These posts are starting to need better names. Maybe something like:
Linux Rant IV - Revenge of Gnome-Shell
So that went well. Not.
Debian 7.3.0 installed cleanly and booted. It looked great. But when I logged into Gnome, it was just as slow as anything Ubuntu did. Crawling. Awful. Unusable.
Diligent digging - aka, bringing up the system monitor and looking at what processes were eating CPU time - showed the culprit is named gnome-shell.
Some googling leads me to wonder if I didn't trip over a known problem in Gnome. Perhaps something in this thread about an llvmpipe being a problem is related. I have no clue.
http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?t=285415
In any case, Debian 7.3.0 running Gnome is just as useless on my laptop as Ubuntu running Gnome. And that makes me worry about (eventually) installing anything running Gnome on my desktop machine.
I am starting to wonder if I will ever get something to run on these laptops without significant pain. And it turns out that my wife's laptop has an ATI graphics chip in it, not an nvidia, so all this work on my laptop might not lead to a solution for hers.
I am just thrilled with all of this. Thrilled I say.
Going to have to discuss options with the wife. It may be time to throw in the towel and get new laptops. These were purchased in Feb of 2004. Yes, really. They are almost 10 years old. We could probably spend $400 each and get something much faster. Ben was telling me to do this the other day, and while I hate to admit it, he might have a point. Gotta think it through.
Such fun. Hopefully this is the last Linux Rant for a while. At least until George Lucas and/or Disney get their grubby hands on the rights to them. The sequels will probably be really painful.
