i would be happy to hear some opinions on this.
i am currently still on 14.04 - 32bit. older PC with e3300 celeron & maxed out ram at 2 GB (ddr2) with an AGP 256 MB Radeon 9600 XT . performance is good and it was tamed (various workarrounds) over the years.
NEG
there are a few things that bother me. it would sitll freeze with some more demanding games (radeon drivers are not being helped by what i think bad fan or bad power management). i tried adding a newer nvidia PCIe card (mobo has PCIe and AGP, as well as DDR and DDR2 slots), but the darn thing wouldn't boot with nvidia drivers (blank screen), while noveau were kind of useless.
latest issue is conectivity with an Android phone. MTP freezes, i tried with USB mode and it also freezes on transfer of files. desktop frozen, disk running.
POS
the good side - it seems the OS is consuming arorund 350 MB ram. minecraft as well as a few other game s(mostly order software accelerated with few exceptions that do not freeze) work ok.free -m command for some reason is showing 980 MB used on boot as well as top.but htop, ksysguard and all show 350-380 MB
something seems to be occupying the CPU. average use seems to be arround 8-10% in ksyguard, htop 1-2%. anyway like i said system is responsive.
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today i tried 16.04.1 (32 bit) on it. RAM usage is a bit higher in live session (arround 550 MB in all tools). CPU usage is shown to be arround 2% on average.
the only strange thing i noticed was windows restore animation, which first stretched the letzter a bit and then corrected them. otherwise all was fluent. ofcourse it being live session i couldn't try the games, though i very much doubt that 3D wouldn't freeze here as well. fonts are clearer (at least to me) and the whole theme seems a lot easier to read. at least to my poor eyes.
what i am interested is - has support for mobile phones improved in any way? is the upgrade on such an old frankenstein PC worth it? would the improvements actually make much of a difference?
the PC is mostly used for browsing, pictures and videos organising and occasional hosted site maintenance. oh and some light gaming. since many games freeze mostly DOS games are played, some oolite, and games with linux engines (quake, doom). though there are a few Wine tries as well (Diablo 2, Morrowind).
so far i only read comments, reviews, articles and it seems 16.04 is a bit heavier on resources, with nice but not fully polished interface. to me it looks nice, but form live session i am not sure how often it would crash or if it would give me some issues with the games.
i am currently still on 14.04 - 32bit. older PC with e3300 celeron & maxed out ram at 2 GB (ddr2) with an AGP 256 MB Radeon 9600 XT . performance is good and it was tamed (various workarrounds) over the years.
NEG
there are a few things that bother me. it would sitll freeze with some more demanding games (radeon drivers are not being helped by what i think bad fan or bad power management). i tried adding a newer nvidia PCIe card (mobo has PCIe and AGP, as well as DDR and DDR2 slots), but the darn thing wouldn't boot with nvidia drivers (blank screen), while noveau were kind of useless.
latest issue is conectivity with an Android phone. MTP freezes, i tried with USB mode and it also freezes on transfer of files. desktop frozen, disk running.
POS
the good side - it seems the OS is consuming arorund 350 MB ram. minecraft as well as a few other game s(mostly order software accelerated with few exceptions that do not freeze) work ok.free -m command for some reason is showing 980 MB used on boot as well as top.but htop, ksysguard and all show 350-380 MB
something seems to be occupying the CPU. average use seems to be arround 8-10% in ksyguard, htop 1-2%. anyway like i said system is responsive.
---
today i tried 16.04.1 (32 bit) on it. RAM usage is a bit higher in live session (arround 550 MB in all tools). CPU usage is shown to be arround 2% on average.
the only strange thing i noticed was windows restore animation, which first stretched the letzter a bit and then corrected them. otherwise all was fluent. ofcourse it being live session i couldn't try the games, though i very much doubt that 3D wouldn't freeze here as well. fonts are clearer (at least to me) and the whole theme seems a lot easier to read. at least to my poor eyes.
what i am interested is - has support for mobile phones improved in any way? is the upgrade on such an old frankenstein PC worth it? would the improvements actually make much of a difference?
the PC is mostly used for browsing, pictures and videos organising and occasional hosted site maintenance. oh and some light gaming. since many games freeze mostly DOS games are played, some oolite, and games with linux engines (quake, doom). though there are a few Wine tries as well (Diablo 2, Morrowind).
so far i only read comments, reviews, articles and it seems 16.04 is a bit heavier on resources, with nice but not fully polished interface. to me it looks nice, but form live session i am not sure how often it would crash or if it would give me some issues with the games.