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Comment by cletus | Hacker News Reader

It honestly boggles my mind that people can't read things like these and see that it's "choice" here that's why Linux on the desktop is doomed to be nothing more than a niche product for us geeks.

Desktops succeed because they're consistent. Possibly the most important thing is to have a consistent API. X at this point is venerable. Nascent Linux desktops come complete with cruft. Lots of cruft.

Honestly I can understand why Canonical wants to start again (Wayland, Unity, etc). Even more honestly, I just don't see adoption of any Linux desktop going much above 1%.

I have a 6 core Xeon with 24GB of RAM on my desktop and Ubuntu still feels sluggish. Go down to 2 cores and 4GB of RAM and I'd have a better experience with either OSX or Win7.

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I can understand why Microsoft wants to start again (Windows 8) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Windows_8_Developer_Previe...

I am going to take a wild guess and say the sluggishness you are encountering is caused by the IO scheduler. It's the main cause of sluggishness on my desktop. In fact it's choking /right now/ as I type this due to a large file copy process in the background. BFQ, the other desktop scheduler for linux, is not included in the default kernel, and in my use has not fared any better.

I could not edit, so I will reply instead. If you work from the terminal I find that prefixing commands with a ``ionice'' priority settings helps keep IO hogs from slowing the desktop.

Sincere meta question: do you have a SSD? I've found that any machine without a SSD feels sluggish after using a machine with one. I have a MBP with 8 GB ram and a 6 GB/s SATA III SSD... it screams past any machine that doesn't have a SSD.

I don't ever want Linux on the desktop to succeed then if I have to sacrifice choice. I'm thrilled with Ubuntu every day, and if I had to sacrifice any of the flexibiltiy and customization I enjoy... well, I'd just use OS X.

Also, I have no freaking idea how your Ubuntu feels sluggish. Being in Ubuntu on my Quad/8GB is vastly faster than being in Windows.

cletus and drivebyacct2

I've discovered recently that its the video hardware and how that interacts with the precise (sic) choice of graphics driver that governs Unity speed.

cletus: you can test my hypothesis by logging in with the Unity 2d session and seeing if the UI becomes more responsive. Scaling (super-s) will be 'ragged' without 3d effects but should be faster.

drivebyacct2: what is your graphics card and what driver? I need a new desktop box soon myself...

I'm giving Unity a try and I have to admit its a little fussy and busy. My fallback is Debian with a tiling window manager (dwm) so I've been going in the 'menuless' direction for some time.

You might be affected by:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/compiz/+bug/763005

There is a series of known bugs where the window manager picks the wrong refresh rate resulting in choppy animations.

I noticed that this happens consistently with all compositing window managers (compiz, xfwm4, mutter) except kwin.

Disabling VBlank syncing may help. The bug report above has instructions to disable VBlank syncing with Compiz/Unity.

If you are using mutter (gnome-shell) you can put this line in /etc/environment, restarting your X session afterwards

  export CLUTTER_VBLANK=none

However, in my experience, Unity/compiz becomes sluggish again after a certain amount of clients are displayed on any (virtual) desktop.

lvillani, yes, the nvidia form of this bug and its associated work around has improved the performance of Unity with my old desktop significantly. Lots of searching Ubuntuforums and the interweb had not turned this up, so thanks.

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux-restricted-m...

Oh, sorry. I don't count Unity/Compiz. I thought you meant the general performance of Ubuntu is bad. I would highly, highly recommend you give Gnome-shell a shot. I have some el-cheap-o Nvidia card with the latest from the Ubuntu repos (they have a new repo that Jockey sees that will let you use the latest from Nvidia rather than the standard distro one)

It seems to me, though, that there's room for all the people interested in developing a "for everyone" UI to rally around a single project.

The people interested in making Unity/Gnome 3/etc aren't the people interested in making ratpoison.

I wish desktop Linux would look a lot more like Rails 3: a "sensible defaults" stack that is ready-made for picking up and using, but with the ability to easily swap out SuperFriendlyDesktop for MyBadassTilingWM, the same way I might swap out ActiveRecord for DataMapper.

Of course, every distro thinks they're that, or are trying to be that. The problem is that there's no agreement on those defaults, partly because none of them are good enough (partly because they're no agreement, and around and around we go...)

The problem we're seeing with fragmentation isn't choice per se, but rather what we're seeing proven over and over again is that everyone trying to create their own "friendly" desktops results in none of the projects getting enough traction to get over the hump.

10.04 was that. That's part of the problem, many of the decisions since then seem to have been going backwards rather than building on it as a solid base.

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