So far, not impressed

I installed Gutsy on my Dell Inspiron 1501 last night. I can tell you right now I am not impressed. At all. Some aspects have been great, such as the fwcutter package for my wifi card. But they have been far and few between. I find that when playing music on it, the music will pause and jump while the computer is idle. This thing has 2 gigs of DDR2 RAM and a dual core processor, the OS in question should be flying. But no, it is very sluggish. When loading a page in Firefox, my computer will literally freeze, my music will stop playing, and everything just stops until the page loads. That is even with all my little tweaks and optimizations. I have been running Ubuntu since 4.10 and have never had this much trouble (I have even gone through Slackware 9 and had less trouble). Now, in the Ubuntu dev's defense, I have gone through a couple machines since 4.10 and this is a relatively new laptop (only about 6 months old).

Another thing I really am not enjoying at all is the heavy GNOME environment. On openSUSE 10.3, it is great. Quite the speedy little thing. Since both are using GNOME 2.20, I really don't see a reason for my desktop to be this slow (it takes about 2 seconds for the Applications drop down menu to initialize).

This is a personal preference, I know, but I don't understand why Gutsy ships with Compiz installed by default. I really do hate all the eye candy stuff (except the cube, that is probably the most efficient desktop feature I have ever used), but all the wobbly windows, flame and water effects, etc... is just too much. I am highly considering downgrading tonight back to 7.04 (possibly side grade to openSUSE 10.3 which is on my desktop ATM and rocks).

BTW, thanks G-Mez for the link to the Lifehacker RSS feed.


EDIT: I will leave Gutsy on for another week or so just to let the updates come in and if it isn't improving, I will side/downgrade...