Performance shock

[Peter Garrett]

On Sun, 2005-04-24 at 10:35 +1000, CB wrote:
> --  Windows is just so fast to use by comparison. Firefox starts
> up almost instantly and doesn't hog the cpu once a few tabs are open,
> windows explorer (atrociously designed though it is) lets me get
> instant access to any part of the filesystem, unlike nautilus which
> kind of oozes around. It occurs to me that due to my pleasure re so
> many aspects of using linux (esp Gnome, which I love) in general, and
> Ubuntu in particular, I had just got used to how slow it is.

You might want to look at rox-filer: I use it almost exclusively in
preference to Nautilus , and it is *much* quicker. It requires a bit of
configuration for mime types etc, and you might want to change some
default icons. Definitely worth a try. 

As for Firefox, while it's true it starts more slowly on first launch, I
haven't noticed any lack of speed subsequently. It might also be worth
remembering that the way RAM use shows in Linux is different - a lot of
memory use is actually cache etc...

The Open Office quickstart applet for gnome also helps with that
monstrous application suite.

sudo apt-get install ooqstart-gnome 

(or is it installed by default? I'm unsure on this point as I've used it
before on Debian) Anyway, when installed it's available from the
right-click "add applets" dialog on the gnome-panel.

Personally I would rather my RAM was being used efficiently: better to
have things in RAM where they are accessible an order of magnitude
faster. I've often seen this complaint about Linux memory use on IRC. I
think it's *usually* a misunderstanding about how the statistics are
presented, (but I'm not assuming that's the case for you).

Peter