Ubuntu vs Debian - Unity vs Gnome3

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ZAFluffyBunny

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I have been running Ubuntu for about 4 years and I actually liked the move to Unity, but Ubuntu was never on my desktop environment, only my server that doubles as a media pc...

Now I installed Ubuntu 12.10 on my laptop and after 3 days I was ready to pull my hair out. Unity feels pretty good on the server, but was really driving crazy as a desktop environment. I can't even put my finger on what was bothering me, it just doesn't feel right. Random things also broke on Ubuntu: First it was the NVidia drivers, had to do a manual install to fix that and then the software center died after an update. I could not get it working again, which in theory is OK since I normally use apt-get, but it did not give me a feeling a reliability for the rest of the system.

Since last night I am running Debian Wheezy with GNome 3... Maybe that will annoy me as well :)
 
Just as a side note, I see E17 has had a stable release not to long ago, maybe check this out as well. As far as eye candy goes, E17 seems to be king.
 
I actually prefer Unity now that i'm used to it - I primarily use a Mac but my additional computer is running Ubuntu. Unity has many similar traits to OSX (I use the OSX dock on the side of the screen too, and mainly use spotlight to run apps) so I like it.

The move from 12.04 LTS to 12.10 wasn't the best idea I've had; as I've also had a few issues with NVidia drivers and crashing where I never had issues with 12.04; though I did notice 12.10's Unity UI was a lot faster and smoother than when I was on 12.04.
 
After a weekend with Debian I can say that I really do prefer Gnome3 a lot. With the Panel Settings extension it 's pretty much perfect for my purposes. Debian for some reason starts up slower than Ubuntu 12.10, but it could be Gnome3

Getting the NVidia drivers and wifi to work was also hard work, but mostly my own fault for not reading the manual:)

What always amazes me about Linux is memory usage. Win7 uses about 1.1Gb of RAM after boot on a clean install, it could be a the propriety software that comes with this laptop though, I have never really bothered to look. Linux is kind enough to use 420mb
 
ZAFluffyBunny said:
Win7 uses about 1.1Gb of RAM after boot on a clean install, it could be a the propriety software that comes with this laptop though, I have never really bothered to look. Linux is kind enough to use 420mb
Click to expand...

Must be all the OEM preloaded stuff. A clean install of Windows 7 uses a lot less RAM than that. However, that number increases very quickly one you install an AntiVirus and all the various apps that have processes running in the background. I'm running Windows 8 Pro that only has Photoshop installed and various updates and its using 700MB RAM. Opening a multi-layer image in Photoshop increases to 900MB. Not too bad. Even so, thats still more than double what your Linux installation is using.
 
vinodh said:
Must be all the OEM preloaded stuff. A clean install of Windows 7 uses a lot less RAM than that. However, that number increases very quickly one you install an AntiVirus and all the various apps that have processes running in the background. I'm running Windows 8 Pro that only has Photoshop installed and various updates and its using 700MB RAM. Opening a multi-layer image in Photoshop increases to 900MB. Not too bad. Even so, thats still more than double what your Linux installation is using.
Click to expand...

I bet you have no issues with graphic drivers though :D
 
vinodh said:
Must be all the OEM preloaded stuff. A clean install of Windows 7 uses a lot less RAM than that. However, that number increases very quickly one you install an AntiVirus and all the various apps that have processes running in the background. I'm running Windows 8 Pro that only has Photoshop installed and various updates and its using 700MB RAM. Opening a multi-layer image in Photoshop increases to 900MB. Not too bad. Even so, thats still more than double what your Linux installation is using.
Click to expand...

Linux is not shy on RAM. It pwns it.
 
Linux may pwn you memory, but it is all used for caching, so while it is in use, its not that its actually in use by applications or even the kernel, the kernel just use it to cache files/blocks from the hard drive, to reduce reading/writing to/from the hard drive.

Soon, with kernel 3.8 you should be able to use SSD as swap memory too, so if you really want to abuse memory you technically can without losing too much speed.
 
In short.
Canonical can take unity and shove it, its stupid, I also cant tell you why cus there is just something i dont like about it, feels like something is missing.
Gnome 3 is just another Tablet interface like Win8 and unity. but better.

Steve Jobs is probably giving an evil grin to the world from the clouds, Going haha! I made everyone's computer a tablet and you must now buy via a central store.
 
ZAFluffyBunny said:
What always amazes me about Linux is memory usage. Win7 uses about 1.1Gb of RAM after boot on a clean install, it could be a the propriety software that comes with this laptop though, I have never really bothered to look. Linux is kind enough to use 420mb
Click to expand...

It should use a lot more than 420mb. Memory management on Linux is quite different from Windows and is not an indicator of performance. Linux is supposed to use almost all available RAM.

As someone once plainly put it when I was still new to Linux and complained about the amount of RAM my machine gobbled up in Linux, "it (RAM) is there, why not use all of it?" Or to quote one of the articles I'm linking later:
Linux has this basic rule: a page of free RAM is wasted RAM.
Click to expand...

Primarily the RAM gets used for SWAP, Cache (system , buffer and hardware) and of course, shared memory (or shared virtual memory - sharing libs and whatnot between programs). In short, if you have large amounts of RAM doing nothing, you are wasting resources.

Code: 
$ free -m
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:          7968       6678       1289          0        130       4589
-/+ buffers/cache:       1959       6009
Swap:         7632         37       7595
Here is my system stats, note that I disabled RAM from handling SWAP and rather opted for a disk partition like in the past. I have just over a 1Gb free out of a total of 8Gb, my RAM is earning it's money.
:D

http://linuxaria.com/howto/linux-memory-management?lang=en
http://www.thegeekstuff.com/2012/02/linux-memory-swap-cache-shared-vm/
 
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