Ubuntu 8.10 on the AA1 – follow-up review

March 17, 2009 Ubuntu 8.10 on the AA1 – follow-up review

EDIT: For some unholy reason, if you google “ubuntu review” this article comes in 4th place. If this is the reason you’re reading this, let me clear something out. This is not a review of Ubuntu, this is a review of Ubuntu 8.10 on the acer aspire one. The disk on the AA1 is so slow it can’t handle it. Ubuntu’s performance on laptops up to 5 years olds can be quite good, depending really specifically on the hardware, so don’t take this article into any wider consideration.

I have been using ubuntu 8.10 on the AA1 since I posted these installation instructions in mid-november.

In a nutshell: it’s terrible. Seriously, I hate it. The performance is unbelievably slow. It is constantly hanging on I\O, meaning that it’s constantly reading and writing stuff to the disk. Since the disk is really slow, everything is really slow. It’s my only complaint, but as you might imagine, it’s vital. I’m avoiding using the damn thing because most it’s impossible to work with any fluidity. If I had to take a guess, it’s probably GNOME that’s too heavy. I could try to install a different desktop environment like XFCE or LXDE, but it’s more stuff occupying the disk… it’s time to try something different.

Just a side note. Apart from performance, it works as expected. Any hardware problem is solved by installing sickboy’s kernels, and you can use it in any debian system, not just ubuntu.

So now I’m gonna try a different distro. This guy on the acer aspire one user forum highly recommends sidux. It uses KDE Lite. I’m not familiar with KDE nor wish to be, but what the hell, I only hear good things about it, might as well take for a spin.

If it’s good, I’ll post detailed install instructions like I did for ubuntu.

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