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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've said for a while now that desktop Linux's biggest problem is that the de facto primary consumer distro doesn't use KDE by default.
well, i figured it would be some problem with the graphics drivers and that's why i switched to using the kubuntu 12.04 LTS dvd instead of the normal ubuntu/unity one, i've been having weird issues with unity lately (invisble mouse cursor and ignored keyboard input on a fujitsu siemens Amilo La1703 notebook - but KDE works perfectly)
http://www.kubuntu.org/getkubuntu/download
( for those that fell recently into the linux soup and don't know what this is, this is practically the same thing as ubuntu 12.04 LTS but with the KDE interface as default instead of unity. )
root@127.0.0.1
What are they doing wrong that results in a slow desktop? Re-rendering all text from HTML on every frame cycle of a drag? The graphics power available in modern GPUs has orders of magnitude more power than needed to manipulate a set of flat windows and icons.
I refused to update for the longest time when Ubuntu switched to Unity, but then I got a new laptop and figured I'd give it a shot first. I was pretty set of just using Mint but really wanted to give Unity a try before switching. I was surprised that I actually sort of liked it, especially once I learned the keyboard shortcuts. My task bar always got cluttered with lots of windows in Gnome 2, and their order wasn't consistent which was a minor annoyance. Realistically, Unity feels a lot like Windows 7 to me (though I've only used Windows 7 briefly on other people's machines, I really liked the UI), and it got rid of all the clutter. I like that Gnome Do is essentially integrated into Unity, and there are some other nice features as well.
That said, I haven't seriously tried Gnome 3 yet. I installed it and loaded it up, and then did a wtf when I couldn't really figure out how to use it and wondered why it was so ugly before switching back to Unity. It felt like a very incomplete product. I've since read that you need to use a lot of add ons (or whatever the correct term for them is) to make it more usable, but at this point it's not worth the investment in time when Unity works well enough for me.
Works fine for me, since my own learning was not so specific that I can't function without things being static.
I can understand if maybe you have a learning disability, but if you don't you have nobody to blame but yourself.
Just because JASC or Photoshop or Paint.NET or whatever put it there, doesn't mean it's the best place to put it (if there is even such a thing).
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
Iss there anyone that actually likes Unity? Or are Canonical just trying to piss everyone off?
Problem is, lots of people hate GNOME 3 too. And KDE has always been divisive, even though the original licence problems have long been resolved. But then, they broke KDE in the transition to KDE4, and from I've seen recently, it's still buggy as f**k and has been for years.
So that leaves, in no particular order;
1) GNOME 2. Abandoned. Resurrected as cinammon in the mint ubuntu fork, but still niche. And dear god, the launch bar is TEENY. /Gnome-shell. Hated by many, the 'let's take away all the stuff people liked' edition, complete with all the options to change virtually anything removed.
2) GNOME 3
3) Unity. Jeez, GNOME 3 really does suck. Let's do something else altogether! Hmm, how about a sideways touch friendly mounted springy dock, and all the apps need to be modified so their window options get merged into the top bar, until they don't.
4) KDE4. Still buggy as f**k and options up to the eyeballs. And I'm struggling to think of a mainstream distro that really backs it; maybe openSUSE, but they kinda went agnostic with the whole Novell thing, and switched to GNOME.
5) XfCE. OK, fine. It's lightweight, it's simple. But some of us want a GUI shell that does more than just be a holder for a bunch of terminal windows. And doesn't look like it's still the year 2000.
So you have the most popular distro Ubuntu with a homegrown shell that's weird and slow, GNOME seem to have forgotten they actually had a userbase before they went off the deep end, KDE are bobbling around trying to work out how to make it not crash, and the remaining desktops are spraying off into a bunch of niche areas.
I'm currently trying to work out what distro & shell to use on my home quiet/dev rig as I'm sick of bugfixing the hackintosh OSX that's on there at the moment.
And right now, they ALL suck.
Remember kids, it's all fun and games until someone commits wholesale galactic genocide.
No one is gonna call the article a troll or shill for pointing out a serious problem? I'm shocked! In the end the problem with Linux is NOT the UIs, or any of the pretty on top, in fact in many ways they have surpassed Windows and OSX in those areas.
Nope, the same damned problem that plagued Linux 10 years ago STILL plagues it to this very day, and it all comes down to drivers and kernel devs constantly futzing with low level internals with nary a thought to QA, QC, or backwards compatibility. Whether anyone likes it or not SOME backwards compatibility IS required, because most software companies and ODMs aren't gonna pay a team of devs to constantly rebuild their products because some kernel dev got an itch.
For proof I direct you to this page of over 100 show stopping bugs which just FYI but every. single. bug. has links showing that yes this IS a problem and its not just one person's opinion or experience and damned near every. single. problem. on that list can be traced by to devs fucking with internals and breaking shit. Now compare that page to the same page from 3 years ago and see how much has NOT been fixed in over 3 years.
All the DE wars, Gnome 2 VS Gnome Shell and KDE 3 VS KDE 4? That's all turd polishing because if the guts are constantly breaking nobody will care about the pretty and as long as the devs are given carte blanche to fiddle with anything without a thought about what its doing to the stability of the overall ecosystem things just won't get better.
That is why I had such high hopes for Ubuntu, I had hope that Shuttleworth would do like Google did with Android and just fork the thing away from the devs so that real stability and central management could be brought to bare instead of the cat herding we have now, but it was not to be.
Linux has beautiful UIs, and tons of software, but retailers like myself won't ever touch your product if we install it on a system and 6 months later its broken its own drivers because some dev got a bee in his butt to futz with some low level system files and trashed my customer's WiFi or sound...ohh God sound, WTF were they thinking with Pulse?
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
I appear to switch too early ahead of the curve. I couldn't stand Gnome2 so switched to KDE 4.0, even though I knew it was a buggy mess. By the time it got to 4.2 it was pleasant to use. I bought a new PC and decided I may as well install the relatively new Unity along side just for fun... and have been using it ever since. I do appreciate KDE but I just find Unity nicer to use. I find KDE a little too much like Windows, but other than than they are both very pleasant and productive. Both have file managers that suck though (Nautilus and Dolphin). Not sure why XFCE went with Thunar instead of taking ROX, come to think of it.
Phillip.
Property for sale in Nice, France
In the L4D2 natively on linux comments pointed out the basic problem with this assertion.
Functions have some overhead and efficiency. A function that has a minimum execution of 4ms will effectively cap your FPS at 250, some other API might have a minimum execution of 2ms, which caps at 500. But at the 60FPS range they can both be the same, or the performance could reverse, the 4ms function could scale much better than the 2ms function for example. Also, because no one really thinks too seriously about FPS in the range of 150+ a lot of weird shit can happen that won't effect normal use.
That said, you're right, who wants to have to buy a 50 or 100 dollar more expensive video card for the same performance? New games especially try and push the limits of the hardware, and you're just not going to get 300 FPS on Guild Wars 2, Borderlands 2 or Call of Duty 2 or with lots of details turned on using affordable hardware today. L4D2 is basically based on a 4 year old engine that aims to be fast on mid range machines. But getting 15 fps or even a steady 40 or 50 FPS with 15 in the marginal cases of major effects on screen can really hurt the experience. Obviously the next generation of consoles is going to raise the bar a step further.
Not even Ubuntu, but its desktops. TFS says KDE is faster than Windows, which seems right to me -- I'm running W7 on a year old notebook and kubuntu on an ancient tower, and the tower (with a much slower processor and less memory) is faster than the notebook. The tower is running kubuntu.
Free Martian Whores!
So you install Linux, then put VM+Win7 on it so she can get work done?
Sounds like YOU are the one not adding value.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Right on! The sad truth is, many problems in the Linux arena are created by the community itself.
One would hope Ubuntu to be the distro that unites the community (Shuttleworth - it must be said - has a vision) but they turned around and made a dumb choice, with a subpar GUI choice that went wrong in two different ways: 1) failed attempt to emulated Humanized's Enso modal interface; 2) failed attempt at "simple is better" with a horrible looking piece-of-shit no modern Windows 7 or Mac user would see the point in even going near the thing (hey, what's up with those horrible OpenOffice icons?). That stupid Unity interface is what you get when you take CSS web developers and let them design a desktop GUI...
KDE is competitive. KDE has usability studies.
This insistence on Gnome is insane.
KDE is written in C++ this is a competitive advantage (compared to Gnome). That Gnome-based stuff is out-of-date is demonstrated by the article.
Linux developers: are you gonna loose the C++11 bandwagon, too? If you do, you are dumb beyond belief...
Main difference between the BSD license and the GPL license: one is from California and the other is from Massachusetts
Sorry, but another vote for Unity here, FWIW, and I used to be a huge Unity nay-sayer (I even switched to linux mint for half a year out of protest) until I actually tried it and was pleasantly surprised. I find it's an excellent power-user interface with an emphasis on the minimal, and that suits me just fine -- any interface that provides more vertical screen realestate gets my vote. The dash panel works great for me, too -- I find typing much faster than hierarchical GUI menus, and Unity makes it possible to do everything via the keyboard if you want.
I should add that I've only used the incarnation of Unity present in 12.04 -- it's quite possible it wasn't always as polished as it is now. But personally, now, I would hate to switch back to any other interface. I've used a hell of a lot of WMs and DEs over the years, and Unity's very much my favourite so far.
All these desktops (including Unity) are more than fast enough on even low end laptops. The real problem with Unity, KDE, and Windows for that matter, is usability.
The irony behind all of this hoopla is, of course, that Windows and Mac users were always claiming that their desktops were faster because they didn't use X11 and "network transparency"; that was utter nonsense, of course. Nobody cared or even noticed that Windows and Mac graphics were actually worse. Now that temporarily, a couple of Linux desktops benchmark slower on a prerelease version of one Linux distribution, the sky is suddenly falling.
To all desktop developers: fix your usability problems, forget about FPS pissing contests.
Unfortunately, stock KDE has all that "semantic desktop" bullshit. What's needed is for someone to take it and make it the default, but tuned it right. Kinda like what Mint does with Gnome3 (though the necessary changes would be much smaller here).
Actually it's quite noticeable in real world use. I just tried out Ubuntu 12.0.4 on a 12 inch netbook Asus 1201N with Nvidia ION graphics. It was all but unusable with Unity and had been running Windows 7 fine. I put Xubunutu on and it is much better. They quite simply and thoroughly screwed the pooch with Unity. It's pretty bad and this insistence that the Unity bar not be moved is insane when you can move the taskbar in Windows and the dock in OS X . It's a design choice that is antithetical to the community that Canonical is a part of. I mean Mark Shuttleworth appears to have a Job's complex and the whole idea of open source is freedom not restriction. It's just sad really.
The irony is that many years ago KDE seemed to be what the majority of people ran. Gnome just didn't seem to have the features, or whatever the case. Then somehow Gnome took off somewhere along the way and got a lot of footing, then we started seeing lots of distros preferring it instead. Now that they've effectively ruined it, doing everything from cloning OSX to making "Tablet OS, desktop style" perhaps it's time to just use KDE as the default on the major distros and be done with it. Efficient hardware support should always be priority. When times change and something gets so many layers of bloat that it stops working as desired, dump it and move on. That's been the Linux philosophy from the start, even if that meant some headaches along the way until the system was inevitably better.
Last year I inherited a nice Acer Aspire laptop, just a year or so old. It came with that abomination called Windows Vista, which true to form managed to lunch itself (corrupting all user profiles) within 3 months of me having it. After a couple of half-hearted attempts to fix Vista, I switched to using an Ubuntu Live CD... and now I have to keep a fan sitting underneath it to stop it shutting down from overheating.
It's not that the built-in fan is inadequate, it's that it just doesn't come on for long enough. The machine warms up, the fan comes on for about 20-30 seconds, and then, inexplicably, turns itself off again, leaving the machine to get hotter and hotter until it just turns itself hard-off to protect itself. Under Vista the fan just stayed on as long as needed.
Last week I finally decided I'd had enough of this and went trawling round all the Ubuntu forums. I spent a couple of days installing lm-sensors and tinkering around with various other bits of software and various things that were suggested. Unfortunately lm-sensors can't see the fan on my machine, there's apparently one chip there it can't recognise. So it seems that I have no way to improve the fan handling on this machine, something the main install should be doing anyway without me having to tinker.
The Ubuntu forums were full of other people with similar complaints "my laptop ran nice and cool on Windows, but on Ubuntu it fries". Mainly Acers, Toshibas and Vaios by the looks of things.
I was planning on kicking Vista into the weeds, and doing a full install of Ubuntu onto this machine, but Unity (the stupid insane scrollbars more than anything else) gave me pause for thought, and now the overheating is the killer.
Until Ubuntu can actually make the fan on my laptop work properly so I can actually use the damn computer, it doesn't actually matter which fricking user interface it's lumbered with. Priorities people, priorities.