I ran Tails (not 2.0~beta1, but something similar enough) from USB (+
persistence enabled, FWIW), and while it was slow at booting (from the
boot menu to Tails Greeter was 2m24s, and then another 33s to the GNOME
desktop) and starting applications, it performance pretty well after this:
* I had several heavy (in images and javascript) web sites open at the
same time in the Tor Browser, and scrolling was smooth. Switching tabs
took ~1 second, which perhaps isn't ideal. I tested youtube, and 360p
playback was watchable, but definitely not smooth. I wouldn't watch any
sports like this (well, I *never* would watch sport :P).
* I was running the following applications concurrently:
- Tor Browser, like above
- gnome-terminal
- Icedove with one IMAP account (with ~1000 emails, FWIW) configured
- Pidgin connected to one IRC account
but I was using only (after excluding buffers/cache) less than ~600
MiBs of RAM, so I had 700 MiBs to spare. Seems rather ok.
* Alt-TAB:ing between windows was perhaps a bit slower than I'd like
(1-1.5s).
intrigeri: > I have one more question. It would be helpful if you could run the
> following command in a terminal inside the GNOME desktop on Tails
> 2.0~beta1 (as the regular 'amnesia' user, *not* as root):
>
> gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface enable-animations false
>
> ... and report back if it improves, in any way, how you feel the
> desktop is slow. Thanks in advance!
Indeed, some of GNOME's animations were choppy. However, disabling them
did little (if anything) noticeable. The expected "instant" switch to
e.g. the activities overlay (when pressing the Win/Meta key) took ~1.5
seconds in both cases, and with animations on I just saw the very end of
them (very choppy!) so they even appeared the same. The Applications and
Places menus animation was pretty smooth, though, as were window moving.
Any way, messing with this pref was irrelevant for my experience.
All in all, it was very usable. Except the choppiness for some of
GNOME's animations and Alt-TAB:ing and Tor Browser tab siwtching and
video playback, the experience was comparable (or even better) to
running Tails from a DVD on much more powerful hardware.
