[ubuntu-uk] Dell Inspiron Mini 10v

[Bruno Girin]

On Sat, 2010-04-10 at 17:49 +0100, Liam Proven wrote:
<snip>
> 
> I am interested: do people really find Xubuntu much lighter, faster or
> more resource-frugal than vanilla GNOME Ubuntu? In my experiments, I
> don't, & GNOME offers novice-friendly features like the ability to
> lock panel widgets & controls into place, progress bars on file
> operations and stuff like that.

Well, my completely unscientific comparison between 3 systems currently
running Ubuntu shows the following memory usage when idle:
      * Karmic Ubuntu laptop: ~400MB,
      * Karmic UNR EeePc: ~200MB,
      * Lucid Xubuntu laptop: ~100MB.

The difference is not huge and wouldn't make much of a difference on the
first 2 machines, as they each have 2GB RAM installed. However, the
third one has 384MB RAM so having an OS that uses just above a quarter
of the physical RAM means that it hardly ever swaps, which makes a huge
difference in terms of user response.

In terms of pure processing power, I can't really see a difference
between Ubuntu and Xubuntu so far.

So my first impression is that using Xubuntu rather than Ubuntu really
makes a difference on machines that are limited in physical RAM (say
less than 512MB). This would be compounded on older machines that have a
slow hard disk and for which swapping can kill performance.

At the end of the day, the final word has to be with the end user: in
this case the Xubuntu box is my girlfriend's old laptop that she's being
forced to use while she finds a replacement for her main computer that
recently died and her first reaction in using it today was "wow, it's
fast!"

Bruno