The Ideal Linux Distro

[clem]

Hi,

It's an interesting post. IMHO Linux is already ready for the desktop and far more than any past or present version of Microsoft Windows. Having said that there's a lot of improvements we can work on to make it even better and I agree with most of the points you brought up.

Linux Mint or Ubuntu or Debian, or SUSE/Fedora/Mandriva and other distros won't make the perfect desktop by themselves, but each will bring its lot of innovations and you can count on us to keep an eye on what's going on and always make our best to make the user's experience better.

Clem

[scorp123]

However I was shocked at how poor the performance of Linux was compared to XP. I was using an old 300 MHz / 128MB RAM computer that could easily run Windows with MS Office with hardly any delay. But Linux was unbelievably slow to boot, to login, to launch programs, to install, to configure. Windows simply ran circles around Linux.

Hmmm ... Usually it's the other way round. I have an old Sony C1 laptop, with a Transmeta Crusoe CPU and only 192 MB RAM. The laptop shipped with Windows 2000 and with it the performance was horrible. I don't even need to try XP on that machine, there are no drivers for some of the special chips (e.g. Sony proprietary interrupt controller, which in turn controls lots of other things) and the Windows 2000 drivers don't work with XP SP2 (I tried that too ...)

Linux on the other hand runs without problems on that laptop, even the built-in web cam gets recognized. And as long as I stay away from GNOME and KDE and instead use something like WindowMaker or Fluxbox the laptop works OK even with GUI programs.

Out of curiosity, but which distribution did you try on that old machine of yours? Maybe things like DMA for the harddisks weren't properly activated? This can happen (some IDE controllers really behave strange and Linux doesn't always detect them correctly), and when it happens then everything feels very very slow.

Regards,
scorp123

[marcus0263]

I love these people who complain about the speed but want ALL the bells and whistles. KDE and Gnome are full featured Desktops and the performance of Gnome since v2.14 is sure snappier than Win2k. People seem to ignore the fact that as hardware progress's coders take advantage of the extra resources.

So suggestion is if you've got an old legacy computer with 64 Meg of Ram run Win95 with the old legacy software that it was designed for. It's unrealistic to expect software that is coded for P-III and P-4 hardware to be responsive on systems designed for DOS.

I've got Linux running on an old AMD K6-2 350 MHZ with a PCI video card, attempt to put Win2K on that and it'll PUKE. It runs fine with Fluxbox and Fluxbox has a lot of nice features and runs QT and GTK programs very sweet. Now launching Firefox on it is painful, Opera runs alright the memory footprint of Firefox is pretty steep. I don't even attempt to launch Open Office but it works great with Abiword and Gnumeric.

So moral of the story is you can't put an engine from a Yugo in a Cadillac and expect it to perform like a Ferrari!

[marcus0263]

<snip>I ran Win2K for quite a while on a P-II 266 MHz with 64 MB of RAM and I never noticed a problem with performance.

Now I know you're exaggerating, 64 MB of RAM you're lucky to get it to boot let alone have any programs run.

Come on

[marcus0263]

A bit more info

http://telcontar.net/Misc/OS/show.php?os=Win2k

Windows 2k has roughly a 70 MB memory footprint, so what happens when you load programs?

Win2k running on 64 MB RAM with no performance issues? Come on you can at least come up with something believable.

[marcus0263]

Now I know you're exaggerating, 64 MB of RAM you're lucky to get it to boot let alone have any programs run.

Come on

Ever tried it? Lighten up a bit and try not to be closed minded.

Yes I have on systems with 128 RAM. I've also spent a number of years in this industry with a good chunk of them on the road through 4 continents. I've worked in a very broad variety of environments

With Win2k having a memory footprint of around 70 Meg for the OS alone you're slamming the swap file before you even load any programs. So your claim that it runs "well" with 64 no one takes this seriously.

Lighten up? About what?
I'm just calling your bluff

Cheers

[marcus0263]

Ha! It would appear we have very different opinions as to what constitutes good performance, then! I wish I had that old beast so I could install Win2k and give some quantitative numbers, but it's gone, good riddance.

Take care.

I take it you never ran any programs on it, like an anti-virus program or maybe an office program

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/suite ... 51033.aspx
Memory 256 megabyte (MB) RAM or higher

Cheers -

[.ee]

rahim,
I guess that your idea about slowness of linux is due to a wrond distribution chosen (windows xp would also freeze on your hardware). Puppy linux would probably be much faster on your old hardware, because it runs from RAM. I would suggest to try it. Mint is beautiful but it is still more demanding to the resources.