I dunno, but as someone on a laptop with an intel HD 4000... who can I thank for this ridiculous increase in performance? Default Ubuntu has gone from laggy to rivalling Lubuntu in responsiveness.
Intel, who is putting the effort into open source drivers and Mesa developers, I think.
I think the increase in desktop graphics performance has to do with the updates in Mesa 3D Graphics Library. Ubuntu 13.10 has 9.1, while 14.04 has 10.1.
Though I would have thought that Intel HD 4000 would provide decent performance even with the old Mesa. I'm on GMA 4500MHD (GM45, ThinkPad X200, circa 2008) and that feels laggy sometimes (with all special effect options I could find tuned to a minimum), especially when I compare it to my brother's desktop with gaming-grade video card. Most times I put up with it, but one time I decided to try the mesa 10.2-devel, and suddenly - what a relief, my old laptop finally feels like it has no problems displaying windows, again! There are some glitches when displaying some window decorations, but I'm ok with that, as long as the smoothness of work is back (I guess, that's the artifact of -devel version).
I'm running 12.04 with I7 Ivy Bridge HD4000 too and have no performance issues. Maybe it's op's hard drive? I'm running the system on an SSD and it's a night and day difference to the rotating equivalents.
8gigs of RAM :) ? in my experience not a single byte over 4GB RAM matters in linux desktop. I have (Ubuntu 13.10 on an old sonny vaio core 2 duo) 4GB and with all the workspace open and a virtual box with 1.5GB RAM allocated to it, i didn't reach 3GB (it stays around 2.7-2.8GB).
I have 16GB. And I have managed to use all of that, with a combination of calligra + blender + around 5 vms in virtualbox + 3 containers + background compiler update operations + 3 web browsers open all with a total of around 100 tabs at the same time.
I find it is just quality of life. If I use 4gigs, I can only have 2 real memory intensive applications open at the same time. If I had 8+, I could easily have anything I want open in normal usage and not break a sweat.
It sounds like you might be using a 32 bit version, which will not utilize more than 4GB of RAM. 64 bit versions have the ability to address memory beyond the 4GB limit of 32 bit systems.
With 32 bit versions of Linux the kernel is mapped into the upper 1GB of address space, and then whatever is left over from the remaining 4GB is exposed for general purpose use, and made visible to the user. The means that by default, even if you have 4GB of RAM, you'll never actually see anything more than 3GB exposed for your use, because the kernel has already reserved 1GB of RAM for itself. (these ratios change proportionately, when less than 4GB of RAM is present)
It's also possible that your system is hitting the 3GB mark and then paging virtual memory to your swap partition.
This makes me hopeful for my future. I have 4GB and am in the constant cycle of "close firefox so I can start my VM, close the VM so I can start Inkscape (with a big file), close inkscape so I can start firefox, and if you want to play one of these new GNU/Linux games: _close_ _everything_".
It honestly feels like there is some kind of problem with the system swapping (or failing to swap some memory) or some memory leak that I can't quite track down. Maybe something got fixed somewhere in the last two years...
But it opens new options. For instance you can mount /tmp as a tmpfs (in memory) file system and spare some write cycles from an SSD. Also, the system uses it as cache, which is nice.
Also SSD, and 8 gigs of RAM in case that might matter.
It's probably just that Lubuntu is my only reference point - it's so lightweight plain Ubuntu feels laggy in comparison. Doesn't make me any less happy with the increase in responsiveness though :)
I've been using KDE for years, but have been testing out the various 14.04 desktops to see how they are doing, and I don't know if love bloat or something but if my windows don't have animated resizing, minimizing, and maximizing the jerky behavior just seems so 90s to me.
