
Lubuntu: Floats Like a Butterfly, Stings Like a Bee - linuxmag
http://www.linux-mag.com/id/7520
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ZeroGravitas
Not a great article but the figures are what I find interesting. It seems
these 'low power' distributions are often run on guesswork, prejudice and
rules of thumb. There's no scientific framework for measuring the actual
impact of certain decisions.

If such a framework existed then any Linux distro could use it and it would
catch stupid bugs in shared infrastructure that suddenly starts eating memory
or CPU and let people focus on areas ripe for improvement. Similar things have
happened with identifying power hogs, browser memory usage, or things slowing
down the boot process. Often there are many stupid bugs that can easily be
fixed without having to throw everything out and start again.

LXDE based Lubuntu seems to do better in this regard than the XFCE based
Xubuntu but I'd still like to see it formalised to the degree that you could
make informed decisions about the tradeoff between different browsers or
whatever and see standard Ubuntu get 10% "faster" or "lighter" with every
release rather than slowly bloat up till something breaks and people start to
notice. The less L/Xubuntu has to diverge from the mainstream the better for
everyone.

~~~
jerf
_Terrible_ article. Whines about choice, then concludes the latest choice is
compelling. Whines about fragmentation in Ubuntu, then at the very end shows
that he does understand that it is in fact all Ubuntu and all these "variants"
are just different installed packages. Spends about half of an article with
some interesting tidbits whining in general.

And in the end, his conclusion is wrong, too. The different between a 200MB
and 300MB memory load is not all that significant; if your machine can run, it
can run the other, with a bit of swap. (In either case you're looking at swap
anyhow, and bear in mind that I'm accounting for the fact we're talking about
soft limits, not hard ones. 300MB actual MB is different than 200 actual MB on
a 256MB system, but memory doesn't work that way, it is always fluctuating up
and down. 200- _ish_ isn't all that different than 300- _ish_.) If you've got
256MB of RAM, you'll pretty much be in the same dire straights with either
system, and comfy at 512MB; if you only have 64 or 128MB, you're screwed with
both choices. So, this is a pretty narrow window of applicable results.

It should be broken into two articles, one about memory consumption, and one
which contains all the whining. Then I could ignore the second one.

------
JeremyChase
I especially like how critical this article is of having so many 'flavors' of
Ubuntu, when all they really have are different window managers.

~~~
windsurfer
And different default applications. And different themes. And different goals.
What else is there to an operating system, anyways?

------
beta
What about Fluxbuntu? I thought that distro's goal was to be lightweight and
put little demand on system resources? In the article he mentions the distro,
but instead draws a comparison between Ubuntu/Xubuntu/Lubuntu. What?

