Linux- What Is Going On?

[coder-guy22296]

back in ubuntu 10.04(correct me if i am wrong) was fast, it booted so so fast, but now we are in 12.10, now its arguably as slow as windows. i used to love linux, but it got slow, so i find myself never using it.  thoughts and corrections?, im curious to see what all you guys and girls out there have to say about linux.

[James_McKeane]

I'm gonna preface this by saying that I'm NOT a l33t user in any way, shape or form.  That being said my memory of 10.04 was quite awful. I was given a hand-me-down Toshiba Satellite L305-S5915 and I installed Xubuntu 10.04 on it.  It was quite literally the most awful tech experience I've had in my life: it was slow, buggy as I don't know what, and worst of all the wireless (which may or not have been Network-Manager) kept crapping out.  I tried to upgrade it and it tooks 3 HOURS before I cut the power, popped out the HD, wiped it out via USB mass storage (dban doesn't work on my drive for some reason), and then installing Mint 14 Nadia, which is terrific.
 
I've never tried straight Ubuntu 12.10, just live cd's of it. Right now I'm running Kali Linux as my main OS on the Satellite and Mint Nadia as a dual boot.  Kali is the successor to BackTrack and is based on Debian Wheezy (you probably know all this already). Kali (and thereby Debian) is the easiest OS i have ever used in my life, and that includes Windows 7 and its predecessors. Its also quite fast on my crappy notebook. takes about 1m 15s to load on a 5400 sata ii laptop hd.

 

If there's one thing I can't stand about kde Mint, its KDE Plasma Workspaces; its great until you accidently remove something in the toolbar. then its a nightmare. 

[Dodge]

People want Linux to offer the same amount of functionality as Windows and to be as easy to use, so it gets bigger, more colorful and slower. Try Ubuntu with GNOME3 or another desktop environment.

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[zoltan]

Ubuntu is arguably not the best of GNU/Linux. There are also tier-one distros to use, like Debian, Fedora, Open SuSE, Mageia, Arch Linux, Gentoo, Slackware, etc..., Ubuntu can hardly be considered a tier-one distro anymore in my opinion, they've completely strayed from the FOSS path. And Ubuntu after 12.04 is slow and buggy, I think that's very hard to objectively deny.

[alpenwasser]

Since switching to systemd Arch Linux is really fast at bootup (at least for

me).

Excluding the BIOS sequence (which has nothing to do with the OS anyway), my laptop

boots up in 4 seconds flat. Another 2 seconds to start the X server after logging in

(I don't start it automatically by default). It's a Dell XT2 with a 128 GB SSD, so

it's decent but not insanely fast.

Before the switch to systemd, it took the same machine about 20~25 seconds to do the

same thing.

[threee6]

From what i have read the stability issues are caused by the new kernel. That is why all the latest releases of Ubuntu and Ubuntu based releases are real pigs :(

[zoltan]

What kernel is Ubuntu 13.04 on now? Aren't they on 3.8.4 or some even older kernel? Fedora 18 stable is now rocking 3.9 completely stable, kernel 4 is in the pipeline.

[IdeaStormer]

My 12.04 system is as fast if not faster than 10.X, then again I remove the BS apps like Bluetooth manager and Network Manager as I have my own network settings and don't need an app to do that for me when its static and doesn't change. There are also a whole series of apps that Ubuntu pre-loads that most people don't need, you need to go over them and then make sure to remove the ones you have no need for.

 

These days its getting to be like Windows installs, you need to remove the extra junk/services that you never use because the installer is generic for the widest install base which means you end up with apps and services you don't need. Look up the app/service and see if you truely need it, you can always turn it off and see what happens or use that tool you have to see what the service does (psst Google).

 

This applies to Windows as well.

[zoltan]

My 12.04 system is as fast if not faster than 10.X, then again I remove the BS apps like Bluetooth manager and Network Manager as I have my own network settings and don't need an app to do that for me when its static and doesn't change. There are also a whole series of apps that Ubuntu pre-loads that most people don't need, you need to go over them and then make sure to remove the ones you have no need for.

 

These days its getting to be like Windows installs, you need to remove the extra junk/services that you never use because the installer is generic for the widest install base which means you end up with apps and services you don't need. Look up the app/service and see if you truely need it, you can always turn it off and see what happens or use that tool you have to see what the service does (psst Google).

 

This applies to Windows as well.

+1, that's what really stopped me from using 12.04LTS any further. I had it installed and have invested a lot of time getting it stable and removing the spyware and manually activating the AppArmor profiles for elementary apps like Firefox (unbelievable that it's not activated by default), etc... but in the end there was little fun left in using it, I can appreciate that someone wants to use it because of the fact that it's a windoze-wannabe, for shopping convenience and self-advertisement, and Canonical wouldn't make the "features" if there wasn't an audience for it. That's OK with me, that's what GNU/Linux is all about, everyone gets exactly what they like, but it's not for me, I get nervous with bloatware and hot air, and I found the experience rather soso after all the work that was needed to get it stable. I did also try 12.10, and that was a complete disaster, I gave up on it before it would run. I still have to try 13.04 though, I heard there were also a lot of bugs, but I want to at least try, everyone's experience is different with a new distro version.