My Ubuntu 10.04 strategy

OK, so I had a not-so-great night running Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx — in release-candidate stage at this writing — and wondered what exactly made things so sluggish during a 2+ hour production session hacking away at Dailynews.com.

Was it Firefox 3.6.x swallowing CPU and memory? All the social-networking and cloud-integration stuff running in the background? Xorg issues (which come and go with every kernel and Xorg update)?

At this point I really don't know.

What I do know is that memory use went up as the night wore on. Running Firefox, gthumb and a terminal, the system was using 2 MB of swap after a couple of hours.

Not that use of 2 MB of swap is earth-shattering, it's just that I don't recall ever using even that much since I boosted the laptop's RAM to 1 GB. That's not enough to run the average Linux desktop with GNOME? Guess not extremely comfortably.

I've always said that GNOME isn't as much of a resource hog as many think it is. While it's true that apps such as Firefox tend to grab CPU and hold onto it, I really don't know why things went so poorly.

Since then I've done yet another software update as Lucid leaps toward the final 10.04 release, which is mere days away at this point.

I also installed the Chromium (nee Google Chrome) browser, which like its Webkit cousin Epiphany (installed that a week ago) and even the Gecko-based Epiphany of releases past doesn't monopolize CPU like Firefox.

That would be great if a majority of my work on a Web-accessed CMS required the use of Firefox ... or worse — Internet Explorer, which I'm obviously not running in Linux because I'm not that self-hating and also not running on my work-supplied Windows XP box because of (see reason I'm not running IE in Linux with the lovely Wine).

Anyhow, despite things going less than swimmingly, right now I'm committing myself to sticking with Ubuntu 10.04 for at least the next month.

I'm always saying that a Ubuntu release doesn't settle into true usability until at least a month after its release date, sometimes longer. Not that Ubuntu is in the habit of making improvements after a release date, but the inevitable show-stoppers often get at least a little attention.

Tonight at least, when I'm blogging as opposed to doing full "Web production," and using Chromium instead of Firefox, I'm quite enjoying Ubuntu 10.04.

I have used Gwibber to update a couple of Twitter feeds as well as my Facebook status - and to read others' updates on those same services. I like what the app does, but I can see my system and the app itself straining to do the job. I don't know all that much about Gwibber, but as much as its potential is something I'd like to have at my disposal, I'm inclined to figure out what I need to do to shut it off so it won't grab so much CPU even when I'm not using it.

More later ...