14 DAY TRIAL // Linux distributions are always heralded as the most secure operating systems and Windows is usually left in the dust, but it's good to know that it can also perform much better in other areas, like application and memory management.
It's a well known fact that if you open too many applications at once you will eventually slow down the system until it becomes unusable. This is a regular problem on Windows, which doesn't deal too well with memory management, but the same thing doesn't happen on Linux systems. There is even a video that shows 100 apps running in an Ubuntu desktop and the performance doesn't seem to be impeded in any way.
To be fair, Ubuntu 14.04 LTS doesn't even ship with 100 applications installed by default, but that shouldn't be a problem. The user who performed this test installed many of them from the official repositories in order to get to this insane number, and all of them have interfaces and all of them can be seen running in the memory.
Running 100 apps at once is no biggie
Someone had the curiosity to see what would happen in Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (which is powered by the Unity desktop environment) if he opened 100 applications at once. That's usually more than enough to bring a powerful system down, but that's not the case with Ubuntu.
"When I went crazy enough to open all of my 100 apps (100 windows) on the desktop to see the performance hit on Ubuntu 14.04 with Unity. Nothing happened really, except that Launcher and Switcher got full. You can see the good smooth animation of Switcher icons. Beautiful!" wrote Ali Najafi on discourse.ubuntu.com.
He did use a powerful Core-i7 2-GHz CPU, which is not very expensive however, so it should be available to numerous users. With 100 apps open at once in Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, the processor didn't go above 50% and the RAM memory was filled at about 75% (out of 6GB). As you can see from the video he posted, everything is running quite smoothly, although that's one crowded Alt-Tab menu.
Ubuntu 14.04 LTS was made available just six months ago. The LTS stands for Long Term Support and the developers from Canonical have pledged to support it until 2019. You can download Ubuntu 14.04 LTS right now from Softpedia and give it a try. You will find that the results posted by Ali are quite accurate.
