[ubuntu-uk] Dell Inspiron Mini 10v

[Liam Proven]

On Sat, Apr 10, 2010 at 7:40 PM, Bruno Girin <brunogirin at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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!"

Wow! Impressive!

Fair play to you, and thanks for that. Maybe I should give it another look!

Currently have Intrepid NBR running on my Thinkpad X31 & whereas there
are a few wrinkles with it, I'm impressed, and it feels faster than
9.x did. I might try Xubuntu as well...

-- 
Liam Proven • Profile: http://www.linkedin.com/in/liamproven
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