Ubuntu too slow? Try Lubuntu | Hacker News Reader

Ubuntu too slow? Try Lubuntu

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18 pointsmonarchwadia16 comments

Ubuntu isn't too slow, unity & compiz is just bulky with all the transition, fades, visual cues, etc.

Install Ubuntu, read about i3, install i3, and enjoy the speed.

You may also consider another distro entirely. I'm very fond of Manjaro. It's an Arch-based distribution. You can choose one of many desktop engines. Some of which are very fast.

If you're shopping around for a different distro, you should try out Gentoo or Funtoo. It's fast, customizable, and you'll learn a lot when installing it.

Lubuntu is fast, but feels unfinished, some things I can't really describe annoy me when using it, I see a lot of small things that are supposed to be there but are missing.

Same here. Switched too Xubuntu, which nicely fits between Ubuntu's polish and Lubuntu's speed.

Is lubuntu faster? I got xubuntu on an old plastic macbook and it's struggeling.

It is. It also feels unfinished, but it really depends on your expectations.

Personally, once I have a functional terminal and a web browser, I am ok, and lubuntu is perfect for this kind of use.

Agree. I develop on Lubuntu using IntelliJ and it works very well for that purpose.

The difference is small if you use mini.iso (net install) and a minimal desktop version but it can be noticeable depending on the kernel version, packages that you add, 32 or 64 bit capability, available ram, other hw components etc. Debian is faster though, and free from the usual ubuntu bloat, install backports, correct drivers and put i3wm or awesome on it and you'll get a usable machine even if it's very old. Not sure if it would play nice with mac hardware but you could always try.

Lubuntu is really fast. You might want to try Debian as per another comment, too; this article sums it up nicely:

https://thishosting.rocks/debian-vs-ubuntu/

I'm going to have to try Xubuntu at some point :-)

Long time xubuntu user here. I'm happy, my daily rig is a 8GB X220 with a 500GB SSD and i5-2540M CPU @ 2.60GHz. Doesn't seem slow to me at all and I'm a software dev.

Very interesting, I'm attracted by the talk about Xubuntu having better graphics.

I like how unfinished it feels, personally. I think it's a matter of personal taste.

none of these are very good. building on an Ubuntu base has always been a bad idea, be it for servers, desktops or whatever odd use-case you may have.

in the end, any of the Ubuntu flavors function really about as well as the others. see any Phoronix benchmark for proof of this.

if you want light, you follow the path of origination to the source. for graphical user environments this means something like Window Maker or TWM or Openbox. for distros this means Debian, Gentoo, Arch, etc. there are representative flavors available: Window Maker Live, CloverOS, and Crunchbang Plus Plus a few of my present darlings.

common wisdom buy-in has resulted in a state of mass hallucination that “light” is just a thinner coat of paint. get outside your comfort zone and you too can be astonished that light, taken seriously, can make your fifteen year old machine feel like the Chromebook if yesteryear.

Another way to go would be to build your environent from a less "productized" distribution, like Debian's minimal netinstall.

How is it that the OS delivery model from Windows 95 is not dead yet? "Everything you need is right inside this box" has been replaced by discrete change just about everywhere else in the stack.

You don't download an archive of GitHub to use one Repo.

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