[clue-tech] ot comments on "little survery"

[Collins Richey]

On Wed, 3 Jun 2009, bediger at inlumineconsulting.com wrote

< Which brings me to my question/observation.  If you have to use Windows XP,
< which we'll just say is "painful, for a lot of reasons" to avoid steams of
< blasphemous invective, do you find it slower than your linux experience?

Of course it's slower, and of course Vista is even more painfully
slow. BTW, Windows XP is painful from my perspective for only 3
reasons. 1. I despise Microsoft as a company (at least it's evil
practices). 2. Windows XP (or any other variant) places millions of
computers at risk to every virus and malware ever created. 3. I'm
opposed to the practice of licenses (of course, the Linux environment
is not totally free from that cancer).

<The contrast is becoming almost grotesque for me.  I have an elderly,
< 700 MHz Pentium 3 machine in my 1st floor office, and a 1.3 GHz AMD
< Athlong server in the basement, both running Slackware 12.0.  The 700 MHz
< Pentium 3, with 386 Mb of PC133 memory, just FLYS compared with a far
< newer, far faster Compaq "EVO" on my work desktop. I keep at least 10
< tabs open in Firefox, and I can swith between tabs almost instantly on
< Slackware. IE7 on XP: creating a new tab takes 10+ seconds, switching
< tabs seems to take longer.

[ other comparisons snipped ]

Impressed as I am by the tremendous performance improvements achieved
by Linux on ancient, less cabable hardware, I believe we are missing
the point. Yes, there are lots of older machines that can benefit from
Linux, but these machines will eventually die of old age, and almost
no one is producing such puny machines any longer. With the exception
of Netbooks, almost all of the current generation machines are capable
of running either Windows or Linux quite well.

The principle need, as I see it, is to make Linux available on current
generation machines from the likes of Best Buy. One of the primary
benefits of Windows is the fact that no one has to (or can) install it
any more. Manufacturers pre-load it, and no one has to go through the
painful (even more so than Linux) process of installation. Most users
are never going to turn up at Installfests; they will just buy
whatever Bet Buy has to offer.

And that applies to application packages as well. No one among the
great unwashed is going to willingly endure the pain of installing and
maintaining a new application with all the myriad of packaging
techniques. A simple, unified, shrink-wrapped approach is needed. And,
to go along with this, open source package developers need to
concentrate on packages that will use whatever level of toolchain is
available, and, finally, open source toolchain developers need to give
up the process of changing the API's at every whim. Even Linus is not
immune to this despicable behavior. He changes the API of kernel
modules any time he feels like it. No one seems to be immune from
reinventing the wheel.

< Why can an old, under-resourced Linux box beat a newer Windows box, and
< not just by a fraction, but by an order of magnitude for most things?

Very simply: the design is better.

-- 
Collins Richey
     If you fill your heart with regrets of yesterday and the worries
     of tomorrow, you have no today to be thankful for.