2009/9/18 J. Lennard <<a href="mailto:lennard90@yahoo.com">lennard90@yahoo.com</a>> <div class="gmail_quote"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"> Hi list, First I'm sorry to write what may appear as a rant, but I hope it is not considered so. I'm writing to express huge instability problems in Ubuntu 9.04. I migrated from ubuntu 8.04 (386) to ubuntu 9.04 (amd64) using a simple clean install. While the installation and boot process was blazingly and beautifully fast, everything else was a disaster, and I'm not exaggerating. First, I'd like to mention that I have *zero* proprietary drivers (nvidia blobs, etc) or extensions (flash) installed. I don't really know where to start. During past month, my machine constantly went to trashing mode where the hard-disk light is constantly on and I can't access anything or even swtich to linux console for several *minutes*. This has occured more than four times although all I usually run is a pdf viewer, an mp3 player, emacs, and firefox with simple html pages (not even gmail, flash, etc). I can't really understand how this can happen. Several times, and after a day or two of use, firefox, with *one* simple html tab open took 340+ MBs; that's insane. Evince took 120MB while only a single pdf file was open. Even Xorg was taking RAM around a hundread megabyte.[1] The final result? a machine constantly thrashing and basically unusable. I ran this on a core2 laptop with a full 1GB of ram. How come the experience is SO bad in supposedly a *stable* distro? The second problem is that the GUI is *really* slow, and I use *zero* visual effects. Switching between workspaces is very sluggish where I see parts of firefox in my audacious window for about half a second while switching between workspaces. Switching between applications (alt+tab) is not smooth at all. </blockquote><div>You don't have enough RAM. 1 GB is pretty low by today's standards. You may be happier with xubuntu on a lower spec machine, but as you've got a fast CPU then you should get more RAM as it is a clear bottleneck. You may be happier without compiz at all - but your system will run a lot better if you sort your RAM problem out. Caroline</div></div>