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Ubuntu NVIDIA Graphics Driver: Windows Competitive, But Only With KDE
An anonymous reader writes "The NVIDIA Linux driver across multiple GeForce graphics cards can compete with Microsoft Windows 7 on Ubuntu, but only when using the KDE desktop and not the default Unity/Compiz. It turns out based upon recent desktop environment benchmarking, Ubuntu's Unity desktop is now noticeably slower than GNOME/KDE/Xfce/LXDE with multiple GPUs/drivers. Sam Spilsbury of Canonical/Compiz acknowledges the problem but it may take longer than one Ubuntu cycle to correct."
I am on Slashdot and I do not hate Unity as of 12.04.
I could not stand the Unity that came with 11.10 - I run a lot of MATLAB, and there was no functional way to switch between multiple figures. People would moan and complain about Unity taking a few more clicks or whatever; for me it was actually impossible for me to switch between windows as needed on 11.10, try as I might. I was fearing a forced switch to Unity, since Ubuntu wouldn't be an option for me anymore.
Unity on 12.04 is a completely different story. While I still don't love its window-switching behavior, the super-W feature of displaying all windows is wonderful.
Unity might not be as polished as KDE 3.5 yet, but 12.04 was so much better than 11.10 that I'm willing to see where Canonical's headed.
Expected time to finish is 1 hour and 60 minutes.
I agree about Unity. It sucks rocks, and I downgraded to an earlier version of Ubuntu for a while.
HOWEVER, you may want to give Linux Mint 13 with the Cinnamon desktop. They basically take Gnome and add their own desktop to it. As a bonus, it's built off of Ubuntu and you can use all the Ubuntu repositories with it.
So you get the bug fixes associated with the latest Gnome, the repositories of Ubuntu, the solidness of Linux, and the clean interface of Cinnamon.
Been using it about a month and quite happy so far.
Help! I'm a slashdot refugee.
> I remember when I studied physics (years and years ago), that the human eye can only perceive about 60 cycles per second.
Wouldn't that be biology?
The point stands though. 60fps is as fast as you need to go for smooth animation. However, if a scene can only be rendered at 60 fps, adding more complexity, bad guysm, explosions, etc could push the render time over the VSYNC delay period. That's a bad thing, as you drop not to 59fps, but to 30fps, which is very noticeable.
Crazy FPS speeds aren't always an e-penis waving contest, it simply means you have plenty of GPU horsepower left in reserve for more complexity or more bad guys on screen without dropping below that VSYNC interval.