I’ve spent the past week or so using Ubuntu Linux 12.04 and 12.10 almost exclusively, using my laptop for some work stuff that requires Windows.
I can hardly believe it, but I like it more than Windows. In fact, I can’t believe how much I like it more than Windows, even though the machine I installed it on is like 7 years old.
I even managed to install Inform 7 on it and it compiles one of my games as identically as it did on my Windows laptop. And most surprising is I installed several Windows applications in Wine and they run FASTER in emulation on this old machine than they do on a 2-year old laptop.
I’m always a bit wary about being very positive about Ubuntu, because, you know, I have had issues with Ubuntu, and if you start using Ubuntu regularly, you’ll have issues too. I also have issues with Windows 7, and have had issues with every OS I ever ran. Operating systems are incredibly complex, and things just go wrong now and then. But, once I have lowered the expectation by pointing out that no operating system is faultless, yes, I can warmly recommend Ubuntu. I’ve been using it as my main OS all the way since April 2007.
I’d suggest looking at the anti-virus software of that laptop. (I can recommend Panda, which has been doing a good job on my Windows computer, keeping it safe without slowing it down. Before I used Panda, I had Norton, which I don’t recommend for performance reasons. But that was a while ago, so maybe they’ve gotten better. All I can say with confidence is that Panda has been working great for me, and that sluggish anti-virus software really can slow a computer down, so it’s something worth looking into.)
Though on the other hand, it is completely possible for software to run faster under Wine than under Windows. Wine is not an emulator, but a compatibility layer: it translates Windows system calls into Linux system calls. Sometimes, those Linux calls may compute faster than the Windows calls.
I hope so, it’s a much newer standard. Though it may very depending on the usage, of course.
Since we’re talking about two different computers, though, it might just be a hardware thing. Perhaps your laptop has a slow HD, or a slow videocard, or something. Not much you can say about it without doing extensive profiling. Though trying to turn off some of the programs that run under your Windows install, like virus scanners, is always a good thing.
I’ve just recently switched to Mint, a variant of Ubuntu, and I have to say I like it a lot too. I must admit tho, it comes with very little installed, so you have to manually install a lot of packages. But that has it’s good points too (security, disk space etc).
I used to run Ubuntu as my main OS, though since getting this laptop I’ve been using Windows 7. It’s the first version of Windows which feels to me like they actually are competent OS designers. I still run Ubuntu in a VM though, because some things are just so much better in Linux, such as LaTeX.
I also lead on a youth technology camp, and we run Ubuntu LTSP fat clients. That is some amazing technology!
I’ve been using it as my main OS all the way since April 2007.