Is Ubuntu wrong for an HTPC or is it just wrong altogether?

Question

This is my story and I'm stickin' to it

Last year I built a Home Theater PC (HTPC) with an AMD A6-6400K processor. It has a built in GPU, just two other Intel systems in the household. I installed Ubuntu 14.04 LTS on it because it was latest and greatest and I loved Ubuntu 12.04.

The HTPC is purpose built. We watch movies, Netflix and stuff on the net. That's about it. It has been wonderful. It was a huge improvement over the, um, smart TV.

Then the Dec 12 2014 update to the 3.13.0.43 kernel gave an unrecoverable BLACK SCREEN OF DEATH. Had to switch off the power and then frantically try to get the grub recovery menu on power up. Learned how to set the default to the 3.13.0.39 kernel after that.

Boot hangs after upgrade to kernel 3.13.0-43

The 3.13.0.44 kernel update a month later corrected this problem. But the mousepad seemed slow and erratic. Changed batteries and swore a lot. Tried using it sober. Didn't make a difference.

Then another 14.04 LTS update to the kernel 3.13.0.45 occurred in Feb 2015. After that a Downton Abbey .mkv file FAILED to play using either vlc or totem (the default video viewer).

The top command revealed that the CPU running over 100% (single core) in play mode. Even when paused vlc was running at 50%. Another process called compiz was running at 90% and the allcore metric clocked in at 60% -- on pause. This made no sense at all.

Then I read this:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/compiz/+bug/1293384

and this

https://tim.siosm.fr/blog/2014/04/25/why-not-ubuntu-14.04-lts

I tried the GNOME/metacity desktop to avoid using compiz. The totem player almost worked but the picture was choppy and frames went missing. vlc rendered a terrible picture.

All of this happened with the default Ubuntu open source drivers (i.e. no additional drivers installed).

An earlier attempt to use the latest AMD drivers ended in frustration -- a 46" image rendered on a 50" TV and with no way to adjust that. An AMD tweak program didn't get installed properly so there was no way of adjusting an 8% underscan or even being aware of this bizarre default setting. But I got around that.

Follow the instruction here. And then do this reinstall the AMD Command Control Center. Then adjust to 0% underscan:

cd <the dir with the .deb files>
dpkg -P fglrx-amdcccle
dpkg -i fglrx-amdccle_<whatever_version_is_here>.deb

Everything works great again after successfully installing the AMD proprietary drivers and making adjustments for a normal screen (0% underscan). The episode of Downton Abbey now uses only 16% of a a single core running full screen with VLC.

There is a point here. Really.

The last two months of Ubuntu 14.04 Long Term Support (LTS) software updates have been hell. I'm used to software updates fixing problems that I didn't know existed. Annoying yes, but never that time consuming. A small price to pay for that sense of security.

But these last few updates have crippled this HTPC more than once, leaving me stranded on the road, as it were, with the wife asking why we aren't using Windows? Grrrrr.

And I'm embarrassed to say how much of my life was flushed away fixing these updates. Time I'll never get back.

After using Microsoft all my life, I switched to Ubuntu 11.04. Loved it. Same with 12.04. But 14.04 has sucked. BIG TIME. So now I'm considering these options:

1. Suspending all software updates except on a need-to-have basis.
2. Ubuntu is overkill and stupid on an HTPC. Install something else. Mint? OpenELEC?
3. Rollback to 12.04 LTS? Ugh.
4. Stick with 14.04 LTS and hope lightening does not strike a 3rd time?
5. It's time to move on. Suggestions? Anything but Windows.

This is a serious question.

Solution 1

What is going on? Most of your problems can be summed up with one statement:

AMD's closed source driver is awful.

And the open source one isn't very much better. It's probably better than the Nvidia open driver but it still has plenty of flaws and spotty hardware support. Often finding an acceptable outcome means manually balancing driver and kernel versions against versions of X and even applications.

You could try upgrading to the 14.10's kernel+driver+X with the HWE stack:

sudo apt-get install --install-recommends linux-generic-lts-utopic  

You'll be able to do something similar when 15.04 and 15.10 are released.

But in the future note the hardware support before you buy things. At the moment, if you want a frictionless experience, you don't buy an AMD GPU.

Solution 2

Compiz is an eye-candy, but for improved performance I always recommend installing CompizConfig Settings Manager ( which you can find in the Software Center ), and tweaking the settings somewhat: disable animations and use fast texture filter under OpenGL settings.

Among other things, get rid of start up services that you don't need.

Using a different desktop environment, like lxde or xfce, definitely helps alleviate the pressure on the system. Personally, I use Gnome, and before that - used Cinnamon.

If you are adventurous enough, you can even try switching to icewm window manager, which should be lighter.

More information on overall tuning of Ubuntu performance can be found here.

Comments

[Ismael Miguel]

Honestly, if you want UI performance and responciveness, use Debian. I've had IMPOSSIBLY SLOW performance on Ubuntu runnind Unity and with LXDE. Using Debian and LXDE improved the performance by a MASSIVE lot. You may install GNOME on it and you have a quasi-similar experience. (There won't be Ubuntu Software Center, but might be possible to install it somehow?). Just for the record, I had Ubuntu and Debian running on the same computer, using VirtualBox on top of Windows 7 x64. If you want easiness of use, stick with Ubuntu.

[Barafu Albino]

To build HTPC today, a modern medium-level i5 CPU with it's internal GPU is enough. Cheap and quiet.

[nyuszika7h]

"At the moment, if you want a frictionless experience, you don't buy an AMD GPU." NVIDIA isn't much better either. Nouveau sucks, and the closed source driver has its own load of issues too. In my experience, the open source AMD driver is more reliable than both.

[Diogenes]

My HTPC worked just fine before the Dec 12 update and I wasn't using any proprietary drivers. The problems all happened after the latest LTS updates. The AMD drivers weren't the problem; 14.04 was.

[Diogenes]

And now that I'm using the latest AMD drivers the HTPC works like it did two months ago.

[Diogenes]

I loaded the Gnome desktop and used the metacity option b/c it doesn't use compiz. It was then X that was using all the juice. Sigh - I can't isolate this bottleneck.

[Sergiy Kolodyazhnyy]

Well what do you see in top or htop ?

[Diogenes]

I'll add a screen shot of the Gome/metacity activity when I have a chance

[Léo Lam]

The NVIDIA driver is better than the AMD one, as in, it doesn't crash the machine or get stuck on a black screen when switching users. Pretty minor, I'd say. (yes, that was irony)