Hello everyone, been lurking for a while, then registered and finally decided to ask something.

I help out at this place that has about 10 computers with Ubuntu on 'em. I say about, cause there's usually something amiss with the hardware, so the actual number is around 8, most of the time.

Either way, we throw LAN parties every now and then, showing off F/OSS games. Thing I've noticed though, lately it seems not even old favourites are willing to work at decent pace.

The computers are P4 3.0GHz, 1GiB, GeForce 5500FX, mostly. I know, old stuff, but Nexuiz, for example, used to run okay on not-completely-terrible settings. These days, not so much okay. Xonotic, the reborn Nexuiz is more or less unplayable.

So I guess my question is, without all the gaming references, did you notice a... noticeable drop in performance on your Ubuntu 10.X? What do you think is the bottleneck of 'my' config, the RAM?

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I have built and support about 12 PC's with Ubuntu, and I have a couple of machines with older NVidia graphics which became very unhappy when I upgraded to 10.10. Even with the latest NVidia drivers. Regular freezing of the desktop needing a hard reboot, and noticeable loss of speed with GIMP. I've now got all back to 10.04, and they are all very stable, including a pair of 6 year old Dell Optiplex GX260's with internal Intel graphics. And BTW, the Optiplexes are noticeably faster and more stable than they were when running M$ XP Pro!

With older hardware, I recommend sticking with one of the LTS releases, either 10.04, or even 8.04 which I have on an older HP P4 which still runs happily as long as I keep the fans clean.

As early as two years ago, Phoronix has documented that Ubuntu has become slower with the newer releases: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pag...nch_2008&num=1 Note that this was long before pulseaudio reared it's ugly head on Ubuntu. If Phoronix ran those benchmarking tests now with the newest versions of Ubuntu, I have no doubt that Ubuntu would be running even slower than when that article was written.
If you want a light and fast *buntu, then install the light, fast, and pulseaudio free Lubuntu: http://lubuntu.net/

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