Stephan Schutter wrote:
I compared Windows XP and RHL 9 on a Dell Laptop (C610)
CPU: 1000MHZ
RAM: 256MB
Software:
OS: WinXP RHL 9
Open office OpenOffice
MS Office 2k MS Office 2k
Software startup times:
WinXP RHL 9
(s) (s)
OS bootup 37 70
Login 8 21
This suggests problems with your setup - just for giggles I checked my
celeron 1200 and it took all of 8 seconds from login to fully populated
desktop including gkrellm -
Def Browser 1 7
OK, close, it took 6 seconds for moz to come up for me - but moz has
never been about quick startup.
Word 2k 4 6
Open Office 10 21
oo is slow indeed, and is my main complaint - but I hear SO7 et al are
much faster at startup
Def TextEdit 1 3
took 1 second here
Your system may need the standard tweaks, the long login time especially
suggests basic configuration issues.
1. If Open Source writes better software; then why is it fatter and
slower?
In most cases it is neither fatter nor slower - one might well ask why,
if windows nt/2k is so efficient, why can it not even boot up on a low
end system which could be used to run a website, or a
firewall/dns/dhcp/vpn/router box with linux? on the other hand, desktop
apps are microsoft's forte, and have been their focus for many years -
you find it suprising that one of the wealthiest and most fanatically
driven corporations has been able to make their desktop apps snappy?
One thing that people fail to realize is that X11 is fairly heavyweight
- it's a complex and sophisticated client/server, network-transparent
windowing system, whereas on windows you have a simple pc gui:
single-user, and local-only. you're not really comparing apples to apples.
Even so, linux desktop performance is not bad, apart from pathological
cases like yours - and is getting better. Just as all the server room
shortcomings were addressed, so now the desktop shortcomings are being
addressed.
As to your question on whether "anyone at redhat" is interested in
performance, I'll let them speak to that.
Joe