[Gllug] Interesting article on the MS monopoly

[Nix]

On Fri, 16 Apr 2004, Garry Heaton stated:
> The worst speed comparison I've seen between open source apps running on XP
> and Linux has to be Emacs. I have it on 2 identical machines running XP and
> Fedora. On XP it boots in around 2 seconds. On Fedora you first get the
> chrome, then an attempt to load some system-wide default, then the
> specifications in my local .emacs file. It's an absolute dog. I had it
> booting faster on Mandrake 9.2 but could never get it to boot as fast as on
> XP and Emacs for XP doesn't even use an MSI installer.

That's a pretty silly comparison. Emacs is a programmable editor, and it
looks like Fedora's copy is running quite a lot when you start it.

I mean, on my box here, XEmacs takes more than fifty seconds to start:
it's scanning about ninety directories over NFS, reading in more than
30,000 lines of lisp, and doing some moderately hefty computation.
But I don't hold that *against* it: it's only doing what I told it
to, after all. (On WinXP on NTFS, it's enormously slower to start,
taking over five minutes, because NTFS is such an incredibly slow
filesystem.)

(Boot time of Emacs is a silly comparison for another reason: Emacs is a
long-running app. My XEmacs here has been up for more than three days,
and that's nothing: the modal running time for me is more like a
*month*. If you're constantly restarting Emacs, you're using it wrong.)

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 but merely a lack of adequate backups.' --- Steven McDougall
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