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I installed Linux the other day on my laptop, ubuntu (and kubuntu the next day) to be specific. Since the Linux-Otaku-Army leaves no Windows related thread in peace and propagandizes Linux with such vehement fervor, I just couldn't resist and had to try it for myself after listening to that crap for the last 5 years.
I'm no computer professional but consider myself a proficient user, it was my first try ever though with a Linux based system. My laptop specs are:
1,83Ghz Pentium M
1GB Ram
Ati Radeon x700
Installation was a piece of cake, ubuntu (gnome) desktop design looks decent and everything seemed fine at first glance. Had some problems installing the proprietary driver for my Ati card because I even though I clicked "activate' it wouldn't do anything. Tried it like 10 times, looked up stuff on google that confused me more than it helped, but miraculously it worked for some unknown reason eventually.
Don't want to make this too long so I'll come right down to the disappointment part. Linux was just overall slow and had this laggy feel. It took ages to install something (flash plugin for firefox for example) that would take like 10 seconds to install on XP. Browser performance was also worse than on XP.
I then turned off all the desktop effect gimmicks, but to no avail. Isn't Linux supposed to be light-weight and ultra-fast compared to the bloated (though I don't know whats bloated about it) XP? I have no problems at all running XP with my Laptop which is, admittedly, a bit older. Just booting Linux would take about 3-4 times longer than XP, just opening Firefox two times longer.
Apart from the slow and unresponsive feel of everything it was just way too complicated and difficult to install stuff. Was trying to get Korean and Japanese input to work which took about 1 hour which is 59 minutes too long (never got it to work on kubuntu though). Had massive problems installing codecs and the Tahoma font. Most of the time googling wasn't very helpful because most of the sites I got were full of Linux pros speaking some language I didn't understand. So after playing around with ubuntu/kubuntu for 3 days I decided that it's not worth it if I can't speed up the system about 100% and got rid of it.
So was there something I did terribly wrong, is my laptop to slow for Linux or is Linux just a slow system after all?
There were also things I liked about Linux btw, but overall it was a huge disappointment.
 
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Where are all the linux lobbyists now? 
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Yea that's pretty much my experience with Linux too. I just have linux dual-booted just in case my windows crashes without warning so i can use Linux to save essential files.
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IMO, there isn't much reason for a casual user to use Linux. Windows XP has everything you'll ever want/need from an OS, really. Linux is great for a lot of things, but mostly things that the average user does not care about.
Now I believe the problem that you're having with a slow, unresponsive computer is not due to Linux, but because the distribution you're using is Ubuntu, which is fairly bloated just like XP.
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Ubuntu nearly fills up one cd it's bloated compiared to others most poeple have troublesgetting wifi cards to work thats the main porb with linux
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Like Slithe said, Ubuntu is a quite bloated distro.
If you want light-weight, try a distro like Arch, which is tons faster than Ubuntu. It's not as easy setting it up though. In fact, it took me a ton of time to just learn my way around, hours of time used to learn how to use the cli properly. But in the end it was pretty fast: I used openbox as my wm. But not miles faster than XP.
The only advantage I could see was that Arch booted up 10 seconds faster than XP did. For the things I use a computer for, Linux wasn't necessary. Now I just use XP with Litestep (shell replacement for Windows) to make it act like openbox, problem solved.
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I agree with you that linux isn't nearly as awesome as linux fans make it sound, but yeah you made a bad decision.... ubuntu is to linux as mac is to pc... it's like the shitty one that is made for moms and noobs... aka non-computer-savvy people that need it to be really user friendly and lame.
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Ubuntu is, in many users eyes, the wrong distro to use. It's the easiest to install, and it's easy to point to it and say "Hey look, there's Linux for noobs over there!" but it's really not that great. Let me address some of the issues you brought up.
The ATI graphics problem you mentioned really can't be considered the fault of any Linux distro. It's well known that ATI has horrible linux drivers (although they are getting better) and in general doesn't support Linux. I don't know which ones Ubuntu installs by default, but there are both proprietary and open source ATI drivers (I forget which one gives better performance at the moment), but they both are somewhat problematic.
As for your boot time, I think there is some misconception about how long Linux takes to boot. The time from pressing the power button to seeing the login screen might be shorter in WinXP, but how long does it take for your computer to start up all those programs when you've logged in (I'm sure I'm not the only one who's had to wait several minutes between logging in and a WinXP computer being usable)? Linux boots extremely fast, but it also starts up a lot of programs which run in the background, so if you don't take this into account, it seems very slow. If you deactivate some of these programs, it will boot faster, but I have no idea how easy it is to do such a thing in Ubuntu.
I don't know what is so tricky about getting Korean and Japanese input. You should just be able to install scim, scim-anthy, and scim-hangul to get it to work. Browsing the package repository should be fairly straightforward once you figured out that you want the scim interface. Solving Linux problems comes with time. I read an article once where the guy said something to the effect of "Windows only comes naturally to you because you've used it for all your life." If you're a native English speaker, do you expect to be able to use Korean fluently the first time you try it? Of course not. Does this make Korean inferior in some way to English? Again, of course not. Why should Linux be different? (Although the Ubuntu people are, to be honest, rather misleading on this point).
As for your lag issues, you were right to turn off the desktop graphics, but if it's still lagging, I'm tempted to blame it on Ubuntu's bloatedness as has been said above this post. Keep in mind that Windows XP was designed for computers like yours, while Ubuntu has updated itself recently and is catering to a more up-to-date crowd. I ran Ubuntu for a while two years ago on my 1.5 GHz Celeron M laptop (1GB of ram) and it worked fine. The eye candy worked great, too, so I don't know if it's your fault or maybe the graphics driver didn't actually get installed properly. As I said, ATI has problems like that which aren't Ubuntu's fault.
There is another piece of Ubuntu which makes it misrepresent the speed of Linux. Because Ubuntu is based off of Debian, it uses a similar package manager and the same sort of packages: binaries. Binary packages are great in that you can install programs very fast, but what if someone compiled the binary for a different computer? Because Ubuntu's packaging is binary files, it's impossible to optimize for your particular machine, which can often result in a 1.5x to 2x slowdown (I made up those numbers, but optimizations really do help).
Finally, I don't know anything about Arch Linux, but I am currently using Gentoo Linux and fluxbox as a window manager, which I recommend to people who are experienced to Linux, but expressly do not recommend for beginners (such as yourself). Quite literally, Gentoo would be hell for a beginner. Even after using Linux for over a year, just the install took me four days the first time (and the second time. The third time, the install itself went quickly, but installing packages takes a while since I don't have a comprehensive list of what to install and also I unwittingly broke the installation a few days in and had to reinstall).
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Ubuntu runs great on my system
1.7ghz Pentium M
1gb RAM
Intel 855GM (i think).
It might be your video card thing. You could also try Linux Mint. It's very similar to Ubuntu, except it has most things preinstalled. Flash works out of the box, as well as other codecs. I use the Fluxbox CE release because it's the fastest available Mint distro. It's been pretty buggy for me, but that might be because I just wrote over my old home folder, which has passed through maybe 4 versions of Ubuntu before getting Mint.
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Canada9720 Posts
like hamster said, the open-source drivers for AIT are notoriously god-awful.
did you disable compiz-fusion?
to be completely honest, linux still isn't ready for the average user as a desktop machine. i'd still recommend it mainly for devs and computer enthusiasts. it's getting ever closer, though
and lol @ hamster for using gentoo 
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Ubuntu ran sweet on my laptop. Installed in 10 minutes i didn't need to install not one driver. Whereas for windows i had to download about 15 different drivers. This was using the gnome windows manager, I myself am a fan of fluxbox.
The only bad thing was really poor APCI support (which you can only point hte fingers at my laptop manufacturer, IBM), so instead of the ~4hours windows gives me, ubuntu gave 2. I frankly did not have the time to look around for different apci settings so i just fucked off back to XP.
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On January 10 2009 12:26 CTStalker wrote:like hamster said, the open-source drivers for AIT are notoriously god-awful. did you disable compiz-fusion? to be completely honest, linux still isn't ready for the average user as a desktop machine. i'd still recommend it mainly for devs and computer enthusiasts. it's getting ever closer, though and lol @ hamster for using gentoo
i'm dual-booting gentoo ;x
i jsut never use it XD
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I had the same problems with installing an NVIDIA driver.. it looked like it would not activate, but once I rebooted it finally did.
IDK if Ubuntu runs faster than XP or not, It may indeed be slower as you said, but personally I am using Ubuntu as I believe it to be much more secure than XP. Got pretty sick of viruses after 10 years of Windows..Could've tried sticking to a limited user account on Windows, but some things won't install/work on that.
After using Ubuntu for two weeks now(dual booting with Windows XP just to play games), I think the installation of certain drivers(especially on the x64 version of Ubuntu) can be a HUGE pain, but overall things tend to work better than they did on their Windows counterparts. Apps don't freeze very often, and when they do, I can just type xkill in the terminal and point/kill it immediately.
Plus, APT will change your life and Compiz-fusion is amazing if you like desktop effects.
<3ing ubuntu thus far.
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United States3824 Posts
Someone asked me if I used Ubuntu and I told them that I don't play Pokemon.
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On January 10 2009 14:40 b3h47pte wrote:Show nested quote +On January 10 2009 12:26 CTStalker wrote:like hamster said, the open-source drivers for AIT are notoriously god-awful. did you disable compiz-fusion? to be completely honest, linux still isn't ready for the average user as a desktop machine. i'd still recommend it mainly for devs and computer enthusiasts. it's getting ever closer, though and lol @ hamster for using gentoo i'm dual-booting gentoo ;x i jsut never use it XD
OpenSolaris :D
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"I consider myself proficient" when having used only Windows over the years means nothing... I started with Linux in 1998 and I've used Windows (and MSDOS before that) exclusively before, and in Linux I felt like everything I thought to know was completely useless because it was such a different system. So I had to re-learn everything, which wasn't quite pleasant but I was curious and interested in the Unix system so I stayed with it.
I've also learned much more about computers during that time than I did when I used Windows.
But this can be a huge problem for newcomers who aren't willing to invest some time.
MacOS and Windows always make huge efforts to make everything rather easily accessible even for complete newbies. In Linux, it depends on the distribution and the software writers but in general there's no such goal... Linux people in general care more about making stuff stable, secure and how they would like it, not how novice users want it. KDE, Gnome and distributions like Ubuntu do, but certainly not everyone in the Linux world.
There is a "clash of paradigms" in the Linux world: some developers make their programs stay true to Unix roots ("like Unix; novice unfriendly but minimalistic, efficient and stable"), while others are going the Windows/Mac route ("novice friendly no matter what").
Also, in Linux it's often the case that GUI is an afterthought or may not exist at all (or is just poorly made) for a program. That is because many experienced users like using the powerful commandline. In Windows/Mac, a program essentially doesn't exist if it doesn't have at least a decent GUI.
Also remember that many developers write open source apps which aren't there to generate profit, so they usually just make the program how they want it to be, and they don't really care if some noob has problems or not - because the developers aren't dependant on the users' money, they just do what they find best.
About speed: Ubuntu *is* bloated, but it shouldn't be noticeably much slower than other systems on recent hardware and a good amount of RAM. There was probably some problem which could have been solved (e.g. some background process using up resources due to certain circumstances, or a wrong driver). Your hardware is good enough to run Ubuntu well, so it was most likely a software problem.
In any case, since there is not "THE" Linux, you could also try another distri like Arch which is really extremely fast, but unfortunately in the Linux world there's either "slow, unstable but userfriendly" or "fast, stable but not userfriendly" - Arch is the latter. If you thought Ubuntu was already user-unfriendly, using distributions like Arch will feel like being punched in the face continously.
That's not to say that Linux is generally hard to use - if you're proficient at using it, it's fast and easy to use. It's just beginners who have problems. It's like your first time ever playing Starcraft playing as a Terran vs. an iccup A-level Protoss - you either quit immediately or you get ambitious and start "training".
There are also Linux distributions which are extremely resource-friendly, like Damn Small Linux, but they're even more user-unfriendly and only exist for special purposes like installing a Linux on extremely old hardware (e.g. a 486, which still has enough power make a small router or similar things), or on embedded devices.
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Thanks for all the responses, you all have valid points.
But in the end it comes down to this: if you want a good, clean Linux you need to use a user-unfriendly distro. If you want an easy, noob friendly Linux you need to use one of the bloated distros which will result in Linux getting slower and not really any better than XP.
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Zurich15324 Posts
It is a common misperception that Linux is supposed to be just faster. Comparing a 2008 Linux distro with 2001 WinXP on the same hardware isn't a fair test however. Of course WinXP will always be faster, it is ages old.
Other than that pretty much everything has been said already.
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It's always ACPI that turns me off from Linux. My last desktop could not shutdown -.-;;
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ATI supports linux.but very poorly...
I can't get Ubuntu 3D-effect working on my laptop thinkpad T40p which has ATI GPU.
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EPT
