At least for my laptop that I dual boot from Ubuntu to Vista. Under Firefox I can open almost unlimited browser windows/tabs and still get good peformance in Vista, whereas in Ubuntu, opening more than a dozen or so, slows the system to a crawl. Vista is also more snappy overall, Ubuntu often hesitates for a second or two to do ordinary things like opening a new browser window. The delay gets progressively longer the more url’s are open in the browser. Eventually it is like molasses.
Perhaps I have something configured wrong, but I did a standard install, and I thought the whole concept of Ubuntu was to make linux as easy if not better for the average user than Windows, so I really shouldn’t need to tweak that much, right?
This is probably Firefox’s fault. It’s been a long time since Firefox was actually small and fast, and I’m guessing that currently Firefox on windows gets more attention.
If you want a faster browser, try dillo, or konqueror, or opera.
Also, some combinations of driver / kernel configurations can slow “normal” responsiveness down to a crawl during heavy disk I/O.
That could certainly be a difference between the Windows version of Firefox and the Linux one. But I too have found like-for-like speed and responsiveness comparisons to favour Windows, and I am mystified by the oft-heard recommendation that “Ubuntu (or Linux distro of your choice) runs faster than Windows”. I have tried, let me make an honest estimate, a dozen installations of Linux, on four or five PCs. Every time I have been struck by how sluggish Linux feels compared to Windows. Screen redrawing (the speed at which menus and dialogs appear) is noticeably slower. Fonts look terrible, subpixel rendering is just plain inferior. Firefox and Open Office take an eternity to load. (Although OO has improved lately - there’s an interview out there somewhere with the guy who was responsible for the speed-up. It does not give you great faith in the Open Office development environment. It sounds like they are merely now doing something right that the more professional outfits had been doing all along.)
I am not really up to speed on the latest claims about Linux but I always thought that the claim about its performance on modest hardware were about the core OS and not the GUIs everyone uses.
For instance, I don`t really care about using linux as a desktop OS but my company installs an admittedly stripped down version on linux on wireless access points with 400 mhz of processing power and 4 megabytes of space. People install linux on microwave ovens and into wrist watches.
I could be completely off base but I always understood applications like these were what people referred to, not that the OS with some GUI installed and a bunch of applications were themselves incredibly efficient and capable of running on modest hardware.
Well, I think people do mean that Linux + some Desktop Environment + the usual array of apps is faster than desktop Windows on the same PC. But it doesn’t really matter what DE you use, because even with something like Xfce you still need to install key components of the heavyweight GUI environments such as Gnome and KDE in order to run useful apps. And those things are slow.
Linux GUIs are all based on a system called X, which essentially pretends that the monitor is attached via the internet and in result slows things down to butt. (And is probably why GNU Hurd has never taken off.)
On top of X are Gnome and KDE for the actual desktop. Gnome, in all of my experience, is buggy, poorly coded, and slow. I don’t know about the bugginess of KDE but in my brief experience it’s impressively slow as well. I’m not sure why this is so, though I suspect that it’s due to a combination of people trying to use “clever” designs like the server-client system and because probably most of it was coded by people who weren’t very good programmers.
If you want decent performance in desktop mode on Linux, use XFCE. This still imposes the speed limits of X, but it is at least significantly faster than Gnome and KDE. Ubuntu with XFCE is called Xubuntu, I think.
I had the same experience. I installed the ostensibly most user friendly version of linux and:
couldn’t play mp3s
couldn’t play videos
my 2 22 in widescreen LCDs had only one working in 800x600 resolution
Did some googling and was told to edit xorg.conf file, etc. etc. and figured I actually wanted to get stuff done on my computer rather than fixing things that already worked in Windows so I switched back.
Linux’s low hardware requirements does not mean you get a slow GUI desktop metaphor, even if you’re using X windows - see again, dillo.
The lack of MP3, video etc encoding or playback isn’t due to any technical problems, it’s purely legal. Download mplayer and you can play pretty much anything - much more than any windows media player - but if you live in the US, it’s probably not legal to do so.
Don’t use GNOME or KDE. Use a tiling window manager or something lightweight like Fluxbox.
if you’ve got an nVidia graphics card, get the non-free drivers from nVidia, don’t use the ones that come pre-installed. I believe the same goes for ATI but I don’t have an ATI card so I’m not sure.
Open up your xorg.conf file and make sure you’ve got dri enabled.
I just opened up 50+ tabs in Firefox (random wikipedia links) with no noticeable slowdown.
You may be experiencing an issue with firefox that is related to the compile time optimization (the distributions of firefox were optimized for running on Windows). This is a really old issue but you still might be experiencing it.
While Linux is faster, Ubuntu IME is not, I’ve tried Ubuntu several times over the past year and have been disappointed with it. It still requires me to build a custom kernel before I am even remotely satisfied with the performance.
Im a huge linux fan, I have several linux boxes that perform a variety of tasks but until there is a usable GUI and enough proprietary software (esp games and newish device drivers), I will always have at least one windows box.
well, I have never used Vista so I can’t comment on that portion. but I certainly have never experienced any of the problems you describe with Ubuntu. Sounds like drivers to me-but I am not an expert. The big problem with Linux is that you have to be prepared to investigate on your own. You need to know what hardware you have and then make sure you have the proper drivers (if they even exist) for that hardware. Given that, I find Ubuntu to be quite acceptable in speed.
Anecdote:
Dell Inspiron 8000 laptop, circa 2001. Had XP Home on it, clean install/complete wipe of Dell installations with a retail XP disc. Ran horridly slow. I had it in the parlor behind a partition to serve music off the file server, stream Pandora, and the occasional YouTube clip. Awfully, awfully slow.
I had Knoppix on it for a short spell, now Ubuntu. Speed is back to where it was when the Laptop was new and had Windows 98 on it (save the crashing). YMMV.