[cumbria_lug] Observations

[Michael Saunders]

On Sun, 7 Mar 2004, Michael Saunders wrote:
>
> Besides, the spec of the 'average home PC' doesn't reflect the real
> world at all. Joe Smith with his 3 GHz 1G RAM Dell box may not have
> any trouble running KDE/GNOME, Mozilla, OpenOffice.org et al., but a
> huge amount of the computers in companies and poorer countries are
> unusably sluggish with such apps and desktops.

Followup to a thread from a few months ago. The performance problems I
was mentioning are becoming more serious now:

http://www.osnews.com/comment.php?news_id=6989&limit=no

Check out the number of comments from users who've tried to run modern
desktop distros on Windows XP systems, but have found it unbearably
slow in comparison.

This is bad.

Linux used to have three genuine advantages over Windows: stability,
security and speed. Microsoft has improved reliability in Win2k and
XP, and now Linux + GNOME/KDE + OpenOffice.org + Mozilla is gigantic
memory hog and often slower than the Microsoft equivalents, as can be
seen in the above discussion.

Which leaves us with security, and for now we should be safe there.
But why does it have to be like this? People LOVE speed -- otherwise,
they wouldn't keep upgrading their systems in an attempt to raise
performance. Linux's desktop acceptance would receive an enormous
boost if it was significantly lighter and faster than Windows, and yet
we're just piling on sloppily-coded features.

In fairness, OpenOffice.org and Mozilla were derived from crumbly old
codebases and both projects are working hard on performance. The GNOME
guys with their 3 GHz 1G RAM boxes need to visit the real world,
though, as do some of the distro engineers who are making Linux the
slowest-booting OS in existence (see Fedora and its 2x starting X!).

I don't know how long it'll be before developers take this problem
seriously, but that discussion above should really sound big alarms.
We need to offer as many benefits as possible over Windows, and we're
not doing it. And at some point it might be too late to fix...

M

-- 
Michael Saunders
www.aster.fsnet.co.uk