Why is my linux desktop so slow?

[theh0g]

Hey,

I'm new at linux (ok I know some server related stuff and some basics I need as web developer), especially when it comes to desktops. I installed Mandrake 9 and tried 9.1B, but it's always so slow, no matter what I run: KDE or GNOME. Well, everything looks like Windows 2000 on a low-end pentium machine, when you move windows it moves like something I've done in Pascal, ... I have a 1800 machine, RivaTNT card (it's a PC in office)..did I forget to configure something or set something or is this really so slow? (and don't attack me, I love the idea of linux and all ) :)

[wickedlester]

not trying to tell you what to do...but being new to linux i would suggest installing the stable 9.0 release. the beta is just that...a beta and is going to have several bugs. 9.0 runs great on my machine.

[theh0g]

I'm thankful for any reply, comment, ... :)

I had 9.0, but I installed 9.1b just because I thought it'd be faster.

[kjordan2001]

I'd check what's running in the background and kill any unnecessary processes and see if that helps anything.

[Xahid]

Check that, how many stuff you installed (packages)

you need to uninstall the unnecessary packages.

check system services, that how many services are running at startup.

I am running RedHat8 at 900 Mhz Celeron & 128MB Ram

and its running smooth as a Web Server, Samba Server, SQL Server, Wine. etc

Just using it for testing purpose.

[Clone5k]

Are you guys saying your Linux installations run as smoothly and as fast as Windows?

Lies! :yes:

For me, Mozilla takes 3-4 seconds to load up in Linux... Less than 1 second in Windows.

[Tran]

For me Mozilla seems to load up at the same speed as it would in Windows. Anyway, in my case, RedHat 8 runs smoothly for me. I'm not saying that the distro you use is bad, but like wickedlester said, it's a beta and there are bugs.

[neowin_hipster]

Do you have 2-d acceleration enabled???

It may mention your graphics card name in some cofig somewhere but you need specific modules in order to get it.

And about load speeds, try using a prelinker ;) Windows essentially loads all the .dll's up during boot. Linux doesn't. Using a prelinker will speed things up a lot. Mozilla is bloated. Even on windows its slow. Phoenix is faster.

Windows is much slower than linux. A lot slower. Perhaps you are using binaries for 586 or 386. Compile everything with the proper flags. like -march athlon-xp ... etc. I've noticed redhat to be the slowest distro i've used. Also, using a file system like reiserfs or xfs rather than ext3 will speed things up a lot.

[Dysphoria]

Ok you need to give us some info on your PC.

CPU, Mem, HD Space ... etc

When you installed linux, how did you configure your swap file, it should be at least 2xRAM, it depends on how much ram you have.

You said you have a Riva TNT card, so you can try and install the Detonator drivers for Linux that you can get from the Nvidia website. They should work with Riva TNT.

also check your startup services and remove the ones you dont really use, that way you'll freeup some resources.

You can find some help here on how to setup your graphic card drivers.

[Prasanth]

  Goalie_CA said:

Windows is much slower than linux. A lot slower. Perhaps you are using binaries for 586 or 386. Compile everything with the proper flags. like -march athlon-xp ... etc. I've noticed redhat to be the slowest distro i've used. Also, using a file system like reiserfs or xfs rather than ext3 will speed things up a lot.

Compiling everything will take a lot of time.

And linux is slow. X server + Gnome or KDE = pure bloat.

[Zombie9920]

  Panorama said:

For me Mozilla seems to load up at the same speed as it would in Windows. Anyway, in my case, RedHat 8 runs smoothly for me. I'm not saying that the distro you use is bad, but like wickedlester said, it's a beta and there are bugs.

It is Linux we are talking about man. It will always be Beta with bugs(even the stable releases). Linux distros have more bugs than Windows could ever dream of having(open source programmers squash old bugs and create new bugs in the process), they just aren't publicized like the Windows bugs are because Linux's user base doesn't make a pimple on the ass of MS Windows' user base(number of users) and of course Linux is Open Source. As with any other Open Source program.....Tons O' Bugs are to be expected but are accepted by Open Source advocates.

The sad thing is these Open Source advocates bash MS for bugs despite the fact that thier preferred software is plauged with bugs. Talk about hypocrititcy at its finest.

[BroChaos Veteran]

  Zombie9920 said:

It is Linux we are talking about man. It will always be Beta with bugs(even the stable releases). Linux distros have more bugs than Windows could ever dream of having(open source programmers squash old bugs and create new bugs in the process), they just aren't publicized like the Windows bugs are because Linux's user base doesn't make a pimple on the ass of MS Windows' user base(number of users) and of course Linux is Open Source. As with any other Open Source program.....Tons O' Bugs are to be expected but are accepted by Open Source advocates.

The sad thing is these Open Source advocates bash MS for bugs despite the fact that thier preferred software is plauged with bugs. Talk about hypocrititcy at its finest.

what in the hell are you talking about? honestly...

[Zombie9920]

This post was removed because it violated Neowin Rules or Guidelines

Edited February 4, 2003 by Neobond

[BroChaos Veteran]

your logic makes absolutely no sense. care to elaborate on why linux is more stable? what happens when you get bsod? have you ever even used linux?

you need to use linux first(no offense intended)

i'll elaborate a little: number of updates is in no way related to stability or bugs. for critical applications and webservers that need 99.999....% uptime, what is the OS of choice? nothing made by MS.

Edited February 4, 2003 by BroChaos

[Zombie9920]

This post was removed because it violated Neowin Rules or Guidelines

Edited February 4, 2003 by Neobond

[BroChaos Veteran]

you are far from ready for using linux as a desktop. it's not linux's fault. for millions of people, linux is extremely stable. you fail to look at the situation as a whole, and instead focus on your lack of linux experience. no one is forcing you to update everyday. applications are stable even without the updates. if you can't make linux look good, then i don't know what to tell you. linux is infinitley more customizable then any MS OS will ever be.

[Prasanth]

They update it regularly, that dosen't mean its buggy. The stable branch is always stable because it is.

  Quote

I know the last time I used it the kernel was at 2.4.19. I just visited kernel.org and it is already up to 2.5.59.

2.4.x is the stable kernel and 2.5.x is a delelopment release.

  Quote

Honestly, how can people be happy with constantly recompiling thier kernel and finding drivers for b@stard hardware that will work with the new kernel.

They are not forcing you to update to a newer kernel every time when its released. If you think its very difficult to update the kernel just use the kernel that bundled with your distro.

I think you have never used linux.

[Prasanth]

  Zombie9920 said:

(EDIT)HAHAHAHA! The irony of this pointless debate is you guys are telling me how the trash called the modern Linux is so great in a thread where someone is having issues with Linux(he had a stable release too). :shifty:

He said its slow. Agreed that the GUI is a bit slow. You said its buggy. Its not.

[theh0g]

  Goalie_CA said:

Do you have 2-d acceleration enabled???

It may mention your graphics card name in some cofig somewhere but you need specific modules in order to get it.

How do I do that? I just select Nvidia Geforce in xf86config, do I need to do something more?

[theh0g]

  Euphoria said:

Ok you need to give us some info on your PC.

CPU, Mem, HD Space ... etc

When you installed linux, how did you configure your swap file, it should be at least 2xRAM, it depends on how much ram you have.

You said you have a Riva TNT card, so you can try and install the Detonator drivers for Linux that you can get from the Nvidia website. They should work with Riva TNT.

also check your startup services and remove the ones you dont really use, that way you'll freeup some resources.

You can find some help here on how to setup your graphic card drivers.

I have Athlon XP 1600+, 256MB ram, Riva TNT.

I know about swap, I made it 500MB, I selected NVIDIA GEFORCE from card list (should be the latest driver included, right?).

I'll check for the services...

[Fotix]

  theh0g said:

  Euphoria said:

Ok you need to give us some info on your PC.

CPU, Mem, HD Space ... etc

When you installed linux, how did you configure your swap file, it should be at least 2xRAM, it depends on how much ram you have.

You said you have a Riva TNT card, so you can try and install the Detonator drivers for Linux that you can get from the Nvidia website. They should work with Riva TNT.

also check your startup services and remove the ones you dont really use, that way you'll freeup some resources.

You can find some help here on how to setup your graphic card drivers.

I have Athlon XP 1600+, 256MB ram, Riva TNT.

I know about swap, I made it 500MB, I selected NVIDIA GEFORCE from card list (should be the latest driver included, right?).

I'll check for the services...

The open-source NVIDIA driver that comes with Mandrake isn't complete; an official driver from NVIDIA is not included due to licensing issues. The linux driver on NVIDIA's website will give you 3D acceleration and other 2D acceleration functions that the driver included with Mandrake does not include.

I highly recommend getting and installing it. :yes: ;)

[warr]

Linux GUI is indeed slower than Windows. because Windows is just good at that. :woot: :woot:

but your problem can't always count on this.

you are using a TNT with how many onboard gfx memory? what resolution you use?

you can calculate how many gfx memory you need of your gfx card using your resolution.

and about the driver, it is reported that the latest 41.91 driver from NVidiot makes slower 2D, faster 3D. so you can change back to earlier 3xxx driver. ( i myself don't notice any slowdown in 2D).

[warr]

Linux X Window system use a Client/Server architecture.

your window clients: twm, kde, gnome are the clients. and the x server underlying is the one that handles with the drivers.

Windows: i don't know. because MS keeps everything to its own. :laugh: :laugh:

each has advantage. Windows GUI is fast. advantage as some of u pointed out.

LInux? you may not know. Because it is client/server architecture, linux has the remote window access for long long time already. u only need a simple pc with very small ram without hdd, and you can access linux/UNix. you are running the client, and and you are using it to access the server running elsewhere.

Windows? remote access? :rolleyes: :rolleyes: since WinXPee rite? :laugh:

[NeoMayhem]

  Prasanth said:

Compiling everything will take a lot of time.

And linux is slow. X server + Gnome or KDE = pure bloat.

KDE and Gnome are pretty bloted (KDE is worse), and I really hope they make it better in future versions :p

Linux is much faster then windows though, if you run Apache/PHP/MySQL, on windows and on linux, it is almost 2 times faster on linux while being more stable :p

[BarryJ]

Using prebuilt distros linux always seemed to run slow for me as well. Now I'm on Gentoo (a distro that is source based, so it's compiled directly on your machine - adding the right compiler options helps to optomize it for your exact system) and everything is faster than windows. Gentoo is considerably more difficult to install, though. And yes, it does take a long time to compile everything - a full system (kernel, XFree, KDE, etc...) rebuild for me took about a day, but the speed can't be beat.