[ubuntu-uk] Application responsiveness, Windows and Ubuntu

[Matthew Wild]

On Sat, Apr 5, 2008 at 9:56 PM, Chris Rowson
<christopherrowson at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi there,
>
>  My little boy likes playing various flash based games from children's
>  websites. I find that in Ubuntu, many of these run pretty badly and as
>  this is all he uses my old laptop for, I decided to put Windows XP
>  back onto it to see the if it would make any difference for him.
>
>  I've just installed Firefox 3 Beta 5, Flash and a Java runtime
>  environment and seen how it runs.
>
>  Strangely Firefox runs about twice as fast under Win XP than on Hardy
>  (although Hardy is on a laptop which is twice as powerful). Rendering
>  and application response are greatly improved under Windows and Flash
>  content flys.
>
>  I'm bamboozled to say the least!
>
>  Are these particular applications created specifically for Windows
>  then ported to Linux? It's wierd, I've tried this on different
>  hardware and find it to be the case on the machines I've tested.
>
>  I wondered if anyone else has tried this out or have any reasons why
>  it would be so?
>

If you are only talking about when flash pages are open, then yes, I
notice it too. My CPU is constantly at about 10%.

This is to be expected, Flash is closed-source after all, and you are
trusting a company that probably doesn't see its Linux user-base as
significant as the Windows one.

Can't wait for Gnash to become a real alternative, until then I use
Flash as little as possible :)

Matthew.