Comparisons

[Jonathan Hutchins]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Brian Densmore [mailto:DensmoreB at ctbsonline.com]

Brian, the only fair way to compare speeds between Linux and Windows is on a
dual-boot machine.

> Also, Linux can't be setup in five minutes as someone else 
> stated, but I can set up and fully configure all the software 
> including networking, office, database, programming and email 
> support in 2-3 hours. This is not possible with Windoze. 

I can do it.  Ok, never done programming support on a Windows box, but I can
get an office machine up and running in 2-3 hours pretty easily.

I really don't think you can get KDE or Gnome lean enough to run as fast as
Windows 95 on the same hardware, though I'll grant you might get some kind
of GUI to.  And note that I am comparing Linux to '95, because that's my
choice for a non-secure OS.  I don't want 98, ME, or XP.  For an office
environment, I'll use NT4, and generally it'll be slower on the same
hardware (than 95), although it depends a lot where you're observing the
speed.  On faster hardware, the speed difference between NT and 95 will be
less apparent.

A lot of the speed problems in KDE and Gnome are because the code is still
chock-full of comments and debugging routines.  That's one of the things
they improved in the last KDE release, they took out some of the debug code
in stable portions, but there's still a lot there.

And just as with NT, the fact that the XWindows system has more complex
layers and capabilities means it's never going to be as lean and as quick as
something like 95 that has a simpler, more direct structure.  As hardware
speed increases though, efficiency becomes less and less noticeable.
(That's what Microsoft counts on to cover it's code bloat.)  Both cleaner,
more mature code and faster hardware are going to mean that very soon it
will be much more realistic to work in a Linux GUI environment for ordinary
tasks.

Meanwhile, Windows own code bloat is getting worse and worse.  I'm running a
version that's seven years old because the I HATE the bloat of 98 - the
first thing I do if I have to work with 98 is switch off every "Desktop
Enhancement" feature I can find.

Is Windows 2000 really anything more than NT4 with a Windows 98 desktop?  I
haven't gotten far enough into it yet to give a real answer.  It actually
looks like some parts have been improved.  I will be learning more this
year.

XP though - that and the .NET (Nazis Everywhere Technology) crap are going
to be a real nightmare.  My company is planning to go to W2K this year, in
part so that we don't end up having to consider XP as soon as we would if we
stayed with NT4.

So while Microsoft continues to bloat it's code with features for the
average-and-below idiot, and worms it's way in to our desktops to watch our
every move, Linux is slowly and quietly cleaning up, tweaking, improving and
moving on.

Already we've come away from that 80's look of Win 3.1 and OS/2 with the
klunky icons and limited colors into stuff that looks as sharp and cool as
the newer MS products.  We took a slight diversion into the Macintosh weird
shapes world, but mostly people are discovering that it's more annoying than
helpful if your music player looks like a fish with a tube radio in it's
belly. The Windows world is still on that road because it takes them longer
to recover just see EZCD5, it's all wizards and strange buttons.

Besides, with Linux you have the option of trading features for speed, and
of tuning your system, which you can't do in Windows.  The average-and-below
user doesn't want to learn to do this, but he's buying Microsoft anyway.