This may be a post that some feel is a statement of the obvious, but I’ve been running my usual suite of work apps today on the 18.04 Beta on an ultrabook on which I usually run Ubuntu Gnome (Pop OS, because battery life has historically been much better with Gnome than Budgie) and I checked memory usage. VERY nice. Here’s how it looks running the same work apps:
UB 18.04 with TLP: 2.6-2.8 G / 7.7 G
Pop OS 17.10, no TLP: 3.8-4.6 G / 7.7 G
Pretty amazing. While I enjoy Pop/Gnome as well, UB feels substantially snappier on this hardware. Skippy-XD is also a much faster and actually more useful expose than Gnome shell. Hey, UB devs - Interested in taking that over? It works beautifully with UB and the hot corner applet, actually much faster than the Window preview applet.
Also, impressively, in the past UB even with TLP was drawing 6-8 W on Powertop, making battery life too poor to use for work. This vs 3.9-5.5 W for Pop/Gnome without TLP on my hardware. For comparison, Solus Budgie sucked down 7-9 W with TLP and a whopping 9-13 W without TLP in the past… That vaunted performance comes with a price.
Using 18.04 UB with TLP, I’m drawing (again, all with my work apps) 4.2-5.8W, good enough to give me about 6-ish hrs on a full charge with my 2016 Xiaomi Air 13, bringing it into a range I could use for work and about the same as Pop OS (6.5+ hours). I need over 5 hours without being able to plug in, so finally Budgie is in play for use at work rather than just at home on the desktop. VERY nice.
After reading your post, I install 18.04 on my HP Stream small laptop with SSD drive ( 32 gig) … Somekind of chrome Book like laptop and I also have the impression the battery is lasting longer
Impressively, with UB and TLP (or even Pop/Gnome without TLP), my battery life on this laptop is better than Windows 10 users say they get with the same hardware. We’ve reached parity, or better!
I may have been a wee harsh on Pop/Gnome too. That was memory usage later in the day, so I may have been hit by the Gnome memory leak. Starting fresh out with apps open, the memory usage is similar to UB…
I have just moved over from Ubuntu 18.04 64bit to UB 18.04 64bit. A completely smooth install - not a re-install - but just an apt install of ubuntu-budgie-desktop and lightdm, followed by a restart & log in to UB. This produced a massive performance improvement - faster login, and much much faster app loading and quitting. Even Firefox that ate memory & CPU in Ubuntu now runs lean & mean in UB!
The very handy system monitor applet (from github.com/fossfreedom/indicator-sysmonitor) showed some use of Swap with 2GB RAM. Upping memory to 4GB now gives max memory use around 60% and zero swap file use - and even better performance.
Added to this the superb desktop & icon design is great to look at - so uncluttered - and very functional.
Thanks very much to the developers of UB - a magnificent job!
Historically there were some startup speed issues with SNAP packages. However I know that canonical has done a lot of work to mitigate that issue. I personally have seen dramatic speedups over the last year. The other context as well, is how the snap package author put it all together. Sometimes the issue is not necessarily with the underlying technology, but more so on how the pieces were put together. I’m a heavy snap user, and other than the occasional application, the majority of them seem to be just as speedy. And I don’t notice any delay.
In the world of about 1 1/2 years ago… The two primary complaints about snap packages were both the speed of startup and the theming. Both of which have become considerably better over time.
Thanks bashfulrobot. Maybe I should try again. I can see that they make life easier for developers - but there seems to be a lot of overhead from the end user’s point of view…
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