Slashdot Mirror
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."
... about problems with Linux on the desktop? Yeah. Here you go.
(I'm not saying it's Linux's fault, but it is undeniably a problem with Linux. If some guy drives into you while you're stopped at a red light, the result is still that you have a broken car.)
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
Linux advocate:
"It may be slower, but you're not stuck with anything Windows-like and you can fix the code yourself!"
Prospective user:
"Wait... It's slower, AND it doesn't work like Windows, AND you want me to fix the code myself?!"
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
Im sorry, but can we finally admit that Unity is a mistake. I tried (REALLY TRIED) to like unity. Its not that bad after all, but it was a step BACKWARDS. Couple that with all of the GNOME devs going Batsh**t crazy and creating GNOME3 and we have a problem. KDE is where I live now, but I miss my GNOME2. For me this is just one more nail in the coffin of Unity. Dont get me wrong though, I can see myself going to Unity in a few years, but that is a LOOOONG time as far as Linux is concerned. There are just too many issues with it right now.
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 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 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.
You keep saying "linux" when you really mean "desktop linux". Two points on that:
1. Linux is an entire world of computing, and desktop linux is actually a small part of that world. Linux is first a multi-user unix-like OS, and second everything else. Since when has a multi-user unix-like OS excelled at being a consumer-oriented desktop system? Never. They excell at being workstations and servers, and require a competant admin. That's just the reality of it, so why do you think it needs to be changed?
2. You (and others) keep implying that desktop linux is worthless ("period"), when people like me have been using it for 15 years and wouldn't even consider switching to a consumer OS. What you really mean is that it doesn't hold up as a consumer-oriented OS, and I'll be the first to admit that you're right. CONGRATULATIONS.
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.
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.
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.