[GRLUG] does Debian run cooler than Ubuntu or am I just crazy?

[John-Thomas Richards]

On Tue, May 25, 2010 at 01:46:37PM -0400, Ben Rousch wrote:
> On Tue, May 25, 2010 at 1:30 PM, John-Thomas Richards <jtr at jrichards.org> wrote:
> > When my laptop died I installed Ubuntu (Karmic then betas of Lucid) onto
> > my wife's HP dv6700 laptop.  She had all kinds of overheating issues
> > with Vista.  I expected Linux to run cooler.  It didn't.  When I did an
> > rsync of my home folder (~70GB) onto a USB hard drive, the laptop
> > overheated and shut down.  If I watched a flash video for too long it
> > would overheat, even if I used a cooling pad.  Last week I installed
> > Debian instead of Ubuntu.  (You know, I've come to appreciate Ubuntu's
> > polish a bit...)  I noticed the temperature seemed to be a bit lower
> > than it was under Ubuntu.  About 30° cooler.  I just put in a DVD about
> > ten minutes ago and began to rip it to an .avi.  The temperature is
> > running about 135°—without the laptop's fan on full speed!
> >
> > Am I missing something?  Could two very closely related Linux distros
> > really function that differently?  Or is Debian with mencoder hitting
> > 125% of CPU really cooler than Ubuntu running just GNOME?  This doesn't
> > seem right.
> > --
> > john-thomas
> 
> Could it be the fancy desktop effects in Ubuntu hitting your GPU more?
> I don't know what Debian enables by default, but Ubuntu turns on some
> pretty effects if your video card is good enough.

Ubuntu is clearly more polished than Debian, but could those pretty
affects have that great a difference?  It overheated during an *rsync*!
-- 
john-thomas
------
The road to wisdom? Well it's plain and simple to express: Err and err and
err again, but less and less and less.
Piet Hein, poet and scientist (1905-1996)