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Comment by ericcholis | Hacker News Reader

I would love to switch to Ubuntu at home, games is one of the reasons I don't; Unity being the other.

This may be isolated to my experience, but the PCs that I've installed Ubuntu on suffer huge performance drops when using Unity. Most of these PCs were running XP, one them is running Win 7. I even had one machine running like a dream on Ubuntu 11.04 then upgraded to 11.10, now it's nearly unusable.

I've drank the Ubuntu kool-aid in the past, but now it leaves a sour taste in my mouth.

*edit for clarification, I'm referring to Ubuntu's new default UI: Unity.

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12.10 works fine for me on an old 1.4ghz core 2 duo laptop with nothing but onboard intel graphics, maybe you should try upgrading.

Also it would be worth checking if there is a proprietary video card driver and using that if so e.g. https://help.ubuntu.com/community/BinaryDriverHowto/Nvidia

I run Linux Mint, which is really great with Cinnamon and QuickTile.py. None of that "use your PC like a tablet" stuff.

I run Steam on it as well, but it's lacking in the number of games that run on Linux. We're definitely moving in the right direction though!

Tried installing Linux Mint. Lack of hardware drivers for my 3 year old Dell laptop.

Have trouble leaving Windows 7 when everything works fine.

I'm not saying you need to leave Windows 7, I don't care what you use. Use what you're happy with. I was just trying to help out the guy who had trouble with Unity.

The graphical effects in Unity can be quite taxing on lower-end computers (i tried running 12.04 on my 3 year old netbook, not very pleasant). If, however, you still enjoy the stability and ease-of-use of Ubuntu, you can always install the classic gnome interface (sudo apt-get install gnome-panel) and use that instead for a significant performance boost.

Have you tried other Ubuntu variants or even another distro? I prefer Xubuntu.

I also tried Lubuntu for a few minutes and it was really, really responsive.

Being a bit of a desktop Linux noob, how the experience of the other Ubuntu distros compare?

I only used it for a few minutes, but I installed it on my sister's netbook and she uses it exclusively. From what I saw, all applications looked exactly the same, save for the window manager chrome. Lubuntu is closer to Windows with a Start-like menu and the applications there, so if you're more familiar with Windows, you will probably find it easier.

I haven't delved deep into it, so I couldn't tell you how easily you can find the settings or whatnot, or if there are issues that aren't in another window manager. Given that you can install it with just an "apt-get install lubuntu", though, it'll probably be faster if you tried it yourself!

It's not isolated.. Recently I quickly needed some linux distro in a VM to test some things out and since I just found a premade VirtualBox image of the latest Ubuntu I tried that. Could hardly believe how slow it felt. I know a VM is not the real thing, but given that anything else I run in it flies it's at least an indication something is wrong.

I have found recently out that VmWare Player works better with Ubuntu 12.10 than VirtualBox. Difference is "you can work with it" and "I will suffer because I need it".

Unity made me switch to Xubuntu. It uses a lot less RAM to begin with.

As many others will tell you, installing Cinnamon within Ubuntu will give you a great UI.

At the Ubuntu login screen, try selecting Unity 2D instead of the default. I run that on my laptop and it helps performance.

11.10 was horrible in terms of Unity performance. 12.04 fixed things for the better. I recommend you update as well.

Are you referring to Unity 3D, the game engine, or Unity, Ubuntu's UI?

Ubuntu's new default UI

Actually, that's a common mistake. The game engine is, also, simply called Unity. Their URL is unity3d.com. Confusing, I know!

Constantly confused by that as well. Try to find information about running Unity3D (the game engine) on Linux via virtualbox/vmware is nearly impossible because every result describes running the 3d effects of Unity (the UI thing) inside a Linux VM.

I don't know about VMWare, but last I checked VirtualBox couldn't do GPU passthrough, so 3D effects and games would only be able to chug along on the CPU.

Also note that vmware Fusion has a "Unity" mode.

For what it's worth I asked Mark Shuttleworth about the overlapping trademark and he said all 3 companies were fine with it.

All we need now are some games on steam called Unity

I for one stay away from Unity/Gnome 3 and switch to XFCE for all.

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