"Ubuntu 9.04 has arrived and includes the latest software and a
whole series of interesting new features, including a much faster
boot process. My enthusiasm for the new release is, none-the-less,
a little muted, and all because of a single driver: the driver for
Intel graphics chips. As the Ubuntu development team freely admits
in its release notes, under Ubuntu 9.04 the Intel driver has
"performance regressions". In plain English this means that
graphics on Intel chips are slower in the new release and that on
some chips the X Server may even freeze -- though there is at least
a workaround for the latter problem.
"The problem can manifest itself through various symptoms.
Ubuntu users have reported that Flash videos in full-screen mode
are jerky, 3D games run unacceptably slow, the desktop is barely
usable with 3D effects activated and, in extreme cases, even moving
a window can be so slow that the computer becomes almost unusable.
We have also observed some of these effects in tests on various
Intel graphics chips."
