Ubuntu 13.04 Suffers Performance

[Liam Proven]

On 25 June 2013 14:19, gvim <gvimrc at gmail.com> wrote:
> Same here. I had my 2.3Ghz dual core Macbook Pro nicked and had to revert to
> a similar spec Lenovo T61 on which I installed Ubuntu 13.04. Considering the
> price of replacing the Macbook Pro, I toyed with the idea of buying a
> Thinkpad and switching to Ubunutu but the abysmal performance of Ubuntu put
> paid to that fantasy. Compiz and Thunderbird were the main cpu hogs. I tried
> throttling TB with cpulimit but that made it unusable.
>
> I use Thunderbird on Mac OS X and don't experience anything like this. It
> does hog the CPU but when it does the system is still usable, unlike Ubuntu,
> and I was under the impression that Linux resource management was superior
> to OS X.

I find Ubuntu 13.04's performance pretty good.

The thing that can really drag it down is poor graphics drivers. If
you don't have the right (often proprietary/binary) drivers for your
GPU, then the modern composited desktops (Unity, all the GNOME 3
variants, KDE) really drag.

So (for instance) on my main notebook, a Toshiba Satellite Pro P300A,
my GPU (ATI RV620) is no longer supported by AMD's binary `fglrx`
driver after 12.04. The GPU does work with the `radeon` FOSS driver,
though.

So I've switched to Xubuntu, as this makes far less demands. Unity
does not work with fglrx, but Xfce works fine and it is fast &
responsive.

I've blogged about the experience here:
http://liam-on-linux.livejournal.com/35410.html



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