Cron/Xwindows

[Jonathan Hutchins]

On Friday 24 October 2003 11:37 am, Brian Densmore wrote:

> Comparing a current KDE with Win95 is equivalent to comparing
> Win95 to WinXP. 

Not really.  I'm talking about equivalent functionality.  Current KDE is much 
more like a good clean Windows95 installation than the bloat and confusion of 
98-2000-ME-XP.  

Yes, everybody talks about how clean and efficient XWindows can be - when 
running an environment that looks worse than OS2.0 and is even less 
functional.  To really be able to use it as a working environment, not just 
an incidental graphical display for program development, you need to use more 
of it's features, which reveals it's bloat and inneficiency.

It's inneficient.  Yes, it can be quick, but only if it's doing trivial 
things.

> I can tell you I can begin
> using KDE faster than I can Windows. I've timed it.

I don't know what you have timed, or how.  I know that I've run Windows95 side 
by side with Linux for better than three years.  Windows 95 is consistently 
faster and more convinient.  It's only with the need to add new software and 
features, and the cumulative problems with and aging Outlook97 installation 
that Linux has become the better choice for me, and it's STILL slower than 
Win95.

With the current hardware, Mandrake9.1 and KDE 3x are almost as fast as W95 on 
the old hardware.  I have yet to get the drivers and such rounded up and 
forced into the old W95 setup, so  I can't do a one-to-one comparison, but 
I'm pretty sure if I do W95 will significantly outpace the Linux environment.

Sure, you can buy a version of Windows that is slower, on some hardware, than 
a tweaked version of Linux.  W95 will do 95 percent of what that version of 
Windows will do faster and better.  People who put W95 down don't usually 
know much about it.  

One of the tragedies of Microsoft's arrogance is that they won't go back and 
clean up the very good code that was W95, patch the known bugs and tidy the 
loose ends.  If they did, we'd have a great lightweight operating system for 
older and low end hardware, without all the horrid cruft, self-deranging 
configurations, and impenetrable "wizards" that have been forced on us since 
then.  (Not just in Windows either.)