Kubuntu running slow

[ihsanshade]

Hello all.

I'm in need of some help. I installed Kubuntu on a machine I built last November and am finally getting sick of how slow it runs. The problem isn't something new, but rather an issue that I have been dealing with since the install. (I have just dealt with it, because I have been busy with grad school.) To clarify, when I say slow, I mean apps load much slower than I think they should. Some of the machines I work on at school respond much quicker and they are all around 3+ year old.

My setup is ...
Kubuntu 8.10 with KDE 4.2.
on...
G.SKILL 4GB (2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR2 1066
GIGABYTE GA-MA78GM-S2H
AMD Athlon 64 X2 6000+ Windsor 3.0GHz
Seagate Barracuda ST3250410AS 250GB SATA 3.0Gb/s

Could my problem be that I need to configure KDE? Or, could it just be that Kubuntu is a slower distro? I use the machine mostly for work, so net surfing, reading and typing docs, Latex coding, a little coding, and a little web design. I don't care about shine, only business. I just want a solid and stable machine that allows me to perform the above tasks quickly and efficiently. So, would switching distros and/or desktop environments help at all?

Any solutions or suggestions are appreciated.

[reed9]

My experience with both Ubuntu and Kubuntu 8.04 and 8.10 is that it's painfully slow. I've hesitated to recommend them or the corresponding Linux Mint versions because of how poor I've experienced the performance to be. This is on a mahine with 3 GB of RAM and an Intel Core 2 Duo T5550 @ 1.83GHz. I have found that other distros feel a little more responsive - especially some of the other debian based distros, ie, Sidux and Mepis. Personally, I prefer Arch Linux above all. But, happily, I'm testing Ubuntu 9.04 on a laptop, and it seems to have had a significant performance boost. I haven't measured it, but I'd wager my boot time was cut by at least 10 seconds. The desktop feels more responsive to me as well. I haven't had any stability issues with the beta, either, though you probably don't want it on a work computer. But the final release is only a few weeks away.

[ihsanshade]

Thanks for the quick reply. I have read about Arch and am considering giving it a run when I get some free time. Would you say it is a good distro for a work machine?

[reed9]

Arch requires a little more hands on attention than some distros. It's rolling release and keeps its repos pretty bleeding edge, so it's not a good idea to upgrade everything without checking the website for any issues. Packages tend to be vanilla as released from upstream, so when their are bugs, they mostly upstream bugs. One example is with KDE 4.2.1. Arch now has qt 4.5 in the repos, and there are a number of known issues with KDE 4.2 running on top qt 4.5. They don't mess with the packages so much though, so until it's sorted out upstream, there are some minor issues.

Anyway, point is, Arch doesn't hold your hand and it doesn't get in your way. It can be whatever you want it to be, but it's up to the user to decide what that is and maintain it as such. I use Arch on my desktop with KDE 4.2.1, and it definitely requires some attention at times and has a few weird issues. But that is mostly due to KDE 4.2 still being pretty new and needing to work out some stuff. I use Arch with XFCE 4.6 on my main laptop, and I've had no issues with it; it's been fast and perfectly stable.

EDIT: I should note, I've been using Linux for less than a year and a half, and have no particular background in computers. I don't want to give the impression that Arch is for experts only. I think in many ways it is simpler to maintain than other distros.

[ihsanshade]

Thanks for the advice again, I definitely plan on testing out Arch. I use to run Slackware in years past, so a non-hand-holding os doesn't intimidate me. The only problem is that I have kind of lost some of the knowledge I acquired during my Slackware years. Oh well, I guess I will just have to re-learn it. I wish an official 64-bit version of Slackware existed.

Do you think Arch is faster than one of the un-offical ports of Slackware like Slamd64?

[reed9]

You know, I only toyed with slackware a little and never tried one of the 64 bit ports, so I couldn't say. For non-64 bit, Arch is optimized to i686 vs Slack's i484, so I suppose in theory Arch should be a little faster. I feel Arch is easier to use than slackware. I was able to get a working Arch system from the ground up in about an hour and a half, including manual reading, my first time through, with little confusion. Slackware confused the hell out of me at first, and this was after using Arch for awhile before I ever tried it. Now I can install Arch and get a fully working system in about 30 to 40 minutes, assuming I'm not trying to install KDE, which takes forever to download. The Arch pros to me are 1) pacman is the best package manager I've used hands down; 2) BSD style init with the rc.conf file as the central point to configure almost everything, including modules and daemons; 3) Arch PKGBUILDs are much easier and intuitive to use than other equivalents like Gentoo's ebuilds or slack's slackbuilds.

Here is what Arch says about themselves in comparison to Slackware. Arch Compared To Other Distros - ArchWiki