Why Ubuntu is a bit slower?

I am using Ubuntu as my main OS on my Toshiba Satellite M laptop. It is 1.7 Centrino with 1.5 Giga of ram and built-in graphics.

I have tried PCLOS Gnome edition and Fedora 14 live CDs on this laptop and the thing that bugs me is that PCLOS and Fedora run much faster than Ubuntu( all having same settings- means no fancy effects etc). The launch of applications is a bit slow in Ubuntu as compared to PCLOS and Fedora. I know it might not be a big deal but I really wish Ubuntu developers to improve Ubuntu in this regard.

Again it,s my personal experience on my laptop. Not sure if others noticed this or not.

 

Hi Aigle

You are right, when I was using Ubuntu two weeks ago I noticed the slowdown. Then I changed to LinuxMint 10 RC and evrything was normal again i.e. speed and ease of use; besides a few bugs that the Mint developers will sure iron out, Mint has been pretty stable and fast.

I've been pretty busy lately; however, I could do some digging in the Ubuntu forums and find out why.

Thanks.

 

I read in your signature that you do not use any security software while using Ubuntu. Nonetheless, I would like to advise you to turn on the firewall that Ubuntu come pre-install with. By default it is off.

Thanks.

 

Ok, Thanks

 

aigle, the post from cogito-testing made me notice your animosity over the lack of security features for linux/Ubuntu.
Have you looked at AppArmor? link

 

Since I haven't used Ubuntu since Dapper that was on an old P4 machine I had, I can't tell if it is faster or slower. However it is a little faster than Win7 that was installed on this laptop. Only glitch I have noticed is sometimes it doesn't respond when I am tapping the touchpad.

I thought that the firewall was on in Ubuntu. I will have to remedy that.

 

Hi,

Fedora has a much smaller memory footprint.

Second, you can check how many modules you have loaded in ram.

Third, you may want to monitor your disk i/o throughput (with atop, sar, iostat, dstat or any similar tool), to see whether there's a difference in the two in terms of disk activity. Are you using the same filesystem, same partition size, position, same swap? Is this the very same machine or different platforms?

Mrk

 

Machine is exactly same. Other things might vary a bit but as I said, in all cases Ubuntu seems a bit slower.

 

The last time I tried it, I guess it's all thanks to the GNOME desktop environment in the default Ubuntu for making it feel "slow" on some machines. Try another one like XFCE (Xubuntu) or LXDE (Lubuntu) for a variant/fork of Ubuntu that feels slightly 'lightweight-er' in comparison.

P.S. I'm not a Linux expert/user by all means....just a passer-by having taken short looks and read-ups about it. Best place to head out to is on Wiki for detailed history explanation....all sorts of info there

 

Does "really wish" mean Ubu's your choice regardless the response issue? What's the draw .. why stay with it?

 

yes. Many reasons. Easiest. More software. More hardware support i guess. Most active development.

 

Why is it easier than PCLinuxOS ? (its not) What hardware does it support that PCLinuxOS doesn't ? ( how much HW support do you need for that Toshiba ) What software do you use that PCLinuxOS doesn't have ?

IMHO you should get one of the mini versions of PCLinuxOS, add the things you need and be on your zippy fast way

My IBM T41 (same spec's as your Toshiba) runs every distro thats non-KDE fast, the old video card can't keep up with KDE's eye candy......

 

I tried PCLOS but i don,t like the look n feel. Not so professional like Ubuntu 10.10 IMO. Just a personal preference. As far hardware support is concerned, I was not referring to just my laptop. I run ubuntu live every now and then on so many PCs, laptops and netbooks, just for fun and install for some friends too.

Infact I did not make the thread to ask for an alternative. I absolutely like Ubuntu so far. Even the slowness I feel is tolerable. I only wonder why Gnome is slow in Ubuntu while it,s faster in PCLOS and Fedora etc. Moreover i wish they could fix this issue. That,s why I posted in Ubuntu forums too.

 

Hi aigle,

I'm finding Meerkat a little more sluggish in the vm than Lucid was. Even a bit of a stability issue ("glassed over" context menus after installing Cairo dock, which continued after completely removing it. It's also installed on the host system, dual boot with Windows, but I haven't played too much with that one yet. Still, all-in-all, this release of Ubuntu seems a little "off" to me as comapred to Lucid.

 

To me Meerkat appears same as Lucid esp speedwise.

 

I take Gnome's preferred? Any optimizations (e.g., swappiness)? Which <lspci | grep -i vga> graphics card have you got there Aigle?

 

I'm running Lucid on a cheap hp laptop and it seems very spritely Actually, I don't spend too much time on Linux, only using it from time to time, and trying different distros on occasion, lately Fedora, and Arch, the latter of which is not going well during the install in vmware (for some reason the /etc/rc.conf config changes completely after re-booting to proceed with adding a user, then adding Sudo, neither of which is possible for me. I can't even install Alsamixer ) as compared to past January. Anyway, I digress. Maybe I need to run Meerkat a bit more on the desktop host to get a better idea of any differences speed-wise between it and Lucid. It's just hard for me to concentrate for long on any one distro

 

I have a desktop machine with XP, a laptop with Vista and my main workstation with Win7 Pro 64bit and Ubuntu 10.10, and booting into Ubuntu is like getting a breath of fresh air. Now I use Ubuntu on my main desktop for everything except music and multimedia production. It may be slower than the other distros, but it is much faster than any recent version of Windows.

 

I

like Gnome. It,s a basic laptop with builtin graphics from Intel. Will check its specifications.