What distros have you been testing recently?

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crosscourt
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Re: What distros have you been testing recently?

Post by crosscourt »

Did some more testing and even though Zorin OS Core and their XFCE version have memory leak issues it doesnt appear to affect other distros like MX19.1, Ubuntu Mate nor Ubuntu. That said there appears to be a small memory leak with Ubuntu and Ubuntu Mate.
I had an emergency and logged into the company site to punch in and within those few minutes before I left memory dropped from 70% to 32%.
Decided to retest when I came back without my company site and left the system to its own devices and again it dropped from 72% to 32%. Both versions of Zorin had this issue and Ive seen this before with previous versions of Gnome and distros using Gnome Shell.
No issues with my various KDE distros including Kubuntu who are a bit more frugal with memory than Gnome these days.

Its clear to me that given the memory usage to start is high, then you have leak issues, that its simply not worth using anything Gnome related which may include some XFCE distros.

Will slide back to KDE and avoid these issues.
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Re: What distros have you been testing recently?

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It appears the memory leak is confirmed with Ubuntu 20.04 and was also present in older versions with Gnome and Gnome Shell related distros based on bug reports.
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Re: What distros have you been testing recently?

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It also appears that the temps in the Gnome related distros are higher with the E6400 than with the KDE distros. I tested Ubuntu, Ubuntu Mate and both versions of Zorin and consistently temps are higher with all components spending much of the time in the 50s and many times above 70c. This was done on an E6400 using the Quadro NV98 gpu all distros using the Nouveau driver except for Zorin.
Same hardware with Kubuntu, Feren OS, and Neon shows a much cooler running system running mostly in the 30s and nver moving above 55c, staying in the 40s mostly. Tests were done by looking first at the baseline at GUI then coming to this website and using it for 5 minutes. I close the browser, reopen it and go to a video site and run the same video for 10 minutes and close it all down. Then I run the software updater to look for updates and watch to see how the system reacts.
In the Gnome distros temps jumped quickly but the KDE distros things stayed very controlled rarely moving above 39c. The difference is easy to see and I find it interesting.
Based on what I see presently KDE is the best choice whether its Ubuntu based or not.
AS I stop writing this comment,the cpu temp is 40c with KDE but with Gnome it would be 20c higher.
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Re: What distros have you been testing recently?

Post by chris »

Have you any data concerning Gnome 2 vs. Gnome 3?
I'm a bit fan of MATE (Gnome 2 related).
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Re: What distros have you been testing recently?

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Based just on my hardware and I tested systems(e6420/e6400) that use both Intel and Nvidia gpus(nouveau and proprietary drivers) the temp issue happened with Ubuntu Mate(Gnome 2 or 3), Ubuntu, Zorin both versions(I was surprised the XFCE version had issues0 and PCLinuxOS Mate. Memory leak issue varied in its severity but Gnome 3/Gnome Shell were the worst. Another issue was the processor fan didnt seem to want to work when in speedstep but does work when speedstep is turned off. I tested in both modes.
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Re: What distros have you been testing recently?

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I dont believe its kernel related as all the 20.04 Ubuntu distros are using the same kernel yet it only happens with Gnome/Gnome Shell related distros.
So far I cant get it to happen on Kubuntu and the 18.04 distros Feren and Neon also have no issues. Interestingly Debian running on the 4.19 kernel seems to have the best temps of any of my KDE distros and a far cry from the 65-70c temps I was getting with the Gnome related distros.
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Re: What distros have you been testing recently?

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Neon has had a lot of updates recently and had a large one today.
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Re: What distros have you been testing recently?

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Going to download Netrunner 20.01 and give it a try tonite. Debian was a nice surprise with my laptops, so going to chaeck out Netrunner to see how it compares. Neptune Im not sure if Ill bother as it doesnt seem to be getting much love these days.
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Re: What distros have you been testing recently?

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Gave Neptune OS a try and installed it but many problems. Issues with k3b and broken packages, then during the install suddenly I couldnt reach the repos. Evidently they have server problems. Also they havent released a recent updated iso so be prepared to install over 2000 updates. Not sure whats going on but what was a nice distro is now a mess.
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Re: What distros have you been testing recently?

Post by tlmiller »

I've noticed the same. And IMO, the one reason Neptune was so nice, the following of the latest LTS KDE in Debian Stable, they stopped doing, so they've become yet another "I changed the wallpaper, it's a new distro", but with massive issues. Totally not worth using anymore.
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