Why Is Ubuntu Slower Than XP?

What are your PC's specs?

If they are quite low, you might be better use Xubuntu (an official derivative of Ubuntu), it is designed to be a lot faster, but is based on Ubuntu

Speed is 1.4 Gigs, 1.5 Gigs ram, laptop is only 2 years old. It's got nothing to do with the system's specs since I got XP as guest on the same computer. So, I'm able to compare the 2 o/s fairly.

Some aplicattion in Linux are more slow that the same in Windows, for example: Firefox and Flash player. But the start of Windows is more slower but that install startup to accelerate some aplicattion, and take more memory in Ram. This the trick to Microsoft for a not than really more speed.

Hmm.. that is strange, I can't really tell you since I have no info to go off of though.

If Ubuntu really is too slow, you might want to try Xubuntu, it is an official ubuntu derivative for slower PC's

Anyone else want to offer some advice?

I wanted to test this as well, so when I had two exact same computers, I did a few tests and benchmarks and started a post on ubuntuforums.org. It's not much help when it comes to an explanation for the difference, but it does exposed varied views from community members.

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=849922

Sadly, I feel this too. It is specially noticed when playing videos. Firefox 3 on Ubuntu is a pain too compared to FF3 on WinXP on same machine. OOO the same. :(

danielgarcia, believe it or not, I am SOOOOOO disappointed with ubuntu that I'm heavily considering uninstalling it completely and bringing XP back. For an o/s that was upgraded recently to be beaten by a 7 year old system (XP) on speed, bootup, and apps is truly embarrassing and needs serious attention. On ubuntu, the scrolling is SLOW for pdfs and documents where OOO sucks! The windows manager is slow in bringing up files relative to XP. XP boots up in one minute on my other machine with same specs... on ubuntu, it takes 1 minute 40 secs. Apps come up faster on XP. Why is all this happening on a linux?

This proves that ubuntu has failed. To reiterate, a 7-year old windows system beats the pants out of ubuntu... this is very sad.

Once again, ubuntu has failed.

Why the past tense? Ubuntu has not failed. LOL. I have managed to improve performance by changing my desktop environment from Gnome to just a simple window manager. And improvement was very very good. I now use icewm. Also consider applications that are faster that does the same job. For example I replaced Firefox 3 with Opera. Though I still use firefox occassionally for compatibility issues. Nay Ubuntu has NOT failed.

My call here was to wake developers to make better code.

Most of the time this slow feeling (on scrolling for example) depends on the video drivers. Install the proprietary drivers for video (ig you got ati or nvidia) and disable the composite manager if you don't need fancy effects.

Ubuntu by far is not slow. Its probably the lack of hardware support
and as it was mentioned in the last answer. You should disable
composition through compiz and that should do the job. We are working
hard to solve the driver based issues :)

Regards,
Vikram

On Sat, Nov 28, 2009 at 12:08 PM, iwkse
<email address hidden> wrote:
> Question #43204 on Ubuntu changed:
> https://answers.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+question/43204
>
> iwkse proposed the following answer:
> Most of the time this slow feeling (on scrolling for example) depends on
> the video drivers. Install the proprietary drivers for video (ig you got
> ati or nvidia) and disable the composite manager if you don't need fancy
> effects.
>
> --
> You received this question notification because you are an answer
> contact for Ubuntu.
>