Ubuntu Hardy Disappointing
I’ve been very disappointed with Ubuntu Hardy. By far, the most noticeable thing after installing it is how much slower it is. If you have a beefier system, you probably don’t notice it, but it’s very noticeably slower on my current system. After using it for a while, it really slowed down, and I noticed that the scrollkeeper process was sucking 80% of my CPU. I just killed that process and removed it from /etc/cron.*, so it wouldn’t be spawned again.
I decided to pull up PostgreSQL to run a quick benchmark. I created a very simple table and added 10,000 rows to it, to see how fast SELECT COUNT(*) performed. The results were shocking:
CREATE TABLE test (id INTEGER PRIMARY KEY);
INSERT INTO test VALUES (generate_series(1,10000));
EXPLAIN ANALYZE SELECT COUNT(*) FROM test;
QUERY PLAN
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Aggregate (cost=170.00..170.01...) (actual time=63.064..63.067...)
Seq Scan on test (...145.00...) (actual time=0.034..27.452...)
Total runtime: 83.567 ms
(3 rows)
WTF!!??!? 83ms!?! On Feisty, the exact same thing takes 8ms, 10x faster than on Hardy! Something is seriously screwed up!
The first thing about Firefox 3b5 I noticed, is it sucks up way more CPU. Just scrolling down the page on some sites causes it to use 90% of my CPU, even with Smooth Scroll turned off. Just sitting idle it uses 1-3% CPU, which isn’t too bad, but FF 2 uses 0% sitting idle. The new UI is nice, though, and it seems “snappier” at times. Also, installing Flash works off the bat, which is really nice (before, I had to download the 32bit version of FF, and use it instead of the one that comes with Ubuntu).
One of the most irritating things about Hardy, is that Power Management is almost completely broken on my system. I set my display to go to sleep after 15 minutes… Three hours later, and it still isn’t sleeping. Now I have to turn my monitor off manually? Barbaric!!!
I don’t have any other criticisms for now. Everything else worked right away, and installing the proprietary NVIDIA driver was a breeze. Bluetooth support is enabled by default, and the usual GNOME improvements are nice… I’m sure I’ll find more to complain about later.
Update: after installing updates, Power Management is now working, and the entire system seems faster.
Update: Power Management is broken again… It works on and off.