Feisty - bloat city

Been happy on Dapper for a while on a (old) 256 Meg PIII Toshiba laptop.
Freed up 5 Gig on the disk for a clean install of Feisty - what a fiasco.
Runs like a three legged dog - 3 minutes to open a terminal. Bloody awful.

Might be time to ditch Canonical - seems it has finally achieved its goal of being the new Microsoft.
Erk !!!.

I'd love to see Ubuntu give us a package selection upon install..

Ubuntu does have a bit of bloat(although it runs fine on all my PC's and laptops, one of which is a PIII with 512mb Ram). I sincerely doubt its anywhere near as bloated as anything out of Redmond.

What GUI were you using?

IGF

Standard Gnome.
I'll look at Xubuntu, but I just might say fuggit and put puppy on ...

I'm pissed off that they (Canonical) seem to have lost focus. Reminescent of Redhat before the Fedora spin-off.

I don't view it as any more bloated than any other big time distro that is trying to bring Linux "to the masses"..(ie, RH, Mandriva, Suse, etc..) Mandriva is so slow I just flat out can't/won't use it, same with PCLOS. I've not tried Suse in a LONG time, so it may very well have changed.

Good luck..

IGF

Originally Posted by syg00 Been happy on Dapper for a while on a (old) 256 Meg PIII Toshiba laptop. Freed up 5 Gig on the disk for a clean install of Feisty - what a fiasco. Runs like a three legged dog - 3 minutes to open a terminal. Bloody awful.

Wow. I must say, though, that going from "happy on Dapper" to "3 minutes to open a terminal" on Feisty sounds like something definitely isn't right with the installation. I actually found Feisty to be zippier than Dapper, mainly due to the performance tweaks Gnome received IIRC. This is on a 1.2Ghz AMD Athlon with 512MB DDR266. Have you actually tried to track down the problem? Or is it gonna be just Feisty bashing and distro hopping?

Everything was as slow as treacle. top shows no big CPU or memory consumers.
The wireless card (which works fine on Dapper) was a bit flaky on Feisty, so I decided to resurrect an old Cisco 350 (11b !!!) card. Everything has loosened up. Much better.


Mmmmm - looks like it might be a problem with the prism54 driver.
Investigation continues - lots of people bitching about wifi on the Ubuntu fora, but I didn't expect it to have an effect like this.

Originally Posted by MattJUK I'd love to see Ubuntu give us a package selection upon install..

Posted that request on saturday on the Ubuntu site ( http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=551641 )

A package selection during install isn't "Ubuntu" in my opinion. Remember that Fedora does this - and comes in 3-5 cds whereas Ubuntu has only one (a DVD is there also, of course). I find this a good thing: no need to download loads of discs when you get out with just one (and can then do customization over internet, if you're willing to). Another thing where Ubuntu and, for example, Fedora differ is the package selection. Fedora lets you choose programs and ends up having seven media players - then you spend time deciding which one of them is the best and removing the rest six. On Ubuntu there's a pre-decided set of packages (which you can change after install if you like), which means smaller installation size and less programs to remove right after installation. Debian offers a package selection during install, so if you like that route, go for it. Ubuntu is a "solid package" for those who are not interested, or don't know enough, in selecting the "right" packages amongh the huge load during the setup. Some people just want to insert disc, answer a few general questions and have the system installed in less than 15 minutes..others of course want to spend eight hours selecting packages, and still remove, install and replace them after the setup.

I find Feisty just as fast as Dapper, maybe even faster. Gnome evolved between those versions, you remember? They said Gnome became faster, and it did. I'm not sure how notable it is on new machines, but I really found it better..not that I'm using Gnome daily, but anyway. IndyGunFreak is right: Ubuntu is just as bloated as any distribution meant to work on a variety of machines with different hardware, for a lot of different kinds of people. If you don't want it bloated, you're more or less forced to drop the easy-to-go plug-and-play installations and such, and install some not-so-user-friendly-by-automation distribution and customize it yourself.

If you find your Feisty installation so slow, consider Xubuntu (XFCE desktop, or something even lighter, like wmaker), and definitely try to see if there's something wrong. In some cases there's a reason behind the "slowness". 3 minutes to open a terminal sounds like it's a bigger problem than just "bloated OS"..refer to the other threads here that cry about slow systems (one was on a recent Fedora; when an internet connection was on, the poster said nothing worked fast..interesting?)

For me, it only has to ask (for the default packages) if I want to install it or not; it does not has to offer alternatives during installation so the CD size stays basically the same. If I don't want compiz as I don't see any advantages in 3D sh.t, just allow me not to install it instead of having to break down my system after the install.

Things just get weirder and weirder ...
Ran with the Cisco card for a while, then decided to blacklist the (new) prism54 modules. modprobe/insmod of the old one failed, so decided to un-blacklist the new ones again.

Reboot, and everything works - no sluggishness at all with the netgear card.
Nope, I am not kidding. No system update, no nothing.
Things are just working.

Pretend I never started this thread - I certainly can't explained what happened.

Hope I'm not highjacking this thread...just wanted to throw my two cents in. I've been using Ubuntu for almost a year now after giving up on Suse 10.2 (too frustrating for a nube...though I will probably give Suse 10.3 a try as a dual boot when it comes out)and find it to be mostly problem free. I run Feisty now..it's fast and clean. I like the idea of only downloading programs and software that I need. I had no trouble loading up my Epson all in one color printer or my HP laser jet 1018 (which some say dosn't work well...it runs great for me). I have Windows on my 2nd hard drive (which I haven't used in months)which I will be dumping soon for another Linux distro dual boot..haven't decided which one yet. I'm not a gamer and I don't demand a lot from my OS so all in all I'm really happy with this. I watch movies, print and save my digital pictures, listen to music...everything and more. As I've said earlier..nothing's perfect; I've had to work my way through some problems..but over all I'm as happy with Linux as I am with this excellant site

I try many distros on an experimenting drive.....I have used usbuntu (Kubuntu, Xubuntu...) and have run into the "slowness" myself. I honestly don't understand it, but REALLY do not like it.

This was a new experience for me as other ubuntu versions all worked ok. If this is symptomatic I give a big thumbs down. This is certainly odd.

fogcat

This was a new experience for me as other ubuntu versions all worked ok. If this is symptomatic I give a big thumbs down. This is certainly odd.

Since the slowness is not a general problem (and therefore not a "bug" or anything), and I don't seem to suffer from it, it's either old/low-end hardware (in which case start thinking what you need and what not, and disable the resource hoggers) or a serious configuration problem or something. It's certainly odd that when you install a Windows, if it happens to run smoothly after install, it definitely won't be doing it after a few weeks or few months of normal usage..on the other hand, I haven't noticed this on the Linux boxes I've been running. So: start figuring out what causes the slowness. Is your RAM full? What's CPU usage? What programs consume most resources? What hardware do you run it on, and how?

So far the only thing I've found to bug the heck out of me, is when I try to remove a program I do not use to free up some space. A message comes up saying that ubuntu-desktop will also be tagged for removal. Other than that, I'm very happy with Ubuntu.