Why has Ubuntu become so "heavy?"

[Randymanme]

First off let me admit that I'm using a ten year old Dell Dimension 8300 -- kind of shabby on resources, I know.

But it seems like ever since Lucid Lynx was released, Ubuntu has gotten progressively more resource hungry. Natty and Oneiric just come right and tell me that I don't have the hardware to run Unity. I have a fresh install of Oneiric that just struggles along.

But here I sit on Ubuntu Forums via Mint 12 RC on Virtualbox 4.1.6 hosted with Mint 11 ME -- and they are both running close to as well as I've ever seen an os run on this machine (with the exception of Lucid Puppy, of course) while equally sharing 1 GB of ram.

What is it that Mint's devs to Ubuntu do that results in its Gnome being so much lighter than Ubuntu's? Or Super OS? With the latter, one can add a Super OS package to an already running Ubuntu and give it muscle! Why doesn't Ubuntu just do what the Super OS devs do? Maybe it's a matter of Canonical being polite and not stepping on its derivatives' toes.

So why bother with Ubuntu at all? Super OS and Ultimate Edition are still Ubuntu configured elsewhere. Mint has improved on Ubuntu and contributed enough of its own innovations to be considered more than just Ubuntu. In my mind, Ubuntu is like a beautiful woman without make-up, designer clothing, manicure, or trip to the hairdresser. Sort of like Alec Wec standing at a London bus stop just before she was "discovered."

I've just downloaded a version of Oneiric for virtual machines, so I guess it'll behoove me to delete the one I have written to physical disk and use that space to expand my Linux /home partition.

[inobe]

to be honest, in a non sarcastic way, i've become heavier after my thirties, if that means anything.

[wolfen69]

Why has windows and osx become heavier? Because they can. Windows and Mac users aren't going to complain if they need to spend more time maintaining their OS. It's typical.

[Copper Bezel]

So why bother with Ubuntu at all? Super OS and Ultimate Edition are still Ubuntu configured elsewhere. Mint has improved on Ubuntu and contributed enough of its own innovations to be considered more than just Ubuntu. In my mind, Ubuntu is like a beautiful woman without make-up, designer clothing, manicure, or trip to the hairdresser. Sort of like Alec Wec standing at a London bus stop just before she was "discovered."

Well, you're right at least in the sense that the differences in Mint are cosmetic. = ) I don't know what could cause the difference you're describing, though. Mint 11 is Natty.

[shuttleworthwannabe]

Another example of much slicker Ubuntu is PinguyOS--I have been using it on a USB as Live install, and it puts Ubuntu 11.10 (also on USB) to shame--booting is faster, apps load faster, shutdown is faster as well--and note, Pinguy 11.10 alpha comes with all the bells and whistles

[FuturePilot]

Try running Windows 7 on that machine. It will be just as "heavy" as Ubuntu if you could even install it at all. It's not just Ubuntu, it's called software evolution.

[nothingspecial]

Moved to Recurring Discussions.

[Randymanme]

Thank you for the responses. I've heard of PinguyOS -- I'd seen something to the effect that there was a distro based on Ubuntu and Mint. I'll download an iso for virtualbox next.

I didn't know how good I was having Oneiric until I began installing it on virtualbox. First off, it took well over an hour. And then after restarting, Oneiric creeped along at a snail's pace, as though it were swapping. The Oneiric I have on physical disk -- I didn't have a blank cd or dvd so I installed Maverick and upgraded until I got to Oneiric. So I had a lot of packages on an otherwise fresh Oneiric that the fresh iso of Oneiric doesn't have, like, for example, gnome classic and synaptic package manager.

The Oneiric on virtualbox only had two session options: Ubuntu and Ubuntu 2D -- neither of which I have the hardware to run apparently -- even on Virtualbox. I've read in the Virtualbox help that Virtualbox doesn't need hardware virtualization and that it can present up to 32 processors. This machine does have hardware virtualization, but I don't know (yet) how to make it virtualize a quad core processor. I bet that would help.

I couldn't get the Oneiric on vbox to invoke synaptic package manager to save my life -- and each attempt took around 10 mintues. When I typed in "package manager," it opened Ubuntu Software Center. It was there that I discovered that synaptic wasn't even installed! It took Ubuntu Software Center 12 to 13 minutes to install synaptic! So far, synaptic is the only part of this Oneiric to move fairly quick. I'm installing, among other things, gnome session, gnome fallback, openbox, and gnome 2.24 suite. Hopefully things will get faster.

Needless to say, I'm posting this with the Mint 11 host which is running just fine on 512 MBs of ram. Oneiric's release notes claim it'll perform adequately on 384 MBs of ram, although it'll take "longer than normal" to install. I doubt that to be taken literally.

I do have Windows 7 Ultimate on sda -- I rarely use it, only in "must have" situations. I plan on using a VMware tool I've read about to turn it into a virtual appliance and then run it in a virtual machine. If Oneiric ran as well as Windows 7, I'd have no complaint.

[Copper Bezel]

The Oneiric on virtualbox only had two session options: Ubuntu and Ubuntu 2D -- neither of which I have the hardware to run apparently -- even on Virtualbox. I've read in the Virtualbox help that Virtualbox doesn't need hardware virtualization and that it can present up to 32 processors. This machine does have hardware virtualization, but I don't know (yet) how to make it virtualize a quad core processor. I bet that would help.

Virtualbox doesn't support hardware-accelerated video for Linux guests. You're stuck using Unity 2D and Gnome Fallback that way.

I'm shocked by how painfully slow the Software Center is every time I launch it. I assume it's a temporary problem, since it wasn't the case in Natty. Still, it's a bear. I really wanted to see how long I would last using it rather than falling back to Synaptic, gdebi, and apt-get on my 11.10 install, but since the issue with Google Chrome being read as a broken package and rejected by the Software Center still hasn't been fixed, that was five minutes, most of which was waiting for it to load. = ) (I don't really care whether the problem is on Google's end. It's not acceptable for that problem to persist over two releases without Ubuntu doing something about it.)

[jjex22]

When wasn't it? it's one of the main full desktop linux. Ive been using since 9.10 (okay the last 2 weeks of 9.10 - that's when I learned about 6 month cycles!) it's the beauty of Linux - we have distro's aimed at all purposes and the large full desktop editions should aim to be the cutting edge of what linux can do... or what's the point?

The great thing we have with linux is that you can change your desktop environment to give your computer some breathing room in ram and graphics. On old or limited hardware we have xubuntu, lubuntu etc, or all kind of ubuntu based resource light distros at distrowatch... you can even select 2D mode in the current release (my choice when on my netbook) The spectrum of hardware you can run ubuntu on is massive especially compared to mac and windows to which it is compared (as I have learned the hard way mac just cut support for your hardware off after a few years - always a risk when your os is made by the same company as your hardware.)

Also it's based on debian which boasts 29000 packages as soon as you get to their site (aparently they lost over 1000 over the summer... careless)It is getting harder to run full blown ubuntu on my older/limited hardware, but I expect this to happen, my emac can't run snow leopard, my old mac can't run tiger, and that grey win 98 box in the loft will not run windows 7!

But they will all run a currently available linux