On Old Hardware, Think Twice About Ubuntu 12.04

[tommo1982]

Now, this makes me think. I wanted to install 12.04 Xubuntu for it's long time support availability. Reading through the article made me wonder. I thought, newer is better. They fixed many things, added something nice ... but I didn't consider loss of performance to be an issue on my laptop. Now I am wondering whether my Intel P6200 with 2GB of RAM can pull off 12.04 even with Xfce. Maybe I should stay with 11.04, but download the 64bit version. I was hoping for 64bit 12.04 thought. Heard they are working on some fixes and stuff.

[Hamish Wilson]

In my experience it is mostly just desktop changes that cause problems. I am running a system currently with just 512 MB of RAM with the Fedora 15 LXDE spin and it is operating fine. Although, this laptop is not that old, but simply came with an insanely low amount of memory.

[Kivada]

I wonder if most of this regression is just caused by the Unity interface. It would be interesting to see benchmarks for 12.04 done on the classic Gnome Panel (which still exists)

Thats my guess, it's why I moved from Ubuntu Studio 11.10+XFCE to Mint 12+Mate on the old P4 2Ghz, It's Ubuntu, only better as It's Ubuntu pre Unity and Gnome3.

[curaga]

So you are still seeing PNG at Phoronix but at least SVG on OB? (without any force_format URL appending) Okay, I think I know the problem if you can confirm this.

Yes, exactly that.

[Camelek]

Not only without PAE...

Processors without CMOV feature will go out of new Ubuntu too.
That feature is older than PAE, so if your processor lacks CMOV it probably lacks also PAE.

Here is what about CMOV thinks Linus:

http://ondioline.org/mail/cmov-a-bad-idea-on-out-of-order-cpus