Why does Windows 7 still give a smoother user experience than Linux Mint 17.3?

[VirtualLarry]

I've been using Firefox in Linux Mint 17.3 on my Haswell Celeron G1820 with a single 8GB stick of DDR3, and using HDMI out from the iGPU. I haven't installed any proprietary drivers.

It definitely feels / seems like Firefox scrolling updates at sub 60 FPS, and that's why it's so jumpy.

I also had the experience of the entire PC "locking up" for like two minutes. When it resumed (I didn't have to reboot it), System Monitor (which was open all the time), showed RAM usage MAXED OUT (8GB), and SWAP also in use.

So something, suddenly, allocated more than 8GB of RAM, and the SSD was thashing. Have no idea what could have caused that, other than perhaps a bug with Firefox, having to do with an ad. (Or was I exploited by an ad on these forums? In Linux? Seems unlikely.. Maybe a RowHammer attack?.)

 

[Essence_of_War]

I'm going to ignore the "temporarily rowhammered" theory because it is tinfoil hat asymptotically unlikely. Dubious driver or bug in application seems way more likely. If this happens again, grab a terminal and run 'top' to figure out what the culprit process is.

which graphics driver are you using? That seems like the first culprit id check.

 

[TeknoBug]

I've used Intel drivers from 01.org, but required a bit of hacking around with my Debian (which isn't a bad thing), temporarely changing the lsb-release profile telling the respitory server that it's Ubuntu, etc. But it was worth it, video playback was smooth and scroling was good.

I used to have the documentations and links to guides to installing it, I can't remember them now but this one might be one of them:
https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?t=168661

 

[VirtualLarry]

I recently had reason to use my Haswell G1820 mini-ITX rig, which has an Intel SSD with a Linux Mint install that started at like 17.1 or 17.2 MATE, and has been upgraded to 17.3, and I also updated to a much newer kernel in the series.

Anyways, using the Haswell G1820 iGPU, it's much smoother than my other recently-build G1820 rig with Linux Mint 17.3 Cinnamon freshly-installed and then fully updated.

Scrolling smoothness is comparable to Windows 7 now, it's not "skipping" lines, it seems like it's scrolling at 60FPS, but it has a tearing problem, at the same spot on the screen. Seems like it's not vsyncing the updates right.

But it's interesting the difference. Seems like the "stock" Mint 17.3 uses kind of an older kernel. (3.16 series?)

Edit: To expand on that, my G1820 mini-ITX rig is dual-channel, 2x8GB DDR3-1600 (running at 1333), with the newer kernel.

I just recently swapped around a pair of motherboards, and moved the G1820 mini-DTX board into an ITX case, and expanded the RAM from 1x8GB to 2x8GB DDR3-1600 1.35V (running at 1333 again).

I didn't see a huge amount of improvement in that rig once I enabled the dual-channel with more RAM. I also installed a 240GB Kingston V300 SSD as the primary SSD, and put Win7 64-bit on the first half, and Linux Mint 17.3 Cinnamon 64-bit on the second half.

So I rebuilt the original case, with the original 120GB SSD with the Linux Mint 17.3 Cinnamon install that started this thread, and I put in my 4.0Ghz G3258 CPU + mobo + 2x4GB DDR3-1600 (running at 1400, somehow, according to the board).

Well, with the G3258 @ 4.0, rather than the G1820 @ 2.7, scrolling is MUCH smoother. So, possibly it was a CPU limitation? (Wouldn't that indicate the scrolling was handled by the CPU, and not hardware-accelerated like it should be?)

In Win7 64-bit, on all of the hardware, single- or dual-channel RAM, it was pretty smooth.