Ubuntu 8.04 checkup, Part 2

Once I filled up a few screens complaining about how LogMeIn failed me in OpenBSD, I was too far along to report how I feel about Ubuntu 8.04 after not booting into it for almost a month, during which time I used a nearly identical Toshiba laptop running OpenBSD 4.4, lately using the Xfce desktop environment.

OK, there is a difference: The OpenBSD Toshiba 1100-S101 has 768 MB of RAM. The Ubuntu 8.04 Toshiba 1100-S101 has 512 MB.

It makes a huge difference. As does running GNOME and Ubuntu instead of Xfce and OpenBSD.

For one thing, I don't think the OpenBSD laptop has needed to use the swap partition even once in four intense months of work. True, it has more RAM.

In Ubuntu with less RAM, but still 512 MB, not less than that, I'm using tons of swap. That slows things considerably. As I reported in a recent entry, I don't think Ubuntu in its default state (GNOME) is all that usable in 256 MB of RAM. And one of the things that was stressing the system is/was a Synaptic update.

In 25 days of not booting the laptop, I still only had 46 packages to upgrade. That's one of the advantages of the LTS version of Ubuntu. I bet the 8.10 and 9.04 releases, especially the latter, have had hundreds of package updates in that same period of time (especially since 9.04 was only recently released).

So I'm happy that Ubuntu didn't make me roll in 100-200 new packages after almost a month, and I still appreciate the easy upgrades that Linux in general and Debian/GNOME/Ubuntu offer in particular. Upgrading OpenBSD isn't anywhere near as easy, and the whole process is as apples-oranges as it gets when compared to an apt-fueled Linux distribution.

But just from a look-and-feel standpoint, using Ubuntu with GNOME on this hunk of hardware (1.3 GHz Celeron, 512 MB RAM) is measurably slower than using OpenBSD with Xfce on a nearly identical-except-for-the-memory hunk (1.3 GHz Celeron, 768 MB RAM).

So that extra 256 MB of RAM in the OpenBSD Toshiba makes quite a difference, as does running Xfce instead of GNOME ... or that would appear to be the case. I can't account for every process, every service running in both of these operating systems.

And even though I have the OpenBSD 4.5 CD set on its way to my mailbox as we speak, I'm considering ... CONSIDERING ... spending the next few months in a Linux environment (maybe this very distro, Ubuntu) just to see a) how I get along in it and b) how it and I respond as I beat the hell out of it in the course of my day-to-day work.

About the only operational difference between Ubuntu and OpenBSD at this point (forgetting the differences in package/upgrade management) is the state of Flash video on both platforms. I'm not doing much work in video these days, so not having Flash 9 or 10 in OpenBSD isn't as much of a burden as it could be if I were doing more video work.

And I've pretty much accepted that if I don't run -current in OpenBSD, my applications will be frozen in time for the six months between releases. As long as everything works, I'm OK with that — although it does take quite a mental adjustment to go from apt-get update/apt-get upgrade or its equivalent in Aptitude or Synaptic (or get-slapt/Gslapt, RPM/yum, etc.) every day or every week to ... not doing that in OpenBSD. Yeah, I should probably run -current and see how that goes ...

But ... I could transfer over my considerable hunk of files to this other laptop, which also has the distinct advantage of a non-broken sound chip (with which I could not only watch more video but actually, you know, hear the sound that goes with it.

Or ... I could give Debian or Slackware (with Xfce in both cases) another try. But I'm a little wary after all the video issues I've had in my last few installs of both Linux stalwarts. That's the thing about Ubuntu: On my hardware, it tends to work without fuss.