Windows 7 in contrast to Windows 1.0 is quite awesome

[piratePenguin]

I too personally think Windows 7 is quite possible the best one to date, but it still has its quirks.

Ubuntu has a lot of quirks too. I have it installed on another machine, a fairly modest one: 2Ghz Athlon 64, 512MB RAM, ATI x800 XT. Sounds fairly decent right? Yet Ubuntu still gets unusably sluggish at times. I'll just be using Firefox, a couple of tabs open and suddenly the machine will completely lock up, and start flogging the harddrive for no apparent reason. It will eventually unfreeze, but will usually be very sluggish still flogging the harddrive. Probably 8 out of every 10 times I walk by the computer, the red HDD activity light will be on and it'll be flogging the drive - even just sitting in an idle state with the video output turned off. No idea why it does this?

Are your disks slow? An old computer would have slow disks, and if they've been used a lot (as mine has), they will have none of the "performance" they used to.

If you want to run ubuntu on an old computer, run an older version of it. 8.04 is supported until April 2011: that's what I happen to have installed, and it works fine. I installed 10.04 the other day and it was much too slow for me, I think that was to a different disk and all my disks are almost dead, but by buying more ram and a reliably non-ancient disk I'd expect it to be better. THERE IS a trend of even the cheapest new computers nowadays having more ram (at LEAST one gb), therefore I don't think it is such a bad thing that modern ubunuts use that up, and crawl on the older computers.

Why do people have older computers for gnu/linux distributions anyhow in these days? I reject the idea that decade-old computers should be the target platform for modern distros. I'm not saying ubuntu SHOULD be slow on these computers, but I think if I can go out and buy a computer for 300 quid and get a perfect modern ubuntu experience, that's an important metric, but computers almost a decade old aren't.

But this computer isn't a decade old, its just barely 5 years old. What I'm asking is why does Windows XP perform acceptably on the same system doing the same non-intensive tasks, while Ubuntu 8.10 (9.04? Forgot which one) is sluggish beyond belief.

I agree that *nix shouldn't be "banished" to older systems, but for the relative lack of eye candy and bling I don't understand why its so taxing on the system.

I'm sure that you would be satisfied by using 8.04, based on what I'm experiencing in front of me right now. If you don't know if it's 8.10 or 9.04, then I hope to god it isnt 8.10.

I'll try to find out whats so slow about 10.04 on my machine (obv seems like 256mb ram is no good, so its clear it uses more memory, since this is the way even cheap computers have been going in recent years this shouldnt be blanketly critisised imo).

[Lead Head]

Is there anything particularly wrong with 8.10, besides it not being LTS?

[piratePenguin]

Is there anything particularly wrong with 8.10, besides it not being LTS?

It's newer, a newer operating system has less considerations for older hardware. That's the only point I'm getting at.

[Kintaro]

I just noticed this...

What are you saying? Is this what you meant to say? SERVER BUILD is for servers. DESKTOP BUILD is for desktops. Could it be any simpler?

If you want to run server software on your desktop, you can install the server software on the desktop build. Don't install the server build, and then use it like a desktop. Because then, indeed, it may not be optimised for desktop performance. Shock.

What I am saying is that the desktop Ubuntu kernel build isn't geared well towards desktops. In fact, Lead Heads problem is one that can be smoothed out by CONFIGURING THE KERNEL FUCKING CORRECTLY. I've never seen anything run unusually yet the options in the kernel which optimize it on a desktop configuration are routinely ignored. I believe this is because once upon a time they might have been marked as unstable, and the downstream script kiddy that builds the actual binary gets scared by things he doesn't understand.

I know Gentoo users probably won't have the problem, unless... Wait a minute, the even bigger moron than the downstream patcher, the end user wouldn't know what the fuck the timer frequency or preemption model options are for either. Simply, tasks like swapping unpreempted leave the kernel spending more time in the CPU without care for the userland... This leaves a system under a lot of load unresponsive, it allows lags in the kernel that slow down the entire system for the end user. It applies to a hell of a lot more than swap as well.

These options are not always just the best thing for workstations, in telemetry applications getting the system to work in perfect real time is incredibly important. Do you think the guys at the LHC can handle the couple of hundred milliseconds of clock drift produced by a giant bloated pile of shit that is the Linux kernel in its default configuration? I don't think so either.

Yet rather than the developers that write and understand the kernel's best advisory in make config the retards down at Fedora, Ubuntu, SuSE, and so on continue to build kernels that are laggy, as opposed to the more modern preemption models which we didn't always have. How very luddite for developers of technology, to entirely ignore what could have less end-users in pain.

[Calum]

by the way what does Windows 1.0 actually have to do with this? Nobody's even mentioned it in this thread except in the title.
I'm right in thinking it's this, yes?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_1.0

[Refalm]

Well I guess that Microsoft claims that the snap and dock feature in Windows 7 where a copy from Windows 1 (and not a copy from Mac OS X).

Windows 1:


Windows 7:

[Kintaro]

Windows 1.0 was pretty useless, Windows 2.0/386 was the shit, especially the marketing team.

[piratePenguin]

It turns out there was a fucking memory leak in the xserver that made it into ubnutu 10.04 (terrible).

So I booted back into it, made a quick update and low and behold, now the damn thing is running great!

I really cant reproduce your experiences with ubuntu. My hardware: 250 megs, 2600+, radeon 9600/9700 (I think), is hitting the spot.

http://img179.imageshack.us/img179/666/ubuntugoes.png