Ubuntu appears to be getting slower

[Edvard]

Can't remember where I first saw this, but it pointed to a link on Slashdot, which pointed to:

With the release of Ubuntu 8.10 coming out later this week we decided to use this opportunity to explore how the performance of this desktop Linux operating system has evolved over the past few releases. We performed clean installations of Ubuntu 7.04, Ubuntu 7.10, Ubuntu 8.04, and Ubuntu 8.10 on a Lenovo ThinkPad T60 notebook and used the Phoronix Test Suite to run 35 tests on each release that covered nine different areas of the system. After spending well more than 100 hours running these tests, the results are now available and our findings may very well surprise you.

http://www.phoronix....bench_2008&num=1

I thought things slowed down abit from 7.10 to 8.04, but 7.04? That's a while back and nobody's noticed?
Thoughts from our resident Linux camp?

[40hz]

I'm a little leery of performance claims based on benchmark testing. But I must admit that my experiences with the 8.10 Ibex release have left me disappointed with overall performance, and frustrated over several hardware issues.

The general feeling I got from 8.10 was a certain sluggishness not felt in 8.04.

Kubuntu seemed marginally better with regards to speed, but it also introduced a lot of hardware issues that were real show-stoppers for me. I think a lot of it has to do with the NVIDIA chipset on my mobo, but many of these hardware  problems weren't there when I was running the standard Ubuntu version. Jockey and KMix in particular were very problematic. Both apps would often crash without regard to whatever else I was doing.

A couple of other issues:

The Kubu Aptitude package manager seems to be a lot more cumbersome than it used to be.

DVD playback of movies is very touch and go. Totem is virtually useless since it sometimes works and sometimes doesn't. MPlayer is not much better. Also - if the DVD language selection  is set to automatic, Ubuntu now defaults to Spanish even though it implies that English is the default. The only way I could get consistent playback and listenable sound levels was if I used VLC for my media player.

Sound - don't get me started on the whole PulseAudio debate. (IMHO Pulse sucks.) Suffice to say sound is a major problem for me with the Ibex (Gnome and KDE) release. Once I'm fully booted to the desktop, my speakers start emitting an obnoxious low hum (around 80hz) that sounds like a ground loop. No amount of tinkering with various system settings fixes this annoyance. This problem doesn't occur when booting up under 8.04.

Overall impression - sluggish and buggy.
                                                                          nope..nope..nope..nope..

Not even close. I think you'd be better off giving this release a month or so for the updates to catch up with the problems.

I'll be keeping 8.04 as my production environment until things get better sorted out. As things stand, I'm thinking I'll just skip Intrepid Ibex completely, and wait for the next (Juvenile Jackass?)** release.

That's the same strategy I'm using with WinXP and Vista!


** Note: Sorry. But I'm one of those people who think the whole Ubuntu naming schema is asinine. It was cute way back when it was Dapper Drake. It's gotten less and less amusing to me with each subsequent release.

[Edvard]

Hmmm... disappointing. I thought 8.04 was a step in the slow direction, but this is giving me the heebie-jeebies.

Most reports are pointing at the recent kernel changes, but if that's the case we'd see the same kinds of slowdowns with other distros, right?
I'm probably not going to skip Intrepid, but I'm going to keep an eye out for what may be the real cause.
In fact, now that I'm thinking about it, I've been really questioning the 63 instances of console-kit in the process list, even though others have noticed it and found no benefit to removing it altogether. 

Is there any way to remove pulse audio without removing the whole shebang? Good thing Xubuntu still doesn't install it by default. Alsa+jack+realtime kernel handles all my audio needs (I play around with multi-track recording every once in a while), I don't need Pulse's mess trying to handhold everything in the middle of it. I have noticed that LADSPA plugins are noticeably, frustratingly noisier with 8.04.

Maybe now's a good time to backtrack to 7.04

[Edit] or maybe Debian... Yeesh