

Ubuntu isn't slow, it's just slow compared to other Linux.

That being said, Ubuntu 12.04 with 3.5 kernel, Brtfs filesystem is pretty quick, a whole lot quicker than Windows...

My Windows 8 install boots faster than Ubuntu.

[lykwydchykyn]

But, all of these are just suggestions. Still, they are common gripes that are probably the biggest source of frustration for the average user.

They're important issues, but most of what you listed are kernel issues. Ubuntu does very little work on the kernel, and there are major projects in place to improve driver support for the Linux kernel. It's not something that's going to be significantly impacted by a papercuts project or an Ubuntu development cycle.

I like your #2 idea, but I'm afraid the Ubuntu devs are going the other way and dropping support for alternate install.

For what it's worth, performance *should* improve over the next few releases. It took a hit in moving from GTK2 to GTK3, and with the switch to a composited window manager. Hardware will catch up to this, and FOSS video drivers are always improving. I don't see any similarly taxing changes coming in the near future to set it back again, but who knows?

[effenberg0x0]

It should be dedicated to Ubuntu users in long-term. Current users opinions, bug reports, feature requests should be the focus in 13.04+. They should be taken more effectively than they are now. Current users should be taught on how to contribute to Ubuntu. Recruiting and retaining contributors seems like a priority to me now.

Something like this would make me happy:

- Create open/transparent metrics to classify bugs, ideas and requests in Launchpad according to their relevance / severity. A,B and C. 0 to 10. Red, Yellow, Green. Short-term, mid-term, long-term. High-importance, low-importance, irrelevant. Anything will do as long as it's adopted broadly and communicated openly;

- Publish these metrics and detailed instructions so that community members can volunteer to triage bugs, feature requests and ideas (i.e. Ubuntu Brainstorm), according to the defined metrics; Ex: Allow community members to directly vote on any bugs, ideas, requests on LP to classify them according to the chosen metric. Current users will be directly influencing the future of the OS, expressing their opinions;

- Publish results, so the community (end-users, companies) can understand where Ubuntu is heading to and decide to adopt it, keep it, drop it, support it or not;

- Accept that the results of this metrics/triaging/classification task force would then be the official, public roadmap for Ubuntu in upcoming versions (not only 13.04); Formalize it as an ongoing process to guide Ubuntu development. Refine it;

- Focus on creating resources (material, media, classes, teams, groups, etc) to promote change in the direction users want. Teach current users how to contribute in any aspect of Ubuntu: From doc to code, testing and design. All aspects. Get rid of any barriers that keeps users from contributing to some parts of Ubuntu. Make it sustainable and organically pointed towards the expectations of its current users, therefore adequate to them, maintained by them. Facilitate and increase the flow of information.

Regards,
Effenberg

[effenberg0x0]

As a side note in the issue of performance, this is what I'm interested in right now:

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pag...tem&px=MTA2NjQ
http://clang.debian.net/

It's hard to say how far we really are from it. It all depends on who will eventually join the efforts, fund it, how the technology itself will evolve, etc. But if you look exclusively to charts and benchmarks, we're talking about *huge* speed improvements here, system wide, kernel and userland.

Regards,
Effenberg

[vasa1]

The thing, IMO, different about Ubuntu is that it isn't community-driven. It's largely the vision and aims of MSSABDFL that are being implemented. And I feel there's certainly nothing wrong with such an approach.

My feeling is that MSSABDFL wants to make the best use of modern technology to achieve his aims. Consequently, making things "backwardly" compatible may not be a priority. (How that will affect Ubuntu's share of the marketplace is unclear in the economic situation.)

I don't really subscribe to the "listen to the users" mantra for two reasons. First, MSSABDFL is implementing his vision and it's needless to say that it's quite a bit of his money in there. Second, user opinion is not "monolithic". Look at Mint. That's supposed to keep users' desires in mind. Just how many Minty flavors are there? Why?

I believe that innovation comes from the vision of one or a few people. I very much doubt innovation can occur by consensus or committee.

My vote is for Canonical freely doing what they want. We, equally, have the freedom to use what we want.

[robert shearer]

@ vasa 1

The thing, IMO, different about Ubuntu is that it isn't community-driven. It's largely the vision and aims of MS that are being implemented.

Quick glance and I read that as MS=MicroSoft...! lol.

Then I read it again and realised that they are not community driven either.
That in the early days the vison and aims of BG were being implemented.

....er, going away to think on that some more......

[synaptix]

My Windows 8 install boots faster than Ubuntu.

Windows 8 is way faster than Ubuntu is. The only version of Ubuntu that ever came close to being incredibly fast was 10.04. My boot times on 10.04 were around 11 seconds. As of 12.04, it was over 40 seconds on the same hardware.

I'd say Windows 8 would be comparable to Xubuntu in terms of speed and performance.

Xubuntu = clean, slick, professional, extremely fast.
Windows 8 = clean, slick, professional, extremely fast.

[BigSilly]

For those of us who don't play games, what exactly is the performance issue? I'm running Kubuntu 12.04, and I don't see what the fuss is about.

You'll not see the same issue with Kubuntu and KDE as you perhaps might with Unity. I have run both very recently and they are both fast enough on my system. However KDE has some great options, one in particular tickbox allows you to suspend effects for fullscreen windows, a feature that Unity does not have. The result of this is that video and games tear and slow down when running fullscreen on Unity, where KDE, and even Gnome Shell and Cinnamon do not.

I'm sure I read on Launchpad somewhere though that the developers were aware of the problems and were fixing them.