> I find it odd that there are so many desktop-ish things based on Android instead of Ubuntu.
That may be a reasonable thing to ponder until you try to run Ubuntu on a device which formerly ran Android. I thought the same as you and installed Ubuntu on my Asus Transformer TF101.
While the original Transformer sports reasonably dated specifications, it's provides a very neat, fast and responsive Android-experience.
I expected Ubuntu to offer the same, but with a wider-selection of (non touch-optimized) software. I was thoroughly disappointed. Just opening the Terminal Emulator took 5-10 seconds. Trying to open Firefox or any web-browser was a joke.
What most people fails to realize (I guess because Android has adopted the Java-is-slow-meme, either it wants to or not) is that Android is heavily optimized because it has to be responsive on ultra-light hardware. Given its feature-set, it's a very fast OS compared to most other out there.
Ubuntu on the other hand, is heavy enough to sometimes make my Core i7 wish it had more CPU-cycles. Putting Ubuntu on underpowered machines is something I wouldn't recommend to anyone.
As a contrast, i'm running ubuntu 12.04 with unity on an old atom netbook, and it runs perfectly fine. It does need about a gig of ram to run comfortably with a few apps open, so i suspect people having a bad experience are running into issues with the amount of ram in their system.
Android obviously handles low memory situations better. Ubuntu can't match its ability to free up the ram used by inactive apps.
Was this using Unity? I found Unity unusably slow on my old netbook — 5 seconds to open Terminal wasn't too far off the mark. But Xfce was so snappy it made that thing useful again.
I'm not disagreeing with your general point, but I wonder if a lighter DE would make a big difference. (Unless you were already using Xfce, and got the results you describe... that would be bad news.)
That may be a reasonable thing to ponder until you try to run Ubuntu on a device which formerly ran Android. I thought the same as you and installed Ubuntu on my Asus Transformer TF101.
While the original Transformer sports reasonably dated specifications, it's provides a very neat, fast and responsive Android-experience.
I expected Ubuntu to offer the same, but with a wider-selection of (non touch-optimized) software. I was thoroughly disappointed. Just opening the Terminal Emulator took 5-10 seconds. Trying to open Firefox or any web-browser was a joke.
What most people fails to realize (I guess because Android has adopted the Java-is-slow-meme, either it wants to or not) is that Android is heavily optimized because it has to be responsive on ultra-light hardware. Given its feature-set, it's a very fast OS compared to most other out there.
Ubuntu on the other hand, is heavy enough to sometimes make my Core i7 wish it had more CPU-cycles. Putting Ubuntu on underpowered machines is something I wouldn't recommend to anyone.