On Sat, 05 Mar 2005 11:41:32 +0530, Parameshwara Bhat <pbhat@xxxxxxxx> wrote: > > On my home computer and office computer, I have logged the time taken upto > logging in, it turns out that Ms windows(XP) is faster than Linux. On both > computers, dma is turned on.On my home computer, I have SUSE, Fedora and > Knoppix (debian) installed and on office computer, only Fedora. I have > measured with all the distros and while knoppix is faster of the distros, > still it doesn't measure upto Windows in speed. Both fedora and SUSE take > about one and a times longer time, evrything else remaining same. > > Any comments ? Or am I missing something ? > > Parameshwara Bhat. > This is all in my personal experience. I am NOT someone with acess to test suites and such so there. XP tends to faster when starting up anything. 1. Boot ups are faster unless you strip out the HAL, kudzu, and CUPS services oh yeah and turn off graphical boot splashes. 2. Start up times of apps are faster. A number of people have already gone over some of the tricks XP uses in order to achieve this speed. Linux in my experience is snappier once the application is up and handles a larger number of apps running and doing things in parelllel better than XP. My disk still churns of like 4 minutes after Windows comes all the way up and everything drags till windows finishes loading all the crap it backgrounded. I would rather the OS be "honest" and only background the things that should logically be backgrounded and lose the time up front. The windowing system xorg has still got a way to go in terms of the smoothness of menu and windowing redraws and a number of other functions but the blame is not with xorg alone in terms of the overall gui experience of linux users. That is part of the difficulty and complexity with truly optimizing the user experience (gui speed and smoothness) in the Linux world. The distributing model of development that gives us two major toolkits and Desktop Environments as well as many smaller projects also gives the headache in terms of tracking done issues of having to look over multiple projects. Linux is becoming more and more commercial with more and more of the major developers working for RedHat, Suse, IBM and other big companies. It might be time to lock the gnome, gtk+, QT, KDE, OpenOffice AND the xorg developers in a room with an endless supply of pizza and Jolt and lock them in till they figure out significant ways to increase the speed and smoothness of the gui experience in Linux. Improvements and even bounties for the gnome people are being issued to address the speed issue. We will see until all the groups converge on this issue how much progress can really be made going it alone.
