Thinking of switching to Kubuntu

[Guest]

I am currently a user of Ubuntu Karmic. Have used Linux in general for 8years now. I have run Mepis at one time and remeber KDE well enough to know i way around. However recently i have had various thoughts about switching back to KDE, especially Kubuntu.

I had read in one forum that Kubuntu uses less resources than Gnome (gnome having more startup stuff?). That's i bonus for me. But yet other sources say KDE is the worst resource hog of all DE's. True or not? I record and tinker with music apps. Ardour/Jack and recently got a high powered Windows app FL Studio 9 working well on Karmic. Resources are an issue. I have a dual core AMD64 2400 each with a gig of ram.

What advantage can you sale me on as far as switching to KDE/Kubuntu? Help. What do i not know about KDE and

[sithlord48]

Re: Thinking of switching to Kubuntu

install the package kubuntu-desktop and try it out .. by loging out and changing your session to kde.
that way you can tinker with kde and keep gnome. if you choose to remove it. then you will have to remove the kde packages..

[Ole Juul]

Re: Thinking of switching to Kubuntu

KDE is certainly a full featured desktop and that is why I use it. Yes, it is probably a bigger system, but I notice that people consider different resources as being important. To me memory and CPU usage are important resources to consider. Some people put a very big weight on hard driver space when they talk about resources. Personally, I can't see much importance in considering an extra 1/2 Gig on even a very old 12Gig drive. Each to his own, I guess. Since your concern is audio, I would think that the RAM/CPU usage is the more important to you.

Regarding your music apps. Ubuntu and Kubuntu have different sound systems now and what works in one won't necessarily work in the other. In fact it might conflict. I recommend you be careful there.

BTW: Hit Ctrl-Esc to see RAM/CPU usage.

[Guest]

Re: Thinking of switching to Kubuntu

Thanks for that advice. I do know that Kubuntu has no PulseAudio. I purposely REMOVED (actually purged) Pulse from my Ubuntu system. My audio under ALSA works 10 times better. I used 64 Studio for close to three years but thier development is lagging severely and so i moved back to Ubuntu. Pulse is a huge headache for audio...Kubuntu has no pulse...(that's sounds funny...lol..you know what i mean)

I did fire up the live disk and my M-audio 2496 card was recognized and so was my Nvidia (as they are in U). I did notice that there was a considerable amount more processes running in system monitor.

Are these normal and could some be shutdown? I shutdown quite a few in Ubuntu. to the point where i have a mere 12% of memory used on idle. Is it possible to achieve this in KDE?

[Ole Juul]

Re: Thinking of switching to Kubuntu

I too wonder just how many processes one can eliminate, but then how many of them take up any significant resources? Looking at system processes on my Kubuntu box right now, it looks like Xorg is the only one that even registers. In user processes, it's only the browsers. Most things are just sitting there waiting for a job - must be nice. (pun intended)

One thing you can do is change to the realtime kernel, if you haven't already. Regardless of the kernel, you can change the nice of some processes. I think it is a particularly good idea to make the audio processes a priority. You can set the audio priorities to rtprio 90 and a nice of -10 in the /etc/security/limits.conf file. Add the following lines:

@audio - rtprio 95
@audio - nice -19

That should make other processes less important of an issue, but I'm certainly no expert. It is possible to also add a line to control the memory usage. It looks like "@audio - memlock 512000" but I'm not sure exactly how to set it so I didn't. Besides I have 3GB so it probably doesn't matter here.

Anyway, this doesn't answer your question about comparing Ubuntu and Kubuntu.