Xubuntu Speed Comparison?

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Adaemox

Xubuntu Speed Comparison?

Post by Adaemox »

How is Linux mint 7 XFCE CE compared to Xubuntu 9.04? XFCE on Debian Lenny flies, on Xubuntu it's pretty sluggish (I've heard it may actually be slower than Gnome on Ubuntu).

Does XFCE on Linux Mint rectify this?
Last edited by LockBot on Wed Dec 28, 2022 7:16 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Husse

Re: Xubuntu Speed Comparison?

Post by Husse »

Don't know about Xubuntu but Mint XFCE is pretty fast
It is not as lightweight as fluxbox so it is not for really low end computers
hunkirdowne

Re: Xubuntu Speed Comparison?

Post by hunkirdowne »

Xubuntu 9.04 and 9.10 seemed to be pretty sluggish compared to Gloria/xfce.

New to Mint. Thought I'd chime in. Recently trying several distros on two old Dell laptops (P-III, P4). So far, I'm really pleased with Gloria/xfce. Felicia/FluxBox wasn't all that great an experience and I really wonder why I was having the issues I had given FluxBox is supposed to be such a lower overhead than xfce.

BTW, I have not yet found any Gnome distro that didn't bog down these computers. KDE seemed to perform better than Gnome, but not as well as xfce.

Now back to my point -- Xubuntu 9.04 and 9.10 seemed to be pretty sluggish compared to Gloria/xfce. One caveat in my anecdotal evidence: I just repartitioned this HDD (20 GB). But all distros mentioned were fresh installs -- no dist-upgrade activity (on these two, anyway). I did change my swap location. I usually put it at the end of the disk but felt whimsical with all these unused partitions and put it at the front (starting with cylinder 11 out of 2,432). Not sure why that would make a great difference -- doesn't seem to get much use so far but I'm just now taking the system for a spin.

I'll post whatever relevant details I'm asked for if there's an interest.

Pity I don't have a DVD drive to install Gloria/KDE otherwise I'd give 'er a whirl. I might give another shot at Debian/KDE if I have the time and inclination.


-HD.
Husse

Re: Xubuntu Speed Comparison?

Post by Husse »

Hardware knowledge is a good thing to have
The beginning of the disk, to the left in gparted, is the outer part of the disk and the speed at which the disk moves under the read/write head is much faster than in the inner part of the disk
So if you need to use the swap a lot it is noticeably faster
(On a CD/DVD it's the other way round - the beginning of the disk is the inner part)
vrkalak

Re: Xubuntu Speed Comparison?

Post by vrkalak »

I have used Xubuntu 9.04 and Xubuntu 9.10 as well as LinuxMint-7 Xfce CE and the new LinuxMint-8 with an Xfce over Gnome.
I have a Debian Squeeze with strictly Xfce (no Gnome) and PuppyLinux 4.2.1 (Xfce). I love the ease and speed of Xfce, as you can tell.

What I have found that appears to slow down or makes Xfce seem sluggish is having the Xfce DE over Gnome or at least, depending on Gnome or gtm.
As what Ubuntu does with Xubuntu . . . runs Xfce over a Gnome base.
At the moment, I am running LinuxMint-8 RC1 with the Xfce Meta Package installed over the Gnome base. It's nice and fairly quick, but it could be faster.
Wait until the LinuxMint-8 Xfce CE is released. If it's the same as Mint-7 Xfce upgraded ... it will rock.

Running strictly a Xfce desktop, without any dependencies on Gnome. is a lot quicker. That's why PuppyLinux or Debian 5.0.3 -Xfce are so fast.
lagagnon

Re: Xubuntu Speed Comparison?

Post by lagagnon »

Another issue with Ubuntu derived distros (including Mint) is that by default they launch a large number of daemon services that many other lighterweight distros do not. These services are launched to enable newbies to have everything by doing nothing. That philosophy is carried through in Xubuntu. This significantly slows down the booting of the distro as well as consuming more RAM.
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Re: Xubuntu Speed Comparison?

Post by ibm450 »

lagagnon wrote:Another issue with Ubuntu derived distros (including Mint) is that by default they launch a large number of daemon services that many other lighterweight distros do not. These services are launched to enable newbies to have everything by doing nothing. That philosophy is carried through in Xubuntu. This significantly slows down the booting of the distro as well as consuming more RAM.

-o0o-
  • ok, you got my attention, could you please list these daemon services that consum so much resources / ram.
    cheers in advance.
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Re: Xubuntu Speed Comparison?

Post by JoeFootball »

Husse wrote:The beginning of the disk, to the left in gparted, is the outer part of the disk and the speed at which the disk moves under the read/write head is much faster than in the inner part of the disk
So if you need to use the swap a lot it is noticeably faster
Interesting! So for best performance, should my linux-swap partition always be the first partition on my hard drive?

Thanks!

Joe
Husse

Re: Xubuntu Speed Comparison?

Post by Husse »

Interesting! So for best performance, should my linux-swap partition always be the first partition on my hard drive?
Absolutely!
I have noticed a considerable difference in performance earlier due to where on the disk you are
Note that a CD or DVD is the other way round - it begins at the center.....
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Re: Xubuntu Speed Comparison?

Post by ibm450 »

ibm450 wrote:
lagagnon wrote:Another issue with Ubuntu derived distros (including Mint) is that by default they launch a large number of daemon services that many other lighterweight distros do not. These services are launched to enable newbies to have everything by doing nothing. That philosophy is carried through in Xubuntu. This significantly slows down the booting of the distro as well as consuming more RAM.

-o0o-
  • ok, you got my attention, could you please list these daemon services that consum so much resources / ram.
    cheers in advance.


-o0o-
  • So what are the un-necessary services you are talking about?
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lagagnon

Re: Xubuntu Speed Comparison?

Post by lagagnon »

ibm450: I have not forgot your question from over a week ago. I have recently removed my multi distro drive due to corruption and am restoring Xubuntu and Slackware/ VectorLinux to show you what I mean. I want to show you a printout of "ps aux" and "free" from both distros to show you what I mean. Bear with me until I finish loading all in the next couple of days....
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Re: Xubuntu Speed Comparison?

Post by ibm450 »

-o0o-
  • cheers for the heads up, ill be on stand-by till further notice 8)
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snuff

Re: Xubuntu Speed Comparison?

Post by snuff »

I couldn't get mint 7 xfce to boot so i went ahead and installed xubuntu 9.10 - other than boot around 10 seconds faster in xubuntu to be honest i cant really see any speed difference over Mint8 gnome as both are fast for me, system resources (with effects on) are slightly less in xubuntu but nothing to write home about - the main benefit for me as far as i can tell is that system suspend works fully in xubuntu both mint8 / ubuntu 9.10 system suspend was unreliable for me.
Think i will stick with xubuntu for the time being but I prefer mint so will be looking forward to giving mint8 xfce a try when it comes out. :)
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Re: Xubuntu Speed Comparison?

Post by JoeFootball »

vrkalak wrote:I have used Xubuntu 9.04 and Xubuntu 9.10 as well as LinuxMint-7 Xfce CE and the new LinuxMint-8 with an Xfce over Gnome.
I have a Debian Squeeze with strictly Xfce (no Gnome) and PuppyLinux 4.2.1 (Xfce). I love the ease and speed of Xfce, as you can tell.

What I have found that appears to slow down or makes Xfce seem sluggish is having the Xfce DE over Gnome or at least, depending on Gnome or gtm.
As what Ubuntu does with Xubuntu . . . runs Xfce over a Gnome base.
Please excuse my newbie ignorance, but I'm curious to know what it means to "run over a Gnome base"? Why do Xubuntu & Linux Mint Xfce have that architecture when it's not necessary (as per Debian & Puppy), especially given that it affects performance in a distribution that's designed for low overhead?

Thanks!

Joe
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Re: Xubuntu Speed Comparison?

Post by fox »

Mint 8 comes with a gnome base; to get XFCE you must add it to what's already there. In the case of Xubuntu, it isn't as pure XFCE as some other distros (I believe Mint 7 XFCE is among them). Xubuntu has a lot of gnome libraries and gnome dependencies in it; at least version 9.04 does. That gives it some extra gnome-like functions, but the cost is extra overhead.
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vrkalak

Re: Xubuntu Speed Comparison?

Post by vrkalak »

If you've used Mint-7 Xfce, you'd find it to be leaner and faster than Xubuntu.

I have downloaded and installed, every Linux distro that has Xfce as their main Desktop. I am an Xfce junkie. :P
And, I do have Mint-8 with the Xfce Meta-package installed over the Gnome base.

The new Xubuntu-Lucid 10.04 Alpha release is one of the fastest of the Xfce distros currently out.
Followed by Fedora 12-Xfce, VectorLinux and Wolvix. I even have Crunchbang with Xfce instead of Openbox. (Madbox-Linux)

I can hardly wait until the LTS version of Xubuntu-Lucid is done, this coming April.
Seems that Ubuntu finally realized that Xfce works better without so much 'bloat' and Gnome dependencies.

In a few weeks the new release of Mint-8 Xfce CE should be released, and I expect it to be just as nice as the last Mint Xfce was.
Maybe, even a little faster and just as pretty as Helena.
Last edited by vrkalak on Wed Jan 13, 2010 11:27 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Xubuntu Speed Comparison?

Post by JoeFootball »

vrkalak wrote:I am an Xfce junkie.
Thanks so much for all the info, and one could hardly argue with your allegiance to Xfce. I certainly knew of Xfce, but really only thought of it as another "wannabe" desktop environment, thinking that there must have been a reason why it didn't have an establishment like The Big Two.

Then I found an old Thinkpad laptop in of the back of a closet, and out of curiosity, installed Linux Mint 7 Xfce on it. Wow! I was not only pleased at how fast it was on the old hardware, but pleasantly surprised at what a full-featured product it was, and it now governs my humble farm of once-obsolete, former-dust-collector boxes running World Community Grid.

Thanks again. I'm learning more every day here on this priceless forum.

Joe
Bullfrog

Re: Xubuntu Speed Comparison?

Post by Bullfrog »

After having been a Microsoft guy for 20 years I first started playing with Linux about 5 days ago and have installed around 20 different distros (many on virtual machines) to get a feel for each of them. The first distro I tried was Mint 8 but after some graphics issues I started looking around for an alternative (although this forum was very useful in resolving some issues).

I have to say that I love the look and feel of Mint and the fact that I never seem to have to hunt too much to find the tools I'm looking for but I was surprised at how slow the standard release of Mint 8 is, particularly at boot time.

I b0rked an install of Xubuntu last night using netbtin which trashed my XP installation and so I've just decided to take the plunge and install a Linux distro as my only OS. As I'm using an older Thinkpad X31 with a 16MB ATI graphics chipset I had fixed on using Xubuntu to take advantage of Xfce. I stumbled across this post while checking that my instinct to place the Swap partition at the edge of the HDD would be a good idea and I saw the comments reporting good things about Mint 7 Xfce's speed.

I've just popped onto the Linux Mint webpage to see what was going on and was quite excited to see that Helena Xfce RC1 has been posted for download. So, I am downloading the ISO as I type and salivating over the prospect of a reasonably fast and beautiful OS. (As long as I can find an appropriate driver to make my ATI chipset play ball).

Just in case the boot time is still sluggish I'm planning to dual boot with xPUD for those "Must get on the Web now!" moments, I think that should cover all the bases.

I noticed that lagagnon mentioned a large number of services running which would be of limited benefit to many users, I wonder if anyone here is able to provide any more info on this as I'd be very keen to strip out anything I didn't need in order to speed things up a bit. As a Linux newbie I'm still not all that clear on how to uninstall core components and services.

Any advice would be very welcome.
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Re: Xubuntu Speed Comparison?

Post by JoeFootball »

Bullfrog wrote:As I'm using an older Thinkpad X31 with a 16MB ATI graphics chipset I had fixed on using Xubuntu to take advantage of Xfce. I stumbled across this post while checking that my instinct to place the Swap partition at the edge of the HDD would be a good idea and I saw the comments reporting good things about Mint 7 Xfce's speed.
Glad you found us! Not to discount Linux Mint 8 Xfce by any means whatsoever, but speaking of lightweight distros for older hardware, please also know that there's Linux Mint 8 Fluxbox out now and hopefully a Linux Mint 8 LXDE on the horizon too.

Joe
Bullfrog

Re: Xubuntu Speed Comparison?

Post by Bullfrog »

JoeFootball wrote: Glad you found us! Not to discount Linux Mint 8 Xfce by any means whatsoever, but speaking of lightweight distros for older hardware, please also know that there's Linux Mint 8 Fluxbox out now and hopefully a Linux Mint 8 LXDE on the horizon too.

Joe
Thanks for the info Joe. I'm a bit bewildered (although excited) by the many options available to Linux users. It's my understanding that Xfce is faster than KDE which is faster than Gnome, I believe. Which of the two others you have mentioned would be fastest?

Many thanks,

Bullfrog.
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