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"Ode To Ubuntu's Unity Dash". The Poem.

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Re: "Ode To Ubuntu's Unity Dash". The Poem.

#21

Post by keithpeter »

qznc wrote: post #16
lemieux wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have no problem on my personal laptop (i7, 8GB RAM, SSD), but on my work laptop (i5,6GB, HDD) it is horrible. I can wait up to 10 seconds before it appears... I just disabled the Super key binding on that computer.

HDD vs SSD would be my guess. I suspect it does a lot of disk accesses like loading icons, loading .desktop files, opening index, ... Is it faster, when you open it the second time?

On a very slow netbook, I noticed that Unity 12.04 (LTS version) opens quicker on the second and subsequent invocation than on the first. However, there is still a significant delay. I suspect the searches and time taken to build the various lenses is the reason. Gnome Shell appears to be a lot snappier because the search does not happen on that first screen.

Does anyone remember Mac OS Spotlight? Took ages when first introduced (10.3?) then got loads faster on the same hardware. I'm hoping the same will happen with Unity.

Re: "Ode To Ubuntu's Unity Dash". The Poem.

#23

Post by CSDude »

voyou wrote: post #3

Why is the Unity dash so slow, and why does Canonical not seem to have any interest in speeding it up? Is it faster on their testing machines? Is it significantly faster on new hardware, if you're using an SSD, or if you have more than 4GB of RAM, or something? I quite like Unity generally, but the ridiculous slowness of the dash is a constant irritant.

I have a good machine with quad core processor, plenty of ram, and a very good GPU GTX675m, but it still lags like it is the first alpha version of Windows Vista.

Re: "Ode To Ubuntu's Unity Dash". The Poem.

#24

Post by csmuk »

nisa wrote: post #10

It's a shame that the dash is so slow - but there are some solutions: apt-get install compizconfig-settings-manager and then apply http://askubuntu.com/a/68552/128873 You should also disable window animations and other funky stuff: http://www.techdrivein.com/2013/03/4-simple-tweaks-to-improv... It sucks that I have to write this here and that countless others wasted their time researching this.

Seriously people need to stop working around crap and just vote with their feet.

I just switched to Fedora 19 on the desktop and it's far better. It's lightning fast and everything just works out of the box; wifi, hibernate, SMB/CIFS networking, RDP. Miracle. Was zero config for me and it's polished.

It's got to the point, that I'll probably switch all my stuff to CentOS 7 when it comes out (this will be based on RHEL7 which is based on Fedora 19).

I just need stuff that works these days.

Re: "Ode To Ubuntu's Unity Dash". The Poem.

#25

Post by smithzvk »

sp332 wrote: post #5

It doesn't bother me that much because it never misses what I type. I can hit the Super key, then 't', then enter, and I know that it will eventually launch a terminal.

Actually, you can't really trust that behavior if you ever install new software, or even change the way you use the computer by say starting to use some other program that starts with a "t" very often. The Dash optimizes for programs that you run frequently and some other program might win out if you run it more often than "terminal". The Dash is based on giving feedback to the user; that's why it needs to be fast.

Re: "Ode To Ubuntu's Unity Dash". The Poem.

#26

Post by smithzvk »

csmuk wrote: post #24
nisa wrote: post #10

It's a shame that the dash is so slow - but there are some solutions: apt-get install compizconfig-settings-manager and then apply http://askubuntu.com/a/68552/128873 You should also disable window animations and other funky stuff: http://www.techdrivein.com/2013/03/4-simple-tweaks-to-improv... It sucks that I have to write this here and that countless others wasted their time researching this.

Seriously people need to stop working around crap and just vote with their feet. I just switched to Fedora 19 on the desktop and it's far better. It's lightning fast and everything just works out of the box; wifi, hibernate, SMB/CIFS networking, RDP. Miracle. Was zero config for me and it's polished. It's got to the point, that I'll probably switch all my stuff to CentOS 7 when it comes out (this will be based on RHE…

Two things here:

1) The cost of work-arounds is incredibly cheaper than surveying the distro space to find one that works for you.

2) It is likely the case that the benefits of using Ubuntu outweigh the cost of the work-arounds (at least this is true for me and probably many others).

Re: "Ode To Ubuntu's Unity Dash". The Poem.

#27

Post by ch0wn »

nisa wrote: post #10

It's a shame that the dash is so slow - but there are some solutions: apt-get install compizconfig-settings-manager and then apply http://askubuntu.com/a/68552/128873 You should also disable window animations and other funky stuff: http://www.techdrivein.com/2013/03/4-simple-tweaks-to-improv... It sucks that I have to write this here and that countless others wasted their time researching this.

Doesn't help me, because the underlying problem is that it won't show any results until they are all in. For some reason Unity needs to wake up my usually sleeping external drive and wait for it to spin up before I can even start the calculator, which is on my internal SSD.

There are some fundamental design flaws in the way the Dock works that unfortunately can be just "tweaked away".

Re: "Ode To Ubuntu's Unity Dash". The Poem.

#28

Post by csmuk »

smithzvk wrote: post #26
csmuk wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seriously people need to stop working around crap and just vote with their feet. I just switched to Fedora 19 on the desktop and it's far better. It's lightning fast and everything just works out of the box; wifi, hibernate, SMB/CIFS networking, RDP. Miracle. Was zero config for me and it's polished. It's got to the point, that I'll probably switch all my stuff to CentOS 7 when it comes out (this will be based on RHE…

Two things here: 1) The cost of work-arounds is incredibly cheaper than surveying the distro space to find one that works for you. 2) It is likely the case that the benefits of using Ubuntu outweigh the cost of the work-arounds (at least this is true for me and probably many others).

Sometimes

1) doesn't scale well. The amount of work just to get Ubuntu into a usable shape is increasing per release. I can't tell you the number of hours I've pissed out of the window on it over the last few years. It's the equivalent hack status of Windows now which removes every competitive advantage I have by using it to start with.

2) There are no explicit benefits to using Ubuntu other than you probably already have it. The benefits are disppearing faster as to be honest it's not really a fairly compatible Linux distribution. There are Ubuntu-isms creeping into other things and this is seriously bad news. Canonical just want their slice like the Unix vendors in the 1990's.

Re: "Ode To Ubuntu's Unity Dash". The Poem.

#29

Post by fps »

voyou wrote: post #3

Why is the Unity dash so slow, and why does Canonical not seem to have any interest in speeding it up? Is it faster on their testing machines? Is it significantly faster on new hardware, if you're using an SSD, or if you have more than 4GB of RAM, or something? I quite like Unity generally, but the ridiculous slowness of the dash is a constant irritant.

I mainly use gnome-shell, but I fired up Unity on my Ubuntu 13.10 running Thinkpad T400 (~4 year old machine, core 2 duo) with 8 GB of RAM and a Samsung 840 pro SSD. the unity dash comes up instantaneously for me; certainly less than 1/2 a second. I'm guessing the SSD makes a big difference, as it does with all other computer performance issues. A 128GB MLC SSD costs less than $100 these days, and using one as your OS drive is by far the most incredible performance improvement you can make on a desktop machine.

Re: "Ode To Ubuntu's Unity Dash". The Poem.

#30

Post by DanTheManPR »

jkldotio wrote: post #4

I was using Gnome-Do and later Synapse before Unity arrived and it is much slower which is one of the top UI felonies for new software.

Ditto for Launchy, which is cross-platform and replicates every feature of Dash. There are a lot of these search-while-you-type launchers out there, and none of them are as slow as Canonical's implementation.
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