I get to observe lots of boxes running Linux: mandrake, fedora. About 50 computers, all running new releases of mdk. I work as an SA in a inet cafe so the number 1 observation is the dead slow GUI.
So it is your confirmed observation that a Mandrake desktop is really more sluggish than an XP one (you can always console yourself with the fact that at >P10K a pop, 50 licenses of XP is infinitely more expensive than 50 FREE mandrake installs :-D )? I'm wondering if this is mainly due to Mandrake's bloat or if it is due to Qt/Gtk being less efficient than the Win32 widgets or worse, XFree 2D drivers being inferior to GDI drivers... (which I would really hate to think is the case and I don't believe to be so).
I noticed on my PIII-400Mhz Slackware machine, WindowMaker itself is very very responsive, but Mozilla 1.5 (or was it 1.6) is dog-slow.
As Mozilla 1.6 performance under Windows XP is adequate on my Athlon 2400XP, I really should be installing Slackware on the same machine and comparing it there to be fair.
People who are used to fast XP boxes tend to hasten things and they get the so-called GUI hangs. Of course I teach the kill and explain that it's just the GUI.
Woah... are you saying that the Mandrake desktop hangs on you if you click on stuff too quickly?!? That is surprising and shocking. Fwiw, I have never really remembered an X-Window desktop ever hanging on me on any of the *nixes I've tried (mainly Slackware and Irix) and I'm one impatient person... :-)
It is so disappointing to hear of a *nix desktop regressing to the quality of a Win 9x one.
Most people with their looks seem to ask: what's the difference anyway? XP looks smooth, KDE or GNOME looks so scattered, very disoriented (microcosm of the Linux desktop blueprint). Don't mention the fonts and the colors--they are so rough, most people don't like KDE (that's a fact). Personally, I hate galaxy.
So what's the difference anyway between the blue screens and the GUI hangs?
When NT/2K/XP gets a blue screen, that is absolutely the end of your session, you have to reboot (unlike 9x where you still get a chance to recover and save). Like an X Window hang (which I honestly have never remembered experiencing) you would completely lose access to what you were doing on your desktop and are not even able to save. But one impt. difference is with an X Window hang, you can kill X Window and restart it again much quicker without needing to reboot.
Even if the console hangs and you can't do the ctrl-backspace-backspace thingy, the kernel is still alive and you can restart both the console and X Window remotely without rebooting. (Something similar to this is actually possible with Windoze, but Windoze's GUI being more tightly coupled and not as modular, the success rate for GUI recovery without rebooting is a lot lower than in Linux.) Now, I'm not sure how fast startx operates in Mandrake, but in non-GUIfied distros like Debian and Slackware, startx should be nearly instantaneous.
Of course the thing is that Windows XP boots surprisingly fast if you don't have much installed (I think I'm getting a tad less than 20 seconds on these office machines!!)
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