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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.
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.
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
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!
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.
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).