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I am not a Windows fan. I don't like Windows. But, for my curiosity, I temporally installed Windows 8 on my machine (a Samsung NP300, Intel Core i3, 4GB Memory).

I observed that it's a lot faster than Ubuntu: boot time, application start and so on.

Why is this happening? Is there any solution to make Ubuntu faster?

Ionică Bizău
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  • I agree with Eliah Kagan, you should give us more details what you are observing (e.g. which applications, what resources). Also note that for example Firefox compiled for Windows can have different performance characteristics than Firefox compiled for Linux. This is not limited to Firefox and comparing cross platform is seldomly an equal 1:1 comparison. Regarding hibernation @RajeshRajendran is right, even if you shut down a Windows 8 machine it does some kind of hibernation to speed up the boot process unless hibernation and this fast startup feature are not disabled. – LiveWireBT Mar 06 '14 at 09:33
  • @EliahKagan The main issue is the application start time. For example, when I was clicking on Windows "My computer" - the file manager was starting instantly. On Ubuntu 13.10 there is a timeout of about 3 seconds. Next time when I start the file manager on Ubuntu, it starts a lot faster - about 0.3s. I guess this is called cache, but I really do not like to wait. Another example: Right click on desktop, to change the wallpaper. On Ubuntu: first time I have to wait 5s, then 0.5s. On Windows the window is opened instantly. Even VIM starts slow on Ubuntu. – Ionică Bizău Mar 06 '14 at 12:26
  • @IonicăBizău When you say Vim starts slow, do you mean the non-graphical Vim, started with the vim (or vi) command issued in a terminal? While in general it is possible Windows 8 could outperform Ubuntu for your machine (e.g., faster/better drivers or suitability to the tasks you perform), a console program like Vim should always start very fast, even on a very slow computer, unless there is a lot running in the background. So I think this suggests there's some correctable performance problem in the Ubuntu system. What's the CPU and memory utilization as shown in top or System Monitor? – Eliah Kagan Mar 06 '14 at 18:01
  • @EliahKagan I think that vim starts slow because it loads a lot of plugins. Yes, the terminal version of vim. Here is a screen shot with the system monitor. Sofware Center started in about 5 seconds and Screenshot app in 3 seconds. How can I reduce this lag...? – Ionică Bizău Mar 06 '14 at 18:11
  • @EliahKagan You can see here the processes tab. I sorted them by Memory. – Ionică Bizău Mar 06 '14 at 19:24
  • @IonicăBizău That looks pretty normal. Can you show it sorted by CPU? If there are processes using more CPU than usual, it's one possible thing to investigate. Also, I recommend installing iotop (sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install iotop) and running it (sudo iotop) to see what processes are performing disk and other I/O. That may reveal something useful. You can copy the iotop output from the Terminal and put it into your question (by editing); you can also add the screenshots you've taken, to your question. Also let's look at disk usage; please give the output of df -h. – Eliah Kagan Mar 06 '14 at 23:21
  • This is primarily a comparison between Windows and Ubuntu so I don't think it's a good fit for this site. – thomasrutter Sep 10 '14 at 12:46

2 Answers2

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Windows 8 usually don't turn off the PC. It does some kind of hibernate shutdown.

And the about app starting, I'm also amazed about the launching speed of Windows 8. I think they load your popular apps in background.

Community
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Rajesh Rajendran
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  • Starting from Vista, there is a service called Superfetch, which preloads applications to RAM. sudo apt-get install preload does pretty much the same thing. – m132 May 14 '14 at 20:21
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There are a multitude of possible reasons, but in my experience Windows 8 tends boot a little faster, and load programs a little faster.

Boot time: By default pre-installed versions of Windows 8 on laptops have fast-boot enabled. This means your Laptop never shuts off even if you click shutdown your laptop is still on, and drawing precious battery life. It's just using a special low low power hibernation. The idea is to make Windows appear to boot more quickly, when it actually never turned off. Windows 8 actually boots quite slow. Compare it to XP's boot times and see what I mean. That said Ubuntu has never been a quick to boot operating system especially now that it has Unity. The server edition is pretty good, but that's because it has no gui.

Application start time: It's kind of unfair to compare different programs. The startup time of a program depends on it's memory demands. Before data can be loaded into the memory it must be copied from the drive so size comes into play, and both operating systems use different filesystems.

Things to keep in mind:

-Make sure you've given enough swap to Ubuntu, it should be around the same amount of ram you have. If possible provide swap on a different drive.

-Keep in mind that with fast-boot enabled in Windows there is less ram available for Ubuntu's kernel, and it can cause issues with Ubuntu. For example on my PC fast-boot prevented my root user from being able to mount and unmount partitions.

mango
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