OSNews

>> It'll be interesting to see how well it runs on older hardware, given that Linux in many ways positions itself as the OS of choice for older under powered hardware. A gigabyte of RAM isn't all that huge, but it certainly isn't anywhere something you'd turn your nose up at in terms of capacity. <<

The screenshots/video are made on an Ubuntu desktop, and Gnome, its desktop environment, is not itself Linux. Sure Linux can run on older hardware, but Gnome is simply the second most bloated *n*x DE around (and I like it), so in order for Linux to run nicely on your say P2, P3 or PPC G3, you'd have to try out another desktop environment.
Frankly, I think as far as KDE/Gnome desktops are concerned, the bigger distros don't run faster than some other OS'es.

All that the "Linux can run on old hardware" story has to do with, is the fact it is configurable and adjustable. And it doesn't usually slow down due to spyware and viruses. But Ubuntu is a ready-to-use, confection distro. Give it 1GB RAM, it will use it.

*(You might want to give Xubuntu a try, if you like to revive your older machine.)

Spyware and viruses aren't the only reason some OSes slow down: a lot of that has to do with things like the Windows Registry, which grows with each new application installed on the machine.

So does file systems. Your point?

My point? My point is the Windows Registry is loaded into memory all the time. No system loads all files into memory.

I've tried Xubuntu and the memory usage is very close to standard Ubuntu, especially in the latest releases with the heavy focus of optimization in Gnome. The biggest sucker of RAM and other resources is OpenOffice and Firefox, both of which are used in Xubuntu. The difference seems to be about 25MB right now, and each gnome release reduces the memory a bit so the difference should become near zero pretty soon.

Have you even tried Xubuntu? It does not use OpenOffice, instead it uses Abiword and Gnumeric. Nor does it use as much RAM as Ubuntu on bootup: on my Pentium II 350 Mhz box it consumes about 45 Mb on bootup, versus like 100 Mb with normal Ubuntu.

well ubuntu is not for older hardware... for that you'll be better served with DSL or Puppy... Ubuntu aims at being a distro that gives you the best features not the smalles footprint.

1Gb may be a lot of ram but it's not that much anyway... I think 1Gb of medium quality ram is about 100 €... not that much money after all...

Knot2 is just a development release, far from beign the final one... which is sceduled for release in oktober I think... anyway I have it running on my desktop and it's already pretty stable... some apps crash from time to time, but the system itself never crashed. this despite the fact that it's, as I sayd a development version, i.e. unstable, and that I mess around a lot with it to find the bugs and issues.

My scanner (epson 2580) was having some problems with dapper, but with edgy it runs perfectly, out of the box... probably the new sane release, and also my not so linux friendly audio hardware (terratec DMX 6fire) works fine with esd (wasn't in dapper).

I tried the new upstart, which is supposed to completely replace init, and it is working well, stable and slightly faster than init.

so all in all... though the screenshots don't really show something new, under the hood there is some good work going on.

>> well ubuntu is not for older hardware... for that you'll be better served with DSL or Puppy... Ubuntu aims at being a distro that gives you the best features not the smalles footprint.

You're taking two extremes here, Ubuntu and DSL, or Puppy, are all fine distros, but a little less old stuff, say, a Pentium2 128MB RAM laptop, can handle a lot more than Damn Small Linux (no experience with Puppy, but that's rather limited too I think) and Damn Small isn't that user friendly for the novice. After all, it's mainly a portable Live OS, and it runs on the real old PCs.
Installing it is a little hassle because you have to partition the drive, etc.

To name a few good alternative examples for limited hardware: Xubuntu (easiest choice, but if your RAM is limited you need the "alternate" install disk, not the common, live+install disk); Vector, Zenwalk, or Debian with Xfce or Fluxbox. A.o.

Edited 2006-09-03 15:01

You have to keep in mind there are many variables in Linux that make it run better on older hardware. Hoping a new version of Ubuntu will work well on older hardware is a little too general. Gnome and KDE might not be the best bets for older hardware since of their memory use. Smaller light-weight DE's such as XFCE will make a difference but probably not a new version of Ubuntu. In general you will see a speed increase in applications compiled with the latest GCC 4 release. Fedora is one distro where you will see this slight increase in FC6.

'If you search for the evidence you want, you will find it; even if it is not there.'

I'm in agreement that the user is only demonstrating what they want to see. This same task could easily be executed in Mac OS and Windows with 1GB of RAM. If the user wanted to proove at least something, the same task would be repeated in 256 & 512MB RAM and the differences measured.

This is rather poor editing from OSNews.

The user opened a big pile of applications and didn't worked on any of them. What is there to see?

What it's trying to show you is that Gnome isn't as slow as hell. Unfortunately, the user didn't do anything with any of those applications.

I could say I'm painting my car black and its now 20% done. So it's in "Alpha". But that doesn't mean that my car has changed alot.

Ubuntu releases are like that. Software is the same, kernel is mostly the same... Very litle changes. Calling it "Alpha" makes it look like the Ubuntu guys are starting from scratch, but no. Most work is already done by other OS projects.

Well not really, alot of new packages and software updates and gnome is in RC state. Then they have to make sure it works with the new packages and there own tools and addons.

True - but Windows Vista is hardly MS 'starting from scratch' either - but that also went through an Alpha stage....

(BTW, just re-read my post and have to say I am not meaning to attack if it has come across that way...)

Edited 2006-09-04 03:00

I run Linux on an Athlon XP 2500+ with 512MB RAM and KDE 3.5,

The XP 2500+ is a nice CPU,on of my linux boxen runs on one.

who uses putty on linux o.O

I still have it on one of my Linux boxen 'cos I hadn't yet found Kssh.

twenex, I think the point trying to be made is the irony of using putty or Kssh after you said

"a couple of shell windows, a couple of compiles, PuTTY"

Why not just use one of those terminals you already have open and type 'ssh user@host'? =)


EDIT: twenex don't take this the wrong way. I don't mean this as an attack or anything. I seriously just got a chuckle out of the irony of using a GUI for a 100% command line app

Edited 2006-09-03 19:02

Oh, right, I see.

Heheheheh.

. I don't mean this as an attack or anything. I seriously just got a chuckle out of the irony of using a GUI for a 100% command line app


what ?
Is the guy not allowed to multitask ?

hahaha

what's wrong with just ssh

maybe if you show 40 divx movies running smoothly, that will impress me...

This isn't Haiku 2.0 running on a dual-core we're talking about! ;-)

That was what struck me. Running applications in windows isn't the same running them in Linux. It's clear propaganda

Under windows most libraries are built statically into the app or bundeled with it as a dynamic library. This means many different versions of the same library are likely running, or many different apps use many different libraries. At any rate this will slow down the system as most applications will load their own libraries rather than using the system provided ones. Worse off system provided libraries have to support 10 or 15 year old API calls which will also make them larger.

On the other hand, and especially under a DE like GNOME or KDE, different applications will often use the same libraries throughout their life as a process, without having to call their own libraries. Far more libraries are shared under this way of doing things than they are under windows. Less memory is consumed in the end.

Hence denpendancies...of course I'll leave it up to everyone to decide which they prefer.

However, X eats much more memory at startup than WinXP... so they both require more or less the same memory. Where it starts to pay off is exactly when linux has a lot of apps open, just because of what you said!

Microsoft's Auto Update would be running on Rosetta, increasing the usage slightly.

(Doh, you've got a G4, not Intel, my bad. In which case I would attribute it to poor code)

Edited 2006-09-03 17:29

"That guy loaded 4 instances of Openoffice."

oh no... that's just your deranged imagination