The study described in the following article was done by Mirosoft, so run to the kitchen and get some grains of salt. “Microsoft’s Linux and open-source lab on the Redmond campus has been running some interesting tests of late, one of which was looking at how well the latest Windows client software runs on legacy hardware in comparison to its Linux competitors. The tests, which found that Windows performed as well as Linux on legacy hardware when installed and run out-of-the-box, were done in part to give Microsoft the data it needed to effectively “put to rest the myth that Linux can run on anything.” Do with the results as you please, but the topic is interesting nonetheless. What are your experiences?
The GUI part of GNU/Linux is not exactly the fastest of the world. Yes, one can use a lightweight window manager, but then you lose a lot of functionality.
But without the GUI, GNU/Linux is really fast on old hardware in my experience.
Yeah, Gnome and KDE are slow. They are getting faster as work progresses, but they can be sluggish at times compared to something like Windows 2000.
However, since KDE 3.1, there has been optimisations happening all over the place.
Look forward to Linux desktops of the future.
um. Windows gui is pretty much horrible. there is soooo much more functionality in KDE. for a start everything is easily point and click changeable. and the commandline just makes linux more versatile. Linux gives you *alot* more control.
I’m sorry but windows has pailed in comparison when it comes to gui. Windows does have better driver support for graphics cards. And thats cause they have big money.
These mor…ehm, skillfull ingeneers at Microsoft have never heard of DSL? or Puppy Linux? or VectorLinux? VectorLinux performed acceptably on a Pentium Pro 180 MHz with 64 mbyte ram. DSL was damn fast.
You bring up a valid point, but then again, Microsoft could say that Windows 3.1 ran brilliantly on a Pentium Pro 180MHz.
DSL and the like are stripped. That’s not necesserally bad, but it points them at a market that isn’t exactly mainstream. Ubuntu is so popular because it can be subbed in for Mac OS X or Windows without feeling like there’s a ton missing. It has the features which means that it uses the resources.
Now, there is a difference between Windows 3.1 and DSL. With DSL, new advances that don’t take a lot more resources can be incorporated. DSL can support more modern things than Win 3.1 because GNU/Linux is open source and they can choose one single new package that they believe is worth it. But Microsoft could have done that with Win 3.1 – backporting things that would have kept it more current without sucking too much resources. The reason they haven’t is that there isn’t a market for that. People always like to talk about bringing old computers back to life with stripped down Linues, but they don’t compete with new computers running Windows. They don’t have the features and people like features and polish more than keeping old computers.
In fact, there’s a reason things like Rox and other desktop managers which are a ton faster than KDE or GNOME haven’t taken off as much. People want what KDE and GNOME can give them – just as they like what the newest versions of Windows can give them. Linux doesn’t run on older machines unless you strip out the features which make it competitive with commercial operating systems.
“You bring up a valid point, but then again, Microsoft could say that Windows 3.1 ran brilliantly on a Pentium Pro 180MHz. “
An excellent comparisson as far as the basic idea is concerned; however, DSL and Puppy Linux still get current security updates and are still supported, plus they support a lot more hardware than Windows 3.1.
“DSL and the like are stripped. That’s not necesserally bad, but it points them at a market that isn’t exactly mainstream. Ubuntu is so popular because it can be subbed in for Mac OS X or Windows without feeling like there’s a ton missing. It has the features which means that it uses the resources. “
True, but anyone running hardware old enough to require DSL or Puppy just to run wouldn’t have been using a very current or featureful version of Windows or Mac OS either.
“But Microsoft could have done that with Win 3.1”
Or they could scale down are more current Windows. I don’t doubt Microsoft could support old hardware if they wanted to, what I do doubt is that they’d make a monitary return on it big enough to justify the expense.
“Linux doesn’t run on older machines unless you strip out the features which make it competitive with commercial operating systems.”
I’ll agree with that point, but then to me old boxes themselves aren’t useful. There comes a time when people just can’t complain that the new software won’t run on their old boxes any more, capable software requires capable hardware.
But Microsoft could have done that with Win 3.1 – backporting things that would have kept it more current without sucking too much resources. The reason they haven’t is that there isn’t a market for that.
I don’t agree with this–the Windows environment relies heavily on the support of third pary software vendors (as a matter of fact, they even rely very, very heavily on these ISVs for their drivers). Since Microsoft does not control this software, there is absolutely no guarantee that they could afford to pay relevant ISVs for legacy support. For example, I’d imagine that nVidia is more likely to release the FreeBSD-amd64 binary drivers before they’d be willing to tape out a Win3.1 OpenGL stack.
For software that isn’t distributed in binary format (whether it be software for Windows, Linux, Solaris, or what have you), the option to extend support to legacy systems remains open for those who are willing. Until closed-source systems figure out a way to relegate support of outdated hardware to parties that aren’t restricted by economic feasibility, I predict that closed-source ISVs will always have this legacy support problem.
Of course, on the other hand, I’ve never had the impression that Linux could “run on anything.” NetBSD is the only OS for which I’d consider making that claim (and NetBSD has, and will continue to amaze me at its portability).
You can be absolutely sure that they heard about it. They run linux on several computers, and they are fully aware of its customizability. But the point was to prove that win runs as good as lin on old hardwer. And they proved that, by carefully choosing those linux distributions that has the largest default base install.
Does RHEL run better on old hardware “out of the box”? No, of course not. The usual FUD begins when they make broad sweeping statements like Windows runs as well as Linux on old hardware. Now that is a lie and a fallacy. You can have 1 floppy linux for a router (or picobsd). You can put slackware on a pentium 166 with 64 Mb ram, and use it as a firewall/router, even fileserver for a small LAN. You just can’t do that with win2k, much less with win3k. They know this very well, but what did you expect. How many casual readers would look at the details? Even if they do, they have no idea how modular linux is, how easy is to build your own or just use one of the lighter distroes. So they read the article, which has valid comparisons, and assume that the final assumption (that win runs as well as lin on old hw) is just as valid.
Folks … nothing to see here, move along. Really. This is getting rather boring.
“But the point was to prove that win runs as good as lin on old hardwer. And they proved that, by carefully choosing those linux distributions that has the largest default base install.”
Some distributions are also rather well optimized, while others run painfully slow even on modern hardware. For example on two of my computers for several versions of SUSE I’ve had the worst performance out of any other distribution I’ve tried, they’re trying to fix that now, but they sure took their time.
Last time I tried to run SUSE on my P4 2.6 with 512 Mb of ram and a GForce FX5200 video card it was unacceptably slow, mp3 playback in amarok took several seconds (I’m not kidding) to respond to changes in volume, to respond to buttons being pressed, etc… No other distribution I’ve used was that slow.
Same experience with Mandrake
Slackware on the other hand… And what amazed me the most was that I didn’t feel ANY performance improvement when I used gentoo on a friend’s computer with similar hw specks to my own.
I don’t know what some big distroes do to slow their system down – it can’t be all about compiler flags used to build the packages.
As to amarok music playback – several seconds is too much to be normal. I suspect something was broken in your install. Problem is, with distroes like suse or mandriva, there are so many customizations, so many ways to (mis)configure the system, and so many built-in automatism that it is rather hard to find out what’s wrong. Years ago I read a review of Linspire. Startup was a bit slow – and the reviewer found out that the cause that the cause was hardware detection. What they did was to modprobe every single module during bootup, that was their way of doing hardware detection (I’m not sure how linux does it, but I remember that the reviewer was genuinly surprised, so I assume there are better ways.) Who knows what SuSE does in the background, how amarok is built, how the engine used by amarok is built, etc…
Last time I tried to run SUSE on my P4 2.6 with 512 Mb of ram and a GForce FX5200 video card it was unacceptably slow, mp3 playback in amarok took several seconds (I’m not kidding) to respond to changes in volume, to respond to buttons being pressed, etc… No other distribution I’ve used was that slow.
Something’s wrong with the config then. I’m running Suse on a PIII 1.13G laptop with 384MB and a 16MB Nvida chipset, it runs just as well as XP on the same system in terms of app loading, performance etc.
9.3 was a hog, I’ll admit, slowest distro I’ve used. But 10.0 was a marked improvement. Still need to do a bit of tweaking with the services, but then XP needs the same thing after a clean install.
“Something’s wrong with the config then.”
I’m not saying I dissagree, but I’ve used several versions of SUSE on at least two different computers, and every time it ran terribly slow. I did nothing to change the OS, so I didn’t cause the problem, and I was running Intel processors on both machines in case that makes a difference. Either way I don’t think I’d be caught dead of alive using SUSE again.
“Microsoft have never heard of DSL? or Puppy Linux? or VectorLinux?”
They are testing about 50 Linux distributions in there Open Source labs and you are saying that they didn’t heard about it. Hah.
That maybe true but xfce, Fluxbox ect are far faster then even Win95, in the end thats what they are for. With Windows you don’t have a choice in the matter. Also add you anti-virus, fragmentation and patches make Windows much SlOWER, not forgetting the programs that fight to startup.
SlackerJack,
What Microsoft is referring to is Legacy hardware support not the speed of the OS, application support or how configurable the desktop is. As a former Windows user I can say that the Windows desktop can be themed with third party tools though not as configurable as on Linux. Also referring to any OS that makes it difficult for non experienced computer users to install an OS isn’t an ideal test for the typical consumer which Microsoft is targeting. This is where companies such as Novell, Mandriva and even Linspire come into play because they focus on more than just the enterprise sector while offering support options that can compete with Microsoft.
Anyway from my own experience I’ve noticed a huge difference in hardware support both for current and Legacy hardware when comparing Windows XP Professional to popular distributions such as Novell (SUSE Linux/NLD) and Red Hat (RHEL/Fedora Linux). Just to alleviate those that consider the Windows OS outdated my experiences were the same even after updating Windows XP Pro with SP2 and all updates through Windows Update. Where SUSE Linux could correctly identify and configure the majority of the LAN Windows XP Pro on the other hand required third party installer discs to install drivers. I was shocked to see Windows XP not able to correctly identify the workstations integrated Intel Pro Giga-LAN chipset where as with SUSE Linux this wasn’t an issue. Even my Logitech Quickcam Orbit was correctly identified by SUSE Linux as “Logitech Quickcam Orbit” though this was with version 10 and I had to update the “pwc” driver to support the newly released camera.
There’s a dramatic difference between the way Novell and Red Hat work with ISV and the way Microsoft does. It’s apparent that Microsoft is used to leaving hardware support up to hardware manufacturers. Though with Linux distribution developers such as Novell they either have their own in-house developement, work with the Linux community to reverse engineer drivers or attract more ISV support from popular companies like HP and NVIDIA.
Edited 2006-01-08 18:59
How is Faster on PentiumII 350Mhz/128 MB/8GB WindowsXP or DamnSmallLinux 2.0?
Or a customized version of Debian SID runnig XFCE as WM?
If you’re going to compare performance of the two on the same hardware, you may as well choose a distro that is *just as capable* as whatever version of Windows you’re comparing to. That doesn’t mean an 80 MB distro with Blackbox as its window manager, because the feature equivalence is not there.
Hell, if we start cutting back on features and justifying it, I can claim “A kernel and shell are faster than anything and take the least RAM! SO THERE!”. Stupid.
We don’t cut anything.
xorg and xfce are still there.
Yeah, now let’s compare XFCE to Explorer and all of its supporting features.
Douchebag.
Explorer is nothing but a primitive file explorer. It’s a shell. It’s basically void of anything.
Explorer is to be compared to Nautilus. And not Gnome or KDE.
The Windows Desktop is to be compared with Gnome and KDE. And XFCE compares just fine with the Windows Desktop.
Explorer in Windows is nothing but a simple filemanager.
Explorer is the file manager, desktop, start menu, and system tray.
Naaah… that’s not entirely correct.
You could also say that Nautilus is the file manager, start menu and system tray in Gnome. It would not be entirely correct, but it wouldn’t be wrong.
The Desktop in Windows is btw. a lot more than Explorer.exe
Out of the box, Windows has hardly any features anyway. So a cut down version Linux would indeed be comparable.
So tell me again how Blackbox is comparable to Explorer in terms of UI-fullness?
Ever heard about rox filer? Blackbox + rox pretty much kills any NT based windows OS on low-end hardware. And rox is quite comparable to explorer, in fact, it is more feature rich. Add Opera as browser, and there you have linux running on hardware on which win2k would not even boot. Read the rest below (I wrote a longish post about this already) And stop trolling.
Edited 2006-01-07 23:44
You cannot compare Blackbox with Explorer.
Blackbox is a window manager. Explorer isn’t. Explorer is a filemanager. Compare it with Nautilus instead.
Explorer = file manager, desktop + icons, start menu, task bar, system tray, and a number of smaller things
It’s still not entirely correct. You can claim it as much as you want, but the truth is much more complex.
It’s not. Blackbox has far more features than explorer.
IceWM may be the only window manager with as few features as Explorer. But I could be wrong, it may have some advanced features I never noticed.
Who said anything about doing that?
If you’re speaking from not reading the article, it sayd this in the article:
“There was this pervasive belief that Linux could run on older PCs and that Windows could not, he said, adding that Microsoft thus decided to test this premise by installing Red Hat Enterprise Linux, SUSE Pro 9.2, Mandrake 10, Linspire 4.5, Xandros Desktop 3.0, Fedora Core 3, Slackware 10.1, Knoppix 3.7; Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 out-of-the-box on older hardware to see what happened.”
If you’re talking about commentors, DSL or Puppy Linux is no less capable out of the box. Hell, they come with complete suites of apps, and Xorg, and hardware detection. You seem to have a strange definiton of “cut back”.
I mean cut back in terms of the user experience. XFCE is not comparable to Explorer. GNOME/KDE are. Blackbox/Fluxbox/related brethren — laughable.
Explorer is a file manager and a simple shell. GNOME and KDE are desktop environments. How exactly are they comparable to Explorer? In that they come with file managers and and toolbars? How does that differ from Xfce?
Fluxbox is a window manager. It provides a simple shell and manages windows. Selecting it over one of the major desktop WMs would be a matter of reducing RAM usage for the overly noncomplex task of managing windows. You can pair it with any number of file managers.
Explorer is a file manager, and the desktop environment. Without Explorer Windows is close to useless, as Explorer provides the desktop + icons, start menu, task bar, and system tray.
No, Explorer is a simple shell and file manager. Without Explorer, Windows is perfectly usable either with a different shell or the task manager. Explorer is nothing like what GNOME or KDE are, except that both offer a collection of programs that provide similar user-interface items.
http://www.boxshots.org/screenies/3327.jpg
Oh no, it’s Windows without Explorer! Ahhhh!
http://www.shellfront.org
Links for various alternative shells for Windows.
OH please mod this guy down, this is just trolling. It isn’t even worth answering this nonsense (and yes, here I am doing it). XFCE not comparable to explorer but KDE is? WTF? Why should anybody exposed to such drivel?
XFCE is not an application, it is a bundle of applications that provide at least as much functionality as Win2K out of the box. Panel, task manager, a file manager, multimedia plugins, calendar, icons, artwork, utilities, session management, tons of applets – battery, mount, launchers, weather, mixer, cpugraph, netload, keyboard switcher,notes etc. It is so obvious that this guy has no idea of what he is talking about when he compares XFCE with Explorer – this is par excellence trolling.
I have had some experience with low end machines because not everyone has money for computers – some just take what they are given.
On an MMX 200mhz with 64Mb, almost none of the majors will run, or even load. Gnome, KDE or even Xfce will not. Beatrix, which is really promising, wouldn’t. DSL will, but you cannot seriously want people to restrict themselves to those applications. Puppy will, but again, its the apps.
Once you get to 500mhz and 128Mb, you have an awful lot more scope, and Xfce + Slackware will do very nicely.
However, on the antiques, start with Debian from scratch, put in the kde libraries, and WindowMaker, and you are fine. It is surprisingly snappy. I used xfe as the file manager, but konqueror ran just fine. Koffice was fine. I’m sure fvwm would have been fine too. Evolution would probably have been ok, but I didn’t think the customer could handle it. Its graphically wonderful but a bit weird for the Windows user.
Now, this machine had been running W9x before. There wasn’t much difference in speed or loading time. What they got was a lot more apps free. The graphics were a lot nicer with linux, too. Fonts, colours, icons.
molnarcs is quite right about xfce, if it will run. Its an acceptable compromise between the really unfamiliar stripped down ones like fvwm, blackbox and so on, and kde/gnome which are a bit resource hungry. I tried an install of xfce and slackware on another machine, and out of the box it was the most elegant DTE I’ve seen. Bar none. Yes, including OSX. If you compare the DTE of W9x with xfce there is no comparison in terms of graphics and look, and the features are easily comparable. Probably LIP hasn’t ever tried it, or is trolling, or is obsessing. Or all three.
Or maybe, like a lot of people, he is too hung up on the DTE. If you are actually working, instead of staring at the screen all day, the DTE is just a route into the apps. WM does that very nicely, and Xfce does it elegantly.
I thought of KDElibs/kdebase as well – konqi ran surprisingly well on these low end machines (compared to the >1 minute startup of firefox/epiphany), but settled with opera at the end.
I also tried Debian on the same machines, but had problems with mouse support at that time (today, if I were not satisfied with my current settings, I would probably try it again, but then woody was the stable release, and mixing packages with unstable didn’t quite work out for me).
The only problem with XFCE was xffm – but you have rox-filer, which integrates nicely, is fast, and has the most user friendly solution for mounting/unmounting peripherals (it is very easy to describe what to do to noobs).
Good night folks (well, it is 1:30 am here)!
Actually I have real experience with this. We have some rather old hardware in a computer lab I maintain. 64Mb ram at most with 2 IBM 300 (I think) machines being the fastest (they run @566Mhz) and 2 packard bells with 300Mhz celerons being the slowest (one of them has 32 Mb ram).
Putting win98 on them sucks – they don’t last longer than a couple of weeks. People mostly use these puters to browse the net, chat, im, listening to music, the likes (just like the more modern machines). Now after two to four weeks, internet barely works (putting opera – firefox is rather slow – on them doesn’t help either, they’ll use IE anyway) if it works at all.
So one day (because there is no money for upgrade right now) I decided to end this crap, and put FreeBSD 5.3 on them. I built the packages on my home machine, put the binaries on an FTP, pointed pkg_add to my repo, and installed everything (they were p2 optimized builds) in less then an hour. They have blackbox as the default desktop. Each machine has a different background (with aquafruit themes – we have mango, banana, peach, etc. machines – most people wouldn’t think how much this helps putting users at ease when they encounter an unfamiliar system). They have a very simple menu, with 6 + 3 items: browse the net (Opera), Instant Messaging (GAIM), FTP (gFTP), Neptun (rdp system used for signing up for courses – basically rdesktop neptunc.unideb.hu), music (starts up xmms), Filemanager (ROX filer), disks with 3 submenus: usb – yeah, they have usb ports, floppy, cdrom. I put one page (A4) near them with instructions how to use them. And they are perfectly usable this way. In fact, I haven’t looked at their direction for half a year, and they were still running. (well, one machine’s PSU broke down actually, and since then, another machine died).
Now that is what you can’t do with windows. Win9x is a nightmare to administer. Win2k/XP won’t run on 64Mb ram, no matter what you do. And that is what Linux (or in my case, FreeBSD) is excellent for. That is what the article tries to disprove, by making a somewhat fair comparison but reaching a false conclusion (win runs as good as lin on old hardware – that is pure bullshit).
It doesn’t take much work to slim down a 98/ME installation. Admittedly, a stock FreeBSD install with a simple WM and a few apps will work better, but saying that 98/ME run like crap is a lie. Administration is easy if you know what you’re doing, too.
You didn’t understand what I wrote. Win98 runs FINE on such hardware, but it is absolutely insecure when you have >90 clueless users who insist on surfing pr0n sites and warez sites when no one is looking. It is crap because if I don’t attend it (meaning go there and run adaware/spybot every 2-3 days) it breaks down in a few weeks. While FreeBSD with blackbox + rox + opera + gaim + xmms runs till the hardware dies (and so does linux) – without me touching them for months (I do the occasional updates, but they are still FreeBSD 5.3, one of the slowest FreeBSD releases btw.)
Besides that, Win9x is NOT a multi user system.
Just press ‘Esc’ and you’re in. With full access to the complete system. Nice security level.
“If you’re going to compare performance of the two on the same hardware, you may as well choose a distro that is *just as capable* as whatever version of Windows you’re comparing to.”
Windows can be tweaked to run better on old hardware too. So how do we know whether any of it was tweaked or not, how much it was tweaked, and whether both were tweaked equally to keep the competition fair?
“… Windows performed as well as Linux on legacy hardware when installed and run out-of-the-box, …”
“Out-of-the-box” usually means out-of-the-box, before any tweaking, or installation of extra stuff.
If you’re going to compare performance of the two on the same hardware, you may as well choose a distro that is *just as capable* as whatever version of Windows you’re comparing to. That doesn’t mean an 80 MB distro with Blackbox as its window manager, because the feature equivalence is not there.
Find me a modern Windows distribution targeting legacy hardware and I’ll gladly do a fair comparison.
The problem is that there aren’t that many windows distributions to choose from…
“That doesn’t mean an 80 MB distro with Blackbox as its window manager, because the feature equivalence is not there. ”
I agree. Linux comes with much much more functionality out of the box even on a small distro like DSL than WinXP could ever hope to.
Out of the box was the key term for the tests. It’s mentioned at least 3 times in the article.
I think the testers’ assumptions are correct for the typical end user.
1. They do very little to tweak for performance.
2. They would stick with a mainstream /popular Linux distro.
So it’s not a comparison of Linux or cutting edge Linux per se but a comparison of redhat and not modified much redhat either? Sounds like far too narrow a viewpoint to draw any sound conclusions on Linux as a whole but enough to create some fud. When your premise starts out as believing something everyone else sees as a fact everyday is a myth and your whole experiment is to, “put to rest”, said myth your head is already way too far up your anus to see anything but dung.
My experience:
Windows CE won’t run at all on a transmeta crusoe tm-200, but linux sprints like a deer desktop and all as many safeway shoppers in northern CA can attest to Theres a k6 400 here on the floor running redhat 7 great as an X station and a firewall but running Windows on it will make you want to kill yourself in minutes.
Doc here has a linux image running in under 5 megs of flash in a broadstone ip director, beat that bill.
And that < 5 meg image is cut down redhat.
““Memory prevented the successful installation on a typical 1997 system, as 32MB of memory is not enough to install most Linux distributions or to run desktop applications with acceptable performance. A memory upgrade could prolong the life of such hardware, but the cost and effort of locating old memory and installing it onto all corporate clients significantly reduces the potential savings,” Hilf said.
Minimum requirements for office productivity performance on a Linux system were any Pentium II (PII) system with at least 64MB of RAM, he said, adding that playback of sound and video would typically require a PII 400 or better. ”
I love the wording in this article… At the start they say “Windows XP performed just as well as Suse 9.2 Mandriva, FC, Xandros….”
Then they add this ^ What they want us to think is that while Linux struggles on a PII with 64Mb RAM etc… Win XP will run fine. They even mention 32Mb RAM earlier. I used to have an XP system with 128Mb DDRRAM and a 1.6Ghz CPU. It would take WinXP a good 5 minutes to load with “out of the box” settings to a usable desktop, where Mandrake 7.2 would load and I would be logged in within 2mins…
Microsoft have some of the cleverest writers I’ve ever seen. No mention of Windows working as well as Linux on these machines, but we all assumed it when we first read it through. Wasn’t until my second take until I saw there was no mention of WinXP perfomence on these machines.
Clever!
used to have an XP system with 128Mb DDRRAM and a 1.6Ghz CPU. It would take WinXP a good 5 minutes to load with “out of the box” settings to a usable desktop, where Mandrake 7.2 would load and I would be logged in within 2mins…
you either don’t know how to use a watch or you never had win xp runing on this system.
I use win xp on 500mhz with 192mb sd-ram and it doesn’t even come close to 5 minutes.
you either don’t know how to use a watch or you never had win xp runing on this system.
I use win xp on 500mhz with 192mb sd-ram and it doesn’t even come close to 5 minutes.
Well, I’ve used XP on a box with 128 MB and a 2.4 Ghz Celeron (crappy chip… benchmarks closer to a P4 1.5 Ghz), and you’re right, bootup was less than 5 minutes.
Unfortunately, the box was PAINFULLY slow. It was nearly unusable, and was quickly upgraded to 768 MB, which resolved the performance problems nicely.
as he said before… Something is terribly wrong. XP should not be ‘painfully slow’ on that original setup. Heck, my laptop is a toshiba 3110ct… 366mhz p2 with 128mb of ram. and its running xp decently. xp uses about 45megs on boot. I even use firefox on it
I suppose it comes down to how much you know about your given OS. I can tweak the heck out of XP but I do not kno anywhere near as much for any given linux distro. Altho i do try
This whole Linux distro A vs Windows version B is getting REALLY annoying.
Look, learn more about your OS of choice and stop bickering. It’s retarded.
Are you timing up to the little jingle noise, or are you meaning until you get a usable desktop. True it will present you with the desktop pretty quick, but click on the start menu and try to connect to ADSL or dial-up networking and you get no option to do so. The start menu will close again before the entries are there. Windows will give you a desktop quite fast, but it’s not usable. As soon as I get into my KDE desktop it’s usable for whatever I want, even restoring old session data (which windows doesn’t do) KD is up and running faster than WinXP
I rarely shutdown my windows or linux boxes… So the whole boot time arguement is pretty much moot… Least with me
Bill should put a Windows 2000 on CyrixMMX/166Mhz/128MB/1GB hdd, stop all unnecessary services and a talk about that.
You cannot cut Windows back like Linux, Linux is the kernel and that the advantage, it’s layered.You may get more functionally with Windows over Xfce but at a cost of performance. Slackware and Xfce4 run on a P2 266Mhz/64mb with Gimp, abiword, running very well indeed.
How about Vista builds on legacy hardware. The fact that you’ve left your gui code relatively unmodified for the last 7 years kind of negates this argument.
Any existing OS is going to be fine to run one program all the time. The OS isn’t even something to worry about there, it’s not switching tasks. It’s only involvement is the use of the graphical toolkit libraries; and that can only cost you so much.
So, libraries are easy.
But yes, some linux programs definitely suck more resources than Windows. Big surprise, they also do more.
WindowsXPSP2 is daiying without at least 256MB
I would say 768 if you want to run applications reasonably fast. Especially with MSN, ICQ, Skype, K-Meleon (or another browser preloaded), firewall, antivirus running in the background. This takes around 340-360 MB of RAM. And if you need some major application to run, without a lot of trashing happening when switching to another application, then somewhere around 768 MB of RAM is needed. 1024 MB is better.
I have 512 MB ram right now, because one of my memory modules decided to die, and Windows 2003 Server trashes a lot more now. Gnome has also become somewhat slower, but luckily not as much. Well, getting the main menu to show can sometimes be rather adventurous
I run on same amount of memory (768) WinXPsp2 on VMWare 5 and Win5/98 on Qemu on Linux Host. I can say every OS is moving fast enough.
the day is fast approaching when win32 apps run better in WINE than on XP…especially with conveniences like winecfg (try getting that kind of control over windows without rebooting 13 times and spending a week tweaking out obscure reg entries…)
not to mention win32 codecs working better in mplayer than windows media player 11.36.72, PlaysForSure Edition MEdia Center Pro…
so yes, the legacy bits of windows that are still useful run fine on linux on old hardware. what was the question again?
Office XP and Office 2000 both run far better and faster under Crossover in Linux than they do under native Windows.
BUT
Quicktime or iTunes doesn’t. They are very sluggish.
Swings and roundabouts I suppose
I’ve seen opposite results, so this statement, and your results are both subjective
you seen quicktime or itunes more responsive under crossover than they are natively ?
anyway….
that is why I added swings and roundabouts at the end
No, I’ve seen Office run slower under crossover office.
“the day is fast approaching when win32 apps run better in WINE than on XP”
I’m hoping that becomes true with Windows games soon, right now Cadega doesn’t support most of the games I play yet. Only a few minutes ago I was playing NFS Hot Pursuit 2 and some stupid Windows app stole focus, the game screen popped back up right away but the game wouldn’t take input any more because Windows kept trying to take it, I couldn’t kill the game, even with CTRL+ALT+DEL so I had to hard reset. I shouldn’t have to kill every single running app before being able to play agame, it reminds of of when I was still running Windows 98 and had to kill everything to run disk defrag without something interrupting it, eventually I just used safe mode to defrag Win98, but I shouldn’t have to do that with my games too.
Actually, there are fewer and fewer win32 codecs mplayer needs. The reason mplayer runs so fast is that they use the fastest decoding library: ffmpeg. Ffmpeg decodes any kind of mpeg4 movie (divx, xvid, ffmpeg), wmv 8-9, h.264, even some weird formats like asus video, etc…
I don’t even know when mplayer uses the win32 dlls anymore (it might have used in the past more, before ffmpeg development accelerated). Download a win32 binary of mplayer … there are lots of win32 build, but only one had the usual gmplayer gui – and that’s the one I’m bundling on all my movie DVDs. This one didn’t need to be installed, just create a shortcut on your desktop to the binary. Drop any .avi on the shortcut – and lo: instantaneous startup! (on my sempron 3100+).
Actually, if you want decent multimedia capabilities for WinXP, forget about codec packs, or xvid, divx and friends, and forget about Media Player. You need one codec: ffdshow (which is actually a codec library). Download real-alternative and quicktime-alternative, install Media Player Classic with one of them, and you will be able to play almost anything (well, I said almost, but I never had a file this combo could not handle, but who knows, you might…)
I don’t think Gnome2.x on a GNU/Linux distribution will run very fast on a Pentium MMX 200 with 80 MB of RAM.
Windows 2000 for sure is virtually unusable, taking approx. 3-4 minutes to load IE or FireFox.
Old hardware needs old software in most cases, because software simply isn’t as optimized as it should be (it costs money, you know).
However, DSL (Damn Small Linux) is pretty fast compared with the kitchen sink GNU/Linux-distro. But it also has limited functionality (don’t forget that part)
I don’t think Gnome2.x on a GNU/Linux distribution will run very fast on a Pentium MMX 200 with 80 MB of RAM.
Windows 2000 for sure is virtually unusable, taking approx. 3-4 minutes to load IE or FireFox.
I dont’t know about that. A friend of mine has a Win2000 machine that has a Pentium MMX and 64MB of RAM and it runs fine. There is nothing on it except photoshop but it runs great.
Hmm… I seriously doubt that I would agree, it runs great.
What about firewall and anti-virus (scanning constantly in the background) ?
I know Windows 2000 can run reasonably but you have to cut it down a lot. No firewall, no anti-virus, no nothing
In the Christmas Holidays I was visiting my father who has before mentioned machine, so my experiences are extremely fresh ( and yes, his machine will be updated on my next visit, next weekend
It’s not used on the internet.
OK, then it runs a bit faster
But nowhere near anything I would consider reasonable.
NT4 instead would do quite a bit better.
First of all it runs very reasonably. Second I think NT4 would be a horrible choice on an laptop.
That could of course be true. I have absolutely no idea about hardware support issues for labtops and NT4.
None the less, I seriously doubt I could accept the performance. A 1.5 GHz Sempron 2200+ with 1024 MB RAM (well, 512 at the moment – one of the modules died – cheap crap) and a lot more stuff with Windows2003 (before that Win2K Pro) hardly performs adequately for me.
You have some insane expectations then. I do the majority of my work on a 700Mhz laptop with only 256MB of RAM. Granted I am using Linux but once in a while I need to boot from my Win2000 drive and there are no real perfomance issues with either setup.
Actually it’s not all that insane.
What happens when a system loses 75% of free avaialable ram? It starts trashing.. before the loss of my 2nd ram module Gnome never used swap. But now… oh boy. Use of harddisk can bog any system. Windows isn’t better.
Windows 2000 can run with 256 MB ram fine on a 700 MHz cpu, but don’t try that with a newer OS.
Try Win2K on a 200 MHz Pentium MMX and 80 MB ram… it’s nowhere fast
Gnome is unbearable on 256 MB of RAM. I use Windowmaker because of that but like I said before Win2000 runs fine on a 166Mhz Pentium MMX with 64 MB of RAM. I wouldn’t have believed it unless I saw it myself.
I have a 200 mhz MMX IBM thinkpad 560x with 96 megs of ram. I have not tried windows on it (only usb cd rom) I found that linux was usable with fluxbox (knopix got me installed but was very slow) I found BeOS is most useable, even fast OS for it
I believe that. But BeOS should have a fast feeling on such hardware
Just for the record it’s never been said that KDE/Gnome are lighter, both developers admit Windows runs better with less ram. Optimising code for less memory usage takes a lot of time, skill and resources, something Microsoft have a lot of.
Yup, but it doesn’t show
I tried on legacy hardware, and admittingly, I stuck to Windows 2000. But startup times and loading apps is way to slow. I tried Mandrake miimal install, with XFCE, beatrix, ubuntu. beatrix was not too bad, but W2000 was way superior. You need to compare a real desktop with a real desktop (gnome of KDE)
Just because gnome and KDE are the mainstream lunix desktops, doesn’t mean they’re the only real ones. Enlightenment is a very popular WM and alot snappier than gnome or KDE, and I’ve not found anywhere where E17 is lacking in functionality that gnome/kde have
I’d have to dissagree on both posts, yours and the one you’re replying to.
I’ve never used Windows 2000, but I’ve used 98 and XP and I’d be lying if I said that either of those two versions of Windows started as fast as Linux+XFCE/ICEWM. As far as XFCE goes it’s got lots of features now, it’s a modern desktop environment.
As for Enlightenment, sure it’s probably got lots of features, it’s been a long time since I’ve used it so it’s plausible by now that it’s as much a modern desktop as the other’s are. But I know there are features in KDE, Gnome and Windows which are not in E17, it’s not like I’ve been ignoring it that much.
Enlightenment is a very popular WM and alot snappier than gnome or KDE, and I’ve not found anywhere where E17 is lacking in functionality that gnome/kde have
Try plugging in a USB pen drive. See that neat icon on your desktop? No?
Then there you go.
Vector SOHO 5, real desktop (KDE) and runs fast on my 300 mhz p2, far faster then anything I have tried except dsl and gentoo…… but then who wants to spend a week compiling on a 300mhz box.
This is a difficult test to measure. What window manager would they select? What desktop environment? Which video drivers? Using a lightweight DE like XFCE4 or blackbox combined with the latest linux kernel will run applications well on low memory or older CPU’s. I have both windows XP and Fedora core 4 installed on the same box and I avoid booting into windows mode since applications like browser, CD burning sofware will bog down the system because of the memory requrements for Windows XP. The memory requirements for Vista will be even greater meaning soon I will get even more performance from my linux boot.
They purposely chose distros that needed the most resources for the comparisons. Also i see many saying the lighter distros dont offer everything you need. But they do they are very featureful you can do anything on them that you can a “full blown” distro and certainly windows xp.(you may not have as much graphical “fluff” though) Now ill say vector linux runs far faster on my 166mhz 64 mb
toshiba laptop then even windows 98 did and xp forget it.
I don’t think anyone really believes that barebones linux on low-powered hardware will provide all of the functionality that XP provides, and this is part of Microsoft’s constant emphasis on rich desktop clients for extra functionality.
Fine. I wouldn’t want to run Suse on a PII300 with 64MB any more than I would want to run XP.
But if I was a corporate customer with a few, or a few dozen, or a few hundred legacy PII300 desktops and facing the prospect of having to forklift all of those desktops to run Microsoft’s latest and greatest, I might be inclined to seriously consider the viability of thin-client.
After all, many heavy corporate apps (CRM, ERP etc.) are server centric and Microsoft’s terminal services simplift the deployment of those pesky MS-centric apps like Office.
Citrix runs as well on linux as it does on Windows. This I know from experience, because my lowly little linux laptop has exactly the same enterprise functionality as our corporate issue XP desktops, since all of our apps are thin client.
There’s the rub I think MS is trying to avoid. Customers don’t have to wipe MS out of their datacenters, but properly deployed thin-client apps can make Windows on the desktop superfluous. Hell, my company is using relatively new 2+GHz machines with 512MB and XP under a global domain, with a whack of management tools and Trend Micro A/V, solely for the purpose of running Citrix. Crazy.
We could easily take all the old PII450 machines we forklifted out and re-deploy those with a locked-down linux desktop optimized solely for Citrix and Java/Web-based apps. Create a portal for launching apps, or simply use a remote desktop. Eliminate the FUD around linux desktops being confusing for users, and increase security by centralizing all applications and resources.
Not an unrealistic or pie-in-the-sky scenario.
Certainly not a solution for everyone, and thin client certainly can’t and won’t replace rich client in every scenario. But it can in many, especially the cost-conscious institutional environments like schools/libraries referred to in the article, and that’s what counts.
Hell, with my up to date system, Windows XP won’t install out of the box due to Serial ATA. Linux distros… no problem.
(Purely out of the box like the article says)
The article states that the purpose of MS’s tests is to look at:
how well the latest Windows client software runs on legacy hardware in comparison to its Linux competitors…given Microsoft’s desire to upgrade every possible customer to the latest version of Windows
On one hand, MS is suggesting Vista will require a relativley state-of-the-art CPU and graphics system to properly handle Vista, but in this article they are testing legacy hardware back to the Jurrasic era to validate how well it can be upgraded? Both can’t be true. And excuse me while i go reset the BS detector. It just went off again.
If you stuck in a situation where you have to deal with old arss hardware like P2 300 Mhz. or lower machines with only 64 megs of ram do yourself a favor and find a better job with a company that dosen’t have its head up its ass.
I worked for an outfit like this once, they had nothing but 233Mhz. or lower pentium machines and of course they expected these to run a pretty *modern* software package with windows 2000 and various apps. The excuse was always “we don’t have the money to upgrade”. My answer to that is “if you depend on the system(s) you cannot afford to NOT upgrade.”
I got sick of working with ancient shit and told them that either they find the money to buy ome good modern hardware or they could use my wages to buy it because I was leaving.
I bailed and today I have a better paying job with a company that dosen’t f–k around trying to mickey mouse old computers with modern operating systems. These guys buy good *NEW* hardware when we need it and life is oh so much simpler.
This may apply for almost any commercial entity but from my experience in a few non-profits this just doens’t add up. They buy what they absolutely need, and everything else has to wait. The stuff that’s laying around is running win2k to connect to the domain and that’s about it. Stuff is salvaged as much as possible, and if something needs to be purchased it is, but only small parts not new computers. The budget simply isn’t there.
The bottom line is really what matters.
Who voted me down, and why? I voiced my experience, this is ridiculous.
“If you stuck in a situation where you have to deal with old arss hardware like P2 300 Mhz. or lower machines with only 64 megs of ram […]”
You’ve just described 90% of schools and businesses I know of.
“I got sick of working with ancient shit and told them that either they find the money to buy ome good modern hardware or they could use my wages to buy it because I was leaving.”
I’ve seen companies I know are gambling with their livelyhood by refusing to get new hardware. Yes it’s expensive, but they’ll be beating their heads on the wall later for being so naive as to think that they could build a lasting business off computers which they never intend to upgrade or replace. For example there’s a local sign shop here and it’s running off very old computers, printers and cutting machines. Right now hard times are just over the horizon for them since their ancient printer/cutter software doesn’t support any modern format any more except for one. To work around this they are using a Corel product to convert what they do get into that one remaining supported format. When that format changes or Corel drops support I don’t want to be around to see them close shop since they’re friends of the family. I tried to suggest they upgrade, and I tried to stress the importance, but they seem financially constrained and I didn’t want to panic them so I might not have gotten the message across. Either way it would have been a fairly expensive upgrade getting new computers, printers and cutting machines, but without those new machines the business could go under before long.
It also depends on the job in hand. Most of the Windows apologists around here always come off with the line that the PC is just a tool. fair enough.
I know quite a few solicitors, and although they have up-to-date laptops for themselves, they also have completely obsolete computers sitting in the corner doing a job.
I am not talking Win2000 obsolete, I am talking about computers that run DOS on a 10MB hard disk.
These computers are stuck in an office as a proper tool, doing a few simple jobs, like printing invoices for customers, printing faxes that come in over the modem, doing the payroll, printing the company headed paper.
These computers can continue doing these jobs until they finally give up the ghost and die.
However, Microsoft would have you all believe that they need the latest OS to do these things, and because they are underpowered, they need to replace the hardware to. You will not be able to print the payroll/invoices, unless you use the latest and greatest software we sell. BOLLOCKS.
But the saddest thing is…. the majority of decision makers believe them.
The case of the sign shop is different though, they need to keep current with image formats and as it is now their printing and cutting software isn’t. There is only one remaining supported file format that their software will support.
As it is they’ve jerry-rigged a system together where they use Corel Paint 10 to convert what is brought in to them to the last working format the printer and cutter software will handle. And it’s an old format which could become dropped completely in the years to come, Corel Paint 10 is the only program I know of that’ll even export to it any more. The people running this print shop have already had to turn customers down because they couldn’t get the formats brought to them to work at all. The software that runs the printers and cutters was made for Windows 3.1 and runs very poorly in Windows 98 which they are running, but they needed Windows 98 to run Corel Paint 10, as you can see the problems are stacking up for these people.
Last I heard they were also having trouble with their hard drive dying. They don’t make hardware like they used to any more, but then the computer is quite old anyway.
I don’t dissagree that very old computers can still get the same jobs done today that they could do when they were new, but that depends on whether the computers can still remain compatible with new file formats and hardware that they’ll need to work with.
agreed, it does depend on the job in hand. if you have to have the machine exchanging files with others, then you do need to keep current. If the computer can function alone, then it will never need updated until death comes a knockin
A lot of people here seem to again forget how easy it actually is to change shells in Windows. It is really easy to exchange Explorer with a much lighter, faster shell. Just download the damn thing and treat it like any other app. Really easy.
This is hard for me to swallow at times but I’ve tried all the *box ports as well as number of propietary shells and litestep, non of them are as usable, fast (yeah, you read right, that’s what I said) or stable (again, you read right) as explorer in windows 2000.
If only XFCE could be cloned or ported…
Correct me if I’m wrong, but explorer cannot be uninstalled, and it gets preloaded when the OS starts. What about the desktop? When explorer crashed in Window 98 for me the desktop went too, in XP the desktop and the bar at the bottom of the screen go.
Explorer seems very much tied into the OS to me.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but explorer cannot be uninstalled, and it gets preloaded when the OS starts. What about the desktop? When explorer crashed in Window 98 for me the desktop went too, in XP the desktop and the bar at the bottom of the screen go.
You don’t need to uninstall it.
Change the following registry key –
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESoftwareMicrosoftWindowsCurrentVersionPolicies
SystemShell
If shell is not there then create it. Make it a string value and put in the path to an .exe you want to run as the shell.
Reboot.
Yes it’s quite easy.
But LiteStep just doesn’t feel right anymore. It doesn’t have that nice touch it used to have.
Very sad.
Thank you for pointing out an(other) advantage of *NIX, Bill. You can actually ditch those heavy DE’s and get openbox instead. Or you can even get rid of the entire GUI (why waste resources on a server?).
Of course Bill knows that they are generalizing Linux with KDE/Gnome. But he also knows that is not the only one who does that. And his name wouldn’t be Bill if he didn’t take advantage of it.
Very true, looks like “Linux is poo” has just exposed his lack of knowledge about window managers in Linux. He slipped up big time, just like people who THINK they claim to know about Linux but really know shit.
when you run the trusted 2.4 kernel you can run on almost any pentium class or above. 2.6+ and you need to know what the hell you are doing.
I run 2.4 with slackware and I get better performance than windows xp, with windows 2000 I get the same performance. You really need a top notch machine to get one of those great distros like RHEL WS to work perfectly. So the game goes, with the latest machines you will have no problems. Without them stick to kernel 2.4. Have a good one!
Just funny to me that the Multi Billion dollar Microsoft has to spend time fighting against little ole Linux!
It’s very simple, if I have a client and they had old machines and wanted to go to Windows XP or Linux, I would show them both, but I would take my time and pick a light version of Linux like damn small Linux. I am not gonna just grab Xandros and think that it will work.
Anyway if MS spent more time making their product better and less time trying to put Linux down maybe they would not have to worry about Linux. But iuin reality MS is a marketing company and not really a software company. They do better at making people believe what they want people to believe then they do at making software.
That not many newbies do their own installs. Anyone with any skill knows that can always install a lite version of Linux or recompile.
With Windows you have to work with what you got. I know there are third party programs that can lighten Windows, but then you run into problems with patch updates and you really have problems when you do service pack updates.
Linux is modular and Windows is not and never will be. (Its not meant to be)
MS will try and make Windows have different install types to try and make it seem more modular, but in reality its just a ploy.
Linux is modular and Windows is not and never will be. (Its not meant to be)
windows is a highly modular os with only a very limited number of modules availabel. but thats microsofts fault for not publishing the necesary documentation.
How is Windows Highly Modular? You can not break it down to the bare Kernel and build it up the way you want. You can’t change the GUI, you can make it look different but it’s still the same ole GUI.
You can’t even remove IE. You can make it not be the default but you can not remove it. (There are third party tools that allow you to remove it, but then you can’t patch your machine cause you need it to work with Windows update)
Modular is when you have a problem in the OS like the WHM problem Windows had last week, you remove or turn off the offending program or you upgrade or even downgrade the kernel till a fix comes out. Can you do that in Windows? Nooooooooo. So you sit and pray or you install some third party patch while you wait till GOD, oops I mean MS comes out with a real patch.
Modular? LOL! Yea ok.
You can’t even remove IE. You can make it not be the default but you can not remove it.
sure you can. if you do a customised install you can choose to not install ie.
if you don’t want the libraries driving ie, windows-help and some other html-stuff you need a tool from the microsoft homepage (it’s a free download).
it’s for building an embedded version of windows but basically you can make your own windows-distribution.
(There are third party tools that allow you to remove it, but then you can’t patch your machine cause you need it to work with Windows update)
well, what did you expect? not loosing any functionality while removing software? please stop dreaming.
“well, what did you expect? not loosing any functionality while removing software? please stop dreaming.”
Hummmmm, last time I looked if I don’t use Firefox on Linux I can still patch my machine!
Wait, wait! I don’t even need a GUI to patch my machine in Linux! LOL!
I can remove software in Linux and not worry that my machine is not patched! You can NOT remove IE on a regular install and use it on the internet. (Unless you just like being hacked!) No way you can tell me you can use Windows with out patchs cause besides not being patched most up to date applications look for the most uptodate service packs and patches.
Oh you can try to search the MS site for hand install patches, but that would be like looking for water on Mars. LOL! It will take QUITE a while!
So no I am not dreaming, I just use Linux!
You can NOT remove IE on a regular install and use it on the internet. (Unless you just like being hacked!) No way you can tell me you can use Windows with out patchs cause besides not being patched most up to date applications look for the most uptodate service packs and patches.
You can use AutoUpdate without needing IE. You can also download the patches from Microsoft Downloads without needing IE.
Autoupdate does not install all patches, and sometimes with autoupdate you still need to have Internet Exsploder.
And like I said in one of my other posts that Microsoft does not have a consistant way of putting patches on their site so you could spend days looking for everything, and then you still can’t be sure you have all the current patches without going to Windows update and checking.
I think some parts of windows are, other parts (the whole shell) aren’t.
The modularity in the kernel really doesn’t help most desktop users customize their computer.
xorg runs badly on my machine with 64 MB of Ram, while Windows 98 and even Windows 2000 run acceptably well.
Damn Small Linux is great and lightweight, but it uses Xvesa so there is no decent video speed, what makes Win in the same hardware much faster overall.
While Windows XP is not modular, Windows XP Embedded is and can run even on 32 MB of Ram. And Windows CE can run a router with no GUI with less than 2 MB of RAM, and even IE with less than 8 MB of RAM.
Now take xorg and popular Gnome/KDE and you get a worse experience even compared to Windows XP with 128 MB of Ram.
All that said, abandon xorg and Linux/FreeBSD can be good solutions for old PCs (much used in developing countries).
Edited 2006-01-08 03:15
Last time I looked Windows 98 and 2000 are outdated and if you run them they may be faster then linux with XOrg but you can’t plug them into the internet without adding 3 or 4 programs like Virus Scan and Anti Spam and a firewall. Once you add those then Linux blows them both away (And don’t tell me you would actually get on the net with 98 or 2000 without at least VS)
Windows XP embedded is not really Windows XP, But I can run embedded Linux with Qtopia on the same hardware as XP and CE. And it’s the same Linux kernel so you don’t have to rewrite a bunch of Kernel level stuff when I port appications. (Unlike with Windows CE and Windows XP embedded)
But there are lots of things I can do on a default install of Linux to make it faster with the GUI, I can turn off some of the Virtual Consoles and Desktops, I can then optimize disk access by using 32 bit DMA, I can also change the swappiness function so it will use the swap file less even with low memory.Also I can tuen on Multisector I/O. And I can recompile the kernel etc. All that without adding or removing anything and my machine will be twice as fast as a default install of say Ubuntu. (Even with Xorg)
That is modular! LOL!
Xorg is not the bad guy, its Gnome/KDE which cause trouble. I run X.org 6.8 with FVWM on a slackware 10.1 box, it runs great. There is no compromise on functionality either. The only problem lies in having to choose a variety of applications (file manager, icon handler etc) to provide the same degree of ease of use. But my full featured FVWM box performs like Windows 9x on my old machine and gives a much greater degree of functionality.
I guess in the end performance is usually inversely proportional to the number of features, but the advantage of a Linux based operating system is that you can choose the proper balance according to your tastes, and implement it with a minimum impact on performance.
But you can even strip down Gnome.
The Nokia 770 uses gnome
And if I am not mistaken the Tablet is running Gnome on Debian.
The Nokia 770 measures 5.5in. x 3.1in x 0.7in and weighs in at a hair over 8 ounces. It also has a 4.13in. LCD display, and what a display it is: 16-bit color at 800×480. It runs something called “Internet Tablet 2005 Software Edition” which is actually a tweaked version of Debian and gnome called maemo It comes with a fair amount of bundled applications including a web browser (Opera), e-mail client, audio and video players, image viewer, RSS reader, Internet radio player, and more.
http://www.maemo.org/platform/docs/maemo_exec_whitepaper.html
Nokia 770 Internet Tablet
http://www.europe.nokia.com/nokia/0,,75023,00.html
Embedded Linux: Etlinux, full GPL
Minimal requirements:
-386SX
-2MB RAM
-2MB Disk
http://www.etlinux.org/index.html
A stripped down and well tweaked copy of windows XP pro will run quite happily on a pentium 75 with 64mb of ram… I know, I have a tower with that sitting next to me. But puppy linux and dsl also run very well on the same machine. I think most of these so-called ‘engineers’ are morons.
You mean, just the (MS) OS only eat all 64 MB Ram.
Where You put the restof software ?
not at all. Once booted, XP consumes right at 34mb. Leaving a bit to spare for other apps. It’s a little bit of magic called ‘tweaking’. such as turning off all unwanted services, disabling all the flashy gui crap I don’t like and various other things. the same sort of stuff you can do to a linux distro to get its ram consumption down to tolerable limits on an older system.
Edited 2006-01-08 05:47
I had a 500K6-2 (about like a Pentium Pro, but nice for games at the time) that I ran with WindowsXP for a long time. I ran Ubuntu on it a while back.
Now, one thing to note: Ubuntu is noticeably slower on a 1GHz Duron than Slackware.
Ubuntu definitely felt slower than I’d remembered XP. However, I’d also gotten used to an athlon 1800 since; so it may have simply been my bad remembrance.
However, the fastest graphical web browser ever is still Dillo
. You can really feel it when you leave the desktop iron and go back to the antiques!
are these studies ever read the minimum requirement for each OS (Linux/BSD)?
well, modern distros like RH,Fedora,Suse,Novell with ful Gnome/KDE installs have much the same sysReQ as Microsofts. thats the point, it is not saying that
there are not other Linux configurations or distros that have less: Eg:blackbox/Fvwm etc…
this is a true statement, but vista will raise the bar on sysreq, then OSX and new RH/Fedora/Novell will as well.
this is not rocket science,
-Nex6
Pure FUD !! I use linux in both servers and desktops because:
1- Linux servers can work without GUI and therefore the computers don’t need good graphic adapters and there are more free RAM space for programs.
2- For desktops, if some PC is much OLD and cannot support a current linus distribution with KDE or Gnome I use some environment like LTSP (http://www.ltsp.org/), Thinstation (http://thinstation.sourceforge.net/) or alike to use old computers (like Pentium 1xxx with 16 or 32 MB RAM) as thin terminals. And with linux solution you don have to pay Windows server license or terminal server client access licenses (TS-CAL).
3- MS licenses are more expensive than hardware upgrades.
1) These tests were made by microsoft, it’s not always sure thei’re telling the truth… They just want their marked share back.
2) If they compared a pretty new linux system with gnome/kde, I suppose they ran it against vista? …
I’ll go read the article later, don’t have much time right now…
Microsoft can challenge OS market and they are doing this. I am not favouring them. I am telling the truth and I am a neutral guy. I always watch every OS’s good and bad things. Look at today’s OS world, MS is challenging every OS and dominating. Every company and all Open Source communities are against them but still they are challenging them. They are just like boss of enemy in a film and such a powerful boss that no one had competed them.
They created Open Source labs just to test where Linux is better than Windows and that report is send to Windows development team and then they make Windows more powerful. Many of u may think that why Windows is still vulnerable. It’s because the arichitect of Windows is so complex that its hard to maintain that complex project without any bugs. Linux architect is much simpler than Windows. If anyone had ever wrote device drivers for both Windows and Linux, ask that person that which architect is diffcult. I am dead sure that they will also solve this problem of complexity because they r doing research on another OS called “Singularity”. I think they will remove all the prevoius support of applications in the upcoming 2 or 3 versions of Windows and will make it simpler and inherit most of the features from Sigularity.
In the end I just want to warn Open Source community that they learn from you and make Windows more powerful. If anyone remember the quotes of Mr. Gates.
“Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning” – (Bill Gates, Business @ The Speed of Thought)
“Look at today’s OS world, MS is challenging every OS and dominating.”
Actually Microsoft has most of its customers from before Linux and OS X. I don’t think Microsoft is climbing at all, now they’re just raking in the bucks and trying to keep their existing customers while loosing some and gaining others. In my opinion Microsoft’s market position has been huge but mostly stagnant for years now.
IMO, Microsoft’s success didn’t come from Microsoft, their OEM contract with IBM in the first place was what made them huge. Back in those days they made a cheaper OS for cheaper computers than almost everything else on the market, and as is proven by Wal-Mart that is what gets customers.
“Microsoft’s success didn’t come from Microsoft, their OEM contract with IBM in the first place was what made them huge”
Why other companies like to become partner of MS???
I am not talking about those old days when IBM asked Gates and Paul to write an OS for their first P.C. Even today, companies are becoming partners of MS.
If you talk about gaming, Windows is the best OS for it. Also if u talk about graphics and animations, its still the best.
There are many companies who are not creating softwares for Linux such as Adobe+Macromedia.
Of course for programmers, Linux is the best OS. I love system programming and only for this reason, I use Linux and for gaming, I use Windows.
“Why other companies like to become partner of MS???”
Care to name any current ones?
“There are many companies who are not creating softwares for Linux such as Adobe+Macromedia.”
That doesn’t have to do with Microsoft gaining ground today, that has to do with the big user base they built up starting with their initial IBM deal. Adobe and Macromedia are just going for the OS with the biggest market share, “the biggest slice of the pie”.
If that slice of pie continuously remains big, then how Linux and Mac can come up in the market ? That slice will always force developers, companies and Open Source communities to develop softwares for Windows.
I doubt very much that Microsoft is keeping it’s market share from fluctuating downwards slowly. And there’s always the people who weren’t Microsoft customers in the first place.
By the way, developers, companies and open source communities don’t all develop software for Windows. I don’t know where you that notion from. There are lots of good programs out there made by “developers, companies and open source communities” that aren’t made for Windows and haven’t been ported to Windows.
Pretty sad.
Ugh. I remember trying to run XP in a P3@800 MHz box. So slow I uninstalled it right away.
Windows 2000? Rocks. Faster for graphical tasks. But, not current. And I like FreeBSD+Gnome+Oo2 much better.
FreeBSD 5 + Gnome2? Well, it rocks. Occassional slowdown with OOo, perhaps, that’s all. Add more memory = better performance.
Yes, and I admit probably Windows 3.11 would run much faster than anything else here, except probably FreeBSD and plain X. Unfortunately I like the Gartoon theme too much..
oh really? What were you running it with, 16megs of ram? Theres NO reason for it to have been slow if you have done proper setting up.
good god people.
Since when have a (current) Windows run on Alpha, MIPS, PPC, m68k, HPPA, sparc, ultrasparc, etc ?
I think there is one basic “flaw” about this comparison: Running an up-to-date system with some sort of GUI to serve graphical applications, you simply don’t have much of a choice in the Windows world. Yes, you can turn off a bunch of effects and slightly tweak your interface, but you can’t expect performance leaps from that. On the other hand side, on my notebook (AMD 1800+ CPU, 512 megs of RAM, running Debian unstable) there _is_ a notable difference in performance comparing, say, a fully-fledged GNOME environment to a lean, simplistic setup with only a window manager and a few simple deskmenus. As mentioned, you can have an up-to-date system using DamnSmallLinux with GUI and everything on machines I experienced Windows almost impossible to install to.
Linux will run on anything. Performance however, may be another story. one has to employ a little common sense.
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/pro/upgrading/sysreqs.mspx
Any of the listed OS’s at these specs are sad. Especially with the GUI’s. IMHO this is where linux takes the lead. you cannot uninstall the Win Shell but in linux you can choose to install a diff WM or none at all.
-nX
It’s nice that Linux allows for alternative GUIs (window managers under X, mostly) or none at all, but I think it’s still sad that the two most commonly used desktops under Linux are as resource-hungry as they are.
They didn’t used to be. KDE 2.2 used to be quite usable on a 32MB box, and it used to fly on a box with 64MB.
I’m not sure what all has been added to create so much RAM usage, but it makes it difficult to use KDE on any older boxes these days. Thank goodness for Fluxbox and other similar alternatives!