Will Xubuntu 14.04 LTS get faster and lower on system ressources?

[Tar_Ni]

Hi,

I have a question for those who have insights on the topic.

I use Xubuntu on a older desktop (1GB RAM 1,8 GHZ proc) and have much more reasonable performance than Ubuntu. I've tried Lubuntu but have encountered all kind of problem so I went to Xubuntu which works just fine.

My question is: Will the next release of Xubuntu (14.04 LTS) set for April 2014 be faster on lower on system ressources?

My humble opinion as a user is that it could yet be lighter while remaining user friendly.

Have you any idea?

[Frogs Hair]

​Moved to Ubuntu Linux and OS Chat

[Elfy]

From the Strategy Document

The Xubuntu team should strive to make Xubuntu lightweight. This means every Xubuntu release should work moderately well on machines that date to a few years before the release date. This ultimately means that newer Xubuntu releases may not able to support older computers.

So - we don't specifically go out of our way to make it work on lower spec machines.

If it does - that's great.

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Xubuntu/StrategyDocument

[grahammechanical]

What do people mean when they say lighter? If an OS is taking up more space on the hard drive than we have room for we can easily remove applications that we do not use, such as games.

I have found a 15 -20% drop in memory usage from Ubuntu 12.04 to Ubuntu 13.10. This has come about through the work being done on Ubuntu Touch (for phones and tablets). Work is also being done to make it possible to automatically switch off system services that are not being used and only have them re-activate when they need to be used. This will lower both memory and CPU resource usage. These benefits will filter into the Ubuntu desktop code as part of the convergence goal and from Ubuntu on to the flavours of Ubuntu.

I will say that most likely Xubuntu 14.04 will use less memory and be faster. If you have space on your hard drive for another 20 - 25 GB partition why not dual boot Xubuntu Trusty Tahr (14,04) and see how it develops?

Regards.

[mips]

You could always roll your own using the minimal iso image....

[lykwydchykyn]

I don't think I've ever seen a distro that actually gets "lighter" over time. There may be a release here and there with really bad performance bugs that get fixed in a subsequent release, but overall the vector is to continue adding improvements that incrementally increase the resource usage of the system. XFCE is fairly mature at this point, though, and I wouldn't anticipate a lot of speed improvements at this point.

[Allavona]

OS and components systems are fast outpacing aging computers these days. The only thing you can do is test the new releases for performance as was mentioned with a small install partition. Even if Xubuntu doesn't run for you as you like, there are distros that are being made especially for low spec computers.

[f-francesco]

I've upgraded from Xubuntu 12.04 to Xubuntu 14.04 on my netbook (Asus eeePC, sorry I don't remember the exact model). 14.04 takes longer to boot and is less reactive than 12.04. I think that I'll roll back in the end. That's a pity because the improvements are interesting. But the machine must be usable, first of all.

[slooksterpsv]

The goal of some of these others derivatives is to stay light or make themselves lighter, while providing newer more security applications and systems (including kernels). It is possible that Xubuntu becomes lighter with newer technologies being implemented, but it is possible the usages go up due to the complexity being added for more features.

I have 8GB of RAM running Xubuntu and my memory usage is the following:
1.62GB used. Why? Well Chrome is eating up a bit. About 1GB with 4 tabs, so overall 600MB give or take.

You'll just have to wait and see.