Quote:
Originally Posted by SameOldStory
I have a new system that I put together before Christmas. Lots of horsepower, more ram than is needed, fast hard drive, and a very fast Nvidia graphics card.
The biggest complaint was how slow it was. I use large dual monitors and with both "turned on" it was like I was running a 486 cpu. "Turn off" one monitor (with the video card software) and it ran better. Not good, just better.
And before anyone suggests replacing the graphics card the answer is No. I spent several hundred dollars for it and don't want to get rid of it so that I can run Ubuntu a bit faster. And if you haven't used dual monitors let me tell you it is worth every cent.
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To me, it sounds like it wasn't using the proper drivers for your video card. For Nvidia and ATI cards, there are the ones supplied by the companies that support everything, but are closed source so are not included by default (would be against the GPL to distribute things that link against GPL code along with the GPL'ed items, so to stay kosher, the offending things have to be separate and put together only by the end user). Ubuntu, and most other distros have utilities built in to allow easy installation, if the person chooses to. Most likely you were either using the VESA drivers, which rely mostly on the CPU, or you were using some sort of stripped down GPL friendly drivers. The community is hard at work to create better drivers that are GPL friendly, but it requires them to reverse engineer everything themselves, because graphics chipset manufacturers don't always want to help.
Quote:
Originally Posted by SameOldStory
The next complaint is one that would be taken care of in time. It seemed that whatever I wanted to do, I had to download one thing or another. There were more requests for permission to run some program or another than I have on Windows 7!
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You kinda have to do that with Windows as well. Windows with a fresh install has very little to work with. You get a basic browser, simple text editor, handful of games, etc. Basically just enough to get you to go online and find the other apps you want. In my experience, in my 20 some odd years experience with *Nix and Windows, most Linux distros give you more out of the box.