[amcintyre]

Today, 11.10 is so unusably slow it might actually make Windows Vista feel competitive.

Unfortunately, I'm having the same experience on my desktop. Unity didn't fit the way I prefer to work (and yeah, I tried it for a while, I didn't just dismiss it without some effort), and I switched to KDE. Holy slowness, Batman...my Windows 7 desktop becomes usable much faster (on the same machine) than the Kubuntu desktop. Applications sometimes take forever to start, with no rhyme or reason. I haven't chosen to explicitly install anything new--I just have the same basic boring dev and scientific computing packages I've always had.

And yes, Ubuntu used to feel like it was usable "out of the box" one major version ago. Then they started adding bells and whistles, and since then it's just been a steady degradation in performance.

Sure, I can probably go fiddle with a bunch of settings somewhere, but as soon as I have some downtime I'm going to try out some other distros that--hopefully--don't feel the need to add a bunch of performance-sucking features by default.