Re: linux noob

J.O. Aho wrote:
Kurt wrote:

As far as the speed (at least the perceived speed of the GUI), pound for pound (of processing power on your hardware) Windows is faster. It's not debatable, it's a fact. If you really want to see the difference, install Windows (Windows 2000 or XP Pro - their biggest hogs) and your favorite Linux distro with the same relative functionality (which will take you a while to build) on some lesser hardware and you won't need a stopwatch to see how much more responsive the Windows GUI is (over Gnome, KDE - I've not tried XFCE but from what I've read, its not in the same league as the others).

There is a major difference between say microsoft and linux, in microsoft the graphical interface is built into the kernel, while in linux and many other unix like OS:es it lies as an application ontop of the kernel and of course you have the option of using different window managers, the more bloated (most bloated today is Gnome2), the slower things will be, while a light window manager like twm will be quite fast and memory economical.
X Windows System can be run over network, allowing a server do most of the job while you see the stuff on your remote terminal, this ain't possible with microsoft, you need to run it on both the server and the remote terminal, which requires a lot more memory and cpu power from the microsoft terminal than the linux terminal.


Want to see a good example? Open some huge directory in a window with windows explorer (like the i386 directory if you copied it to your computer). Notice that it opens in - oh, about 3 seconds. Now open /usr/bin or something from Nautilus or Konquerer. Can you say "pack a lunch"?

There is a major difference here, it would be possible to make Konqueror and Nautilus to be as fast as explorer in microsoft, instead of examine the file itself and determine if it's a binary, script, image and so on, it could do as in microsoft and just look at the file names extension, you don't have to be smart and see that it takes less time just look at a file name than open a file and examine it's "header". Why examine the file "header" and not just the file name extension? You don't want to get the problem as so many have got with their outlooks, you think you have an image attached, while it's a binary file which installs a virus, checking the "header" had told the user at once that the file isn't an image but a binary.


If you want a Linux box that performs with XP, I'd say XP Pro on an AMD Athlon XP2600+ (32 bit) "feels" about like my standard Linux Desktop install on an XP3500+.

You miss a lot of things too, like security, free software, freedom to configure your machine for you liking and so on. But the important thing when comparing, is to compare things that does things the same way, comparing a linux program that does things correctly with a microsoft program that takes all the possible shortcuts will always give a misleading result, it would be as comparing a linux ls that is made to only list 10 files per directory with microsoft dir and list a directory with 10000 files, which one do you think would be fastest?


//Aho

No argument as far as the quality. Just stating the fact that, for whatever the reasons, people -at least desktop power users- who are used to the feel of a MS GUI will feel like they're bogged in molasses by comparison.

As far as examining every file to see what type it is, MS really doesn't have to. "MIME" is tied to filename extensions. Although there are some that get mis-identified, the accuracy is pretty darn good. And if you want to open a file with a program other than what the extension identifies it with, a right-click -> "open with" will do the trick. If you want to change the default program, just check the box to "alway use this program to open these file types". And about 99% of the time, the program you're looking for will be found in "program files". For a newbie in Linux, just finding the binary or script that launches an app can be daunting (/usr/bin?, /usr/sbin?, /usr/local/bin?, /usr/share/bin?, ....). Since Linux files don't have that sort of id "tag" with each file, examining the contents is the only way to decide - there are exceptions, like pdfs. But pretty much because they are hand-me-downs from MS.

It will be interesting to see how "Longhorn" Server in a minimal, non-gui configuration compares to Linux servers. Of course, now we're talking about doing everything from the command line, and the Windows APIs and COM, DCOM, WMI, etc. are a b1tch, both on the command line and in a programming environment. And you still have to pay massive bucks for the licenses. (First you pay for the OS, then Office, visual studio, exchange, additional licenses for server, additional licenses for exchange -over $3500 just to get a single server with one client up and running.......... all of which can be had for free using open source).



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