12-15-2015, 05:13 PM
I recently set my Gateway LT40 up for dual boot with two Linux distributions, LL 2.6 and MX-15. I installed MX-15 so I could do a somewhat longer comparison of it with LL, as it was one of the distros I tried that worked out of the box. Also, it uses the xfce4 desktop as does LL.
First, I was concerned because my previous install of AntiX-15 had clobbered the grub menu items for LL. However, I was a bit smarter this time and skipped the grub install section of the MX-15 installer. Afterwards I rebooted but used the old grub menu to go to LL, then ran update grub there. This picked up the MX-15 installation and kept my LL entries clean and working.
Anyway, I configured MX-15 to be similar in look and feel to LL, adding my favorite program icons and notifications to a small left-hand vertical deskbar, with the rest of the desktop clean. This is my favorite way to compensate for the small 1280 x 600 screen. I then tried out my favorite games, Guayadeque music player, and Firefox browser.
Everything performed very similarly to LL until I tried playing Youtube videos in Firefox. The videos played very poorly. Since MX-15 comes with SMTube, I tried that, with very mixed results. Some videos had audio but no picture, etc. I messed around and made sure that MX-15 and LL were using the same flash plugin and installed SMTube in LL to see how it played Youtube videos through VLC. LL played videos inside Firefox and using SMTube/VLC just fine while MX-15 yielded variable results, some quite poor.
It may be possible to fiddle with things in MX-15 and get better performance, but I did what I could to make that happen, and it didn't. I have identical conky displays in both distros, and it was clear from them that MX-15 was maxing out the CPU at 100% during video play while LL did not (it was high, but not 100%).
I don't know the underlying causes. It could be a Ubuntu vs. pure Debian thing I suppose. And on faster equipment it might not matter. But for my little Atom notebook Linux Lite proved itself to be capable of delivering good video play while MX-15 came up short, both in Firefox and it SMTube/VLC.
Cheers,
Andy
First, I was concerned because my previous install of AntiX-15 had clobbered the grub menu items for LL. However, I was a bit smarter this time and skipped the grub install section of the MX-15 installer. Afterwards I rebooted but used the old grub menu to go to LL, then ran update grub there. This picked up the MX-15 installation and kept my LL entries clean and working.
Anyway, I configured MX-15 to be similar in look and feel to LL, adding my favorite program icons and notifications to a small left-hand vertical deskbar, with the rest of the desktop clean. This is my favorite way to compensate for the small 1280 x 600 screen. I then tried out my favorite games, Guayadeque music player, and Firefox browser.
Everything performed very similarly to LL until I tried playing Youtube videos in Firefox. The videos played very poorly. Since MX-15 comes with SMTube, I tried that, with very mixed results. Some videos had audio but no picture, etc. I messed around and made sure that MX-15 and LL were using the same flash plugin and installed SMTube in LL to see how it played Youtube videos through VLC. LL played videos inside Firefox and using SMTube/VLC just fine while MX-15 yielded variable results, some quite poor.
It may be possible to fiddle with things in MX-15 and get better performance, but I did what I could to make that happen, and it didn't. I have identical conky displays in both distros, and it was clear from them that MX-15 was maxing out the CPU at 100% during video play while LL did not (it was high, but not 100%).
I don't know the underlying causes. It could be a Ubuntu vs. pure Debian thing I suppose. And on faster equipment it might not matter. But for my little Atom notebook Linux Lite proved itself to be capable of delivering good video play while MX-15 came up short, both in Firefox and it SMTube/VLC.
Cheers,
Andy