Moving on to to Openoffice then, I know that OOo comes with a nice install program that makes it easy for idiots like me to install it. So I navigate to the DVD cover disk and drag it from the DVD onto the desktop and copying starts... and continues... and continues a bit more... and then stops at 16%. I'm only copying a 70mb file. In Windows doing this takes 13 seconds, but mandrake does 16% in about a minute then stops, not just the copying but all of the desktop stops, XMMS stutters and window redrawing stops. I went for a cup of coffee and returned to see it made it all the way to 17%, whereupon I killed it (CTRL- ALT - ESC). I fired up Gnome system monitor only to see what was happening before I tried again, only to discover Linux using 505Mb of system and 100Mb of swap - Bear in mind that I had nothing else running except 1 Konqueror window at this point. 500Mb! Out of curiosity I rebooted the machine to see how much was being eaten at startup: 200mb, quite staggering really; that's more than XP uses at Startup even with SQL server, IIS, Trillian, Bluetooth drivers, Activesync and my anti-virus running. But I've got 512Mb of Ram, and it's using about half of it, not to worry I've got 300Mb left. That is until I start using Koqueror, doing a search or copying large files. I tried once again copying Openoffice and within a few seconds of the copying starting RAM usage shot up to 500mb again and within a minute or so it had hung at 16% again. Killing the copy didn't seem to bring any RAM back either. After yet another reboot (I don't know yet how to get that RAM back without rebooting, but the system was unusable as it was) I tried performing a search (on my NTFS drive). Just a simple search on a 15GB drive once again started eating in memory and processor usage. I'm not sure if this is Linux performance in general or just Mandrake, or just Mandrake on my machine but either way it's pretty pathetic.
KDE 3.1 looks lovely, and the new features of Konqueror that I've read about make it seem very appealing (obviously without Internet access I can't make any use of it) and the anti-aliased fonts are a big improvement. Although, sadly, even on my Athlon 2400+ KDE still seems sluggish compared to XP and applications seem to still take too long to start.
KDE and Mandrake-Linux in general just seems bloated and sluggish, although I can't really put my finger squarely on the reason why I feel that. It's significantly slower at booting than Windows XP. Typically, XP loads on my machine in about 20 seconds, while Mandrake took 65 seconds to get to the log in screen and another 15 seconds after that to load KDE. Gnome on the other hand was much faster to start and felt a lot less sluggish, but just looked and felt too UNIX-like and ultimately didn't feel friendly or fun, so after a couple of minutes of using it I logged out and back into KDE again; for all its slowness it's enjoyable to use.
I don't see why distros bother with shipping more than one window manager, again I'm sure most Linux savvy users would shout about choice for the end user, but in reality KDE is good enough for virtually everyone, Gnome too. Surely it'd be better to just offer one desktop in the package letting the end user then decide if they want to download another WM or get it from the install CD. No other OS confuses its users with a choice of window managers like this. Windows can support other shells and does quite happily, but for most people the default one is all that's needed. Adding the 5 window managers and all their associated packages, libraries and tools only succeeds in bloating out each distribution. Anyone savvy enough to want to try another desktop will probably be quite happy installing it themselves anyway!
But Mandrake isn't all bad by any means, it's far and away the best Linux distro I've used so far, beating my previous best SuSE 8.0 in many ways. The installer is really very good, easy to use and surprisingly flexible and intelligent. The boot loader works well, without any fuss and is flexible enough for non-standard installations. Most of the menu items in Mandrake are sensibly laid out and the default options are more than adequate for most people. It looks great, thanks to KDE 3.1 and the anti aliased fonts, and seems straightforward enough for most users, providing of course that all their hardware is detected correctly and they don't want to install any other software, ever!
But overall, I still can't switch yet. There's no Internet access for me and no Bluetooth support either and ultimately I don't have the time, inclination or patience to spend days, or even weeks trying to get all my hardware to work, and this is the crux of the problem. For a lot of users, Windows just works, things (mostly) just work, and when they don't it's fairly easy to investigate, even if you can't always fix the problem yourself. Why spend lots of time and effort re-learning a new and seemingly more complex way of working with your computer than you have already?
- "Personal Review of Mandrake 9.1, Part I"
- "Personal Review of Mandrake 9.1, Part II"
