Linux Mint Forums

I've been using Mint for a few years now staring version 9. My previous distrbution was version 13 and it was fine. I've moved to version 17 and was very much dissapointed.

1) Mint 17 has outperformed windows in resourse usage. Previously I would demonstrate my friends how everything ran faster in Mint, even wine environment was running software faster than native Windows. Now I was shocked that running two browsers at thr same time consumes 60-70% of CPU. Windows 8 on the same laptop takes 40% to run three if them.

2) Power management is non-existent. For modern computers switching the screen of provides almost no effect on battery time. Adding TLP slightly improves battery usafe but not enough. Again, my laptop can run for 4+ hours under Windows with my networking. Mint 17 wastes the battery in 1,5 hours. With TLP I can extend this to 2.5 hours which is still rather bad.

I blamed it on Cinnamon and reinstalled a Mate version - no effect.
There is nothing exotic I do with my laptop. Most of the time its emails, skype and online games.
I have not followed all the distributions in between, but is there any chance you could make Mint what it was? A very efficient and fast operating system?

I think its embarassing for a Linux distro to be outperformed by Windows

I suggest you return to the working LM13.


As for LM17, wait for the next update release, which is 17.1 version, test it later.

How old is this laptop ? If its harwdare is too new to be well supported, especially regarding the GPU (running in software rendering instead of hardware rendering) this will make it very power/CPU hungry. If there is hybrid graphics, this needs to be set up in a special way depending on which graphic components are in the computer.

Its a Dell XPS 13 ultrabook. Its components are not ultra-new. Video is an integrated Intel HD 3000 and the chipset is Intel QS67.

aberlin wrote:I've been using Mint for a few years now staring version 9. My previous distrbution was version 13 and it was fine. I've moved to version 17 and was very much dissapointed.

1) Mint 17 has outperformed windows in resourse usage. Previously I would demonstrate my friends how everything ran faster in Mint, even wine environment was running software faster than native Windows. Now I was shocked that running two browsers at thr same time consumes 60-70% of CPU. Windows 8 on the same laptop takes 40% to run three if them.

2) Power management is non-existent. For modern computers switching the screen of provides almost no effect on battery time. Adding TLP slightly improves battery usafe but not enough. Again, my laptop can run for 4+ hours under Windows with my networking. Mint 17 wastes the battery in 1,5 hours. With TLP I can extend this to 2.5 hours which is still rather bad.

I blamed it on Cinnamon and reinstalled a Mate version - no effect.
There is nothing exotic I do with my laptop. Most of the time its emails, skype and online games.
I have not followed all the distributions in between, but is there any chance you could make Mint what it was? A very efficient and fast operating system?

I think its embarassing for a Linux distro to be outperformed by Windows

If memory serves (it fails often) that computer is also sold with Ubuntu as a preinstall so the Ubuntu site might be a resoource worth checking. Good Luck
PS: Rants often do you more harm then good.