Ubuntu 12.04

[stillborn]

another with xubuntu
http://dedoimedo.com/computers/xubuntu-pangolin.html

[Burt Wilson]

He calls that Thinkpad T61P "low end"? Who the heck is he kidding? That thing has a faster CPU than my Dell Precision workstation, 2 GB of RAM, a nVidia Quadro GPU with 256 MB onboard memory... And it starts with a 7200 RPM hard drive, as opposed to the normal laptop 5400 RPM, only he replaced that with an SSD. No freakin' duh he gets good results, that laptop is a monster.

Exactly what I thought, it's not exactly low end is it, certainly not comapred to my ancient 8 year old P4 desktop!

[mlmyers]

In fairness to the poster who called his laptop low end, it isn't exactly brand new hardware. Its CPU is a generation or two newer than mine, the SSD must be nice, and I would kill not to have an integrated graphics chip. Now, I'm jealous, but the fact is his hardware is getting on in years, especially for certain tasks. So, my laptop chugs along nicely for most tasks, and his should zip through almost any tasks, but if you try to do video editing on a laptop that's that old, you're going to run into trouble.

Who am I kidding? I'm super jealous.

[GJones]

The most powerful computer in my house is a Dell Precision workstation, which is a little less powerful than the reviewer's "low end" computer. It has a slightly slower Core 2 Duo processor.

Currently I don't have a DVI to VGA adaptor, so the workstation uses an ancient Matrox Millenium graphics card instead of the default nVidia ubercard. Software rendering is roughly an order of magnitude faster than hardware rendering. The CPU is so fast it can run KDE composite effects on software rendering alone, with no stuttering at all. Granted, this is at 800x600 resolution because the Matrox card can't support anything higher; but even so, by any sane measure, it is a very fast desktop. Calling it "low end" is like calling a Corvette "low end" because it can't outrace a rocket car.

Then again, I never let go of old computers. I have a Thinkpad 600E laptop from 1999, with a 300 MHz Pentium II and 192 MB of RAM. Salix works on it, with the help of Fluxbox and zram compressed swap; but for desktop use my choice would be Windows 2000. Opera on Win2k on that thing can still browse Facebook. The only real issues are security, which can be managed if you know what you're doing; and lack of USB ports, which can probably be remedied with a hub or a PCMCIA card.

I'll probably end up using the 600E to run a filtering proxy. But my point is, there is no reason that the the machine couldn't be a usable desktop, other than uncontrolled greed and uncontrolled software bloat.

P.S. Speaking of KDE, I tested Kubuntu 12.04 later, on the same laptop as Ubuntu. It is worlds better than the standard Ubuntu desktop. Less crashy, too. And KDE 4.8.3 performs a lot better than prior KDE versions.

[mlmyers]

Then again, I never let go of old computers. I have a Thinkpad 600E laptop from 1999, with a 300 MHz Pentium II and 192 MB of RAM. Salix works on it, with the help of Fluxbox and zram compressed swap.

But my point is, there is no reason that the the machine couldn't be a usable desktop, other than uncontrolled greed and uncontrolled software bloat.

P.S. Speaking of KDE, I tested Kubuntu 12.04 later, on the same laptop as Ubuntu. It is worlds better than the standard Ubuntu desktop. Less crashy, too. And KDE 4.8.3 performs a lot better than prior KDE versions.

Well, I'll agree with all that. I just think of my laptop of a similar (but distinctly worse, as mentioned in my previous post) as being low end, but that's on the criteria of being a desktop, a seed box, a server, and a workstation all rolled into one. As workstations go, it's rather low end. But for a desktop alone, it's more than adequate. And, you're right, I don't think in the context of the review that he was asking more than being a simple desktop.

For a while, I had a Pentium (MMX!) 200MHz and 48 MB of RAM running Xfce with Slackware 10. It can be done if necessary. I'd like to dig that old machine out of storage and turn it into an email / MPD server.

Also, I'm glad to know that KDE 4.8 is better than the older KDEs. I've never really been one for KDE, but there's plenty to like about it, and I would recommend it to others who haven't been entrenched in the Gnome way of doing things for 10 years. Yet another reason to welcome Slackware 14!

[GJones]

Well here's some good news: most of the resource hogging in Ubuntu 12.04 is due to one service, Ubuntu Oneconf. This service lets you share your config files between computers over the internet, or something... Suffice to say you probably don't need it. Removing Oneconf puts Ubuntu about on par with Salix 13.37 KDE in terms of performance.

(Aside from the apt-xapian-index cron job running wild once a week, but that can be easily remedied by removing the cron job.)

[jessejazza]

Umm wow. I'm going to have to eat my words here... I got a random Xorg crash on the laptop. IMO that's totally unacceptable on a modern OS. Bye-bye Ubuntu.

Certainly are!

I started linux with ubuntu in 2007. Due really because of the media and not having a linux user group locally to advise. When 2009 came they seemed to get into all sorts of problems mainly due to the 6 month release cycle in my opinion. I've been a xubuntu user since 2010 versions and much prefer it to gnome. Xubuntu 12.04 had a buggy development version of Abiword and generates .goutputstream******* each time you log in. Loads of other things as well... now we learn that ubuntu is considering rolling release. They seem to have 'lost the plot' since introducing Unity (which i've never looked at). Yet i have much to thank them for... opened my eyes to linux. Fedora i found was little better and they started the 6 month release cycle.

[Grasshopper]

Well, I dunno. I've been runnin Ubuntu 12.04 on a middle-of-the-road desktop and a semi-netbook (2GB or RAM and Celeron instead of Atom, but not a screaming machine by any stretch). Had it running now for about a year, and I haven't had problems. Four or five times I've had an application freeze, but xkill does the trick. The OS itself has never crashed.

That said, I'm in distro-playing mode, and there are definitely distros that are lighter than Ubuntu. I'm liking Manjaro, and I just installed Salix. If I were advising someone switching from Windows I'd steer them toward Zorin -- it's lighter in its shoes than the standard Ubuntu with Unity, and the menuing is very easy to navigate. But so far -- and it's early days still -- I'm enjoying all the distros a lot.

Ubuntu with Classic Menu and Cairo Dock plus Unity's dock and Dash give one a lot of options for navigation. And even on the netbook it's not particularl slow. I know it's not for everyone, and Canonical comes in for some well-deserved hits in the FOSS community.

[marcxjo]

I've tried Ubuntu 11.10 through 13.10 in several different flavors. 12.04 was always pretty solid for me, with a few exceptional bumps, but never anything lasting that an update or a simple config file adjustment couldn't undo. I seem to remember the majority of my issues actually coming from PPAs, but I was also running a respin that depended rather heavily on them (including for metapackages, which seems like a rather frustrating design decision). I was and remain downright impressed with how Xfce runs on it. These days my all-purpose rescue disk is actually a live USB of Xubuntu 13.10.

As for the other DEs, Kubuntu 12.04 was also unusually nice, and I'm rarely much of a KDE fan. Lubuntu was decent, but has (imo) significantly improved with later releases; LXDE is still too feature-light for my tastes, but not by a wide margin. It's also decidedly ugly, but I'm rather curious to see how the whole merge with Razor-qt alleviates that issue.

The flagship release doesn't even deserve a mention, as far as I'm concerned. I have no use for Unity.