Comparisons

[Rich Edelman]

I've really been trying to stay out of this one, but I can't anymore, sorry. 
Comments are inline.

> I really don't think you can get KDE or Gnome lean enough to run as fast as
> Windows 95 on the same hardware, though I'll grant you might get some kind
> of GUI to. 
> A lot of the speed problems in KDE and Gnome are because the code is still
> chock-full of comments and debugging routines.  That's one of the things
> they improved in the last KDE release, they took out some of the debug code
> in stable portions, but there's still a lot there.
I don't remember the exact layout of the KDE and Gnome makefiles anymore, but 
I do know it's possible to really slim them both down. A lot of open source 
projects (including KDE and Gnome at one time) by default compile with all 
kinds of (mostly) useless compiler generated debugging info. Most distros 
keep that compile config as well, because while it's not hard to remove it, 
it's not hurting anything either. Except performance.  Now, comments in code 
don't hurt anything, the compiler skips over them. Comments in code are good. 
Without comments, you'd be working with a huge pile of cow dung.  Debug code, 
well... yes, that slows things down a tiny little, but do you really think 
Windows doesn't have any? I'm willing to bet it has way more than you think. 
Just install Visual Studio 6.0 on any windows box, and wait for Explorer to 
crash. When it does, instead of the standard 'ok' and 'details' buttons, 
you'll also get a 'debug' button. Click on that, it launches VS6 and brings 
up the debugger. Fairly complete, too, with all kinds of symbol information. 
There's gotta be support for that somewhere, and I know that support slows 
other things down.

> And just as with NT, the fact that the XWindows system has more complex
> layers and capabilities means it's never going to be as lean and as quick
> as something like 95 that has a simpler, more direct structure.  As
> hardware speed increases though, efficiency becomes less and less
> noticeable. (That's what Microsoft counts on to cover it's code bloat.) 
> Both cleaner, more mature code and faster hardware are going to mean that
> very soon it will be much more realistic to work in a Linux GUI environment
> for ordinary tasks.
IMO, the single most important factor in the small list of reasons why M$ 
Windows is faster than XWindows with KDE or Gnome is because Microsoft has 
this nasty habit of embedding everything in the kernel. If we (as a linux 
community) did that with Xwindows and bits and pieces of KDE/Gnome, linux 
would surely be faster than Windows. Stock, out of the box, full debugging 
turned on. No questions asked.  Oh, that and M$ still codes a lot of their 
crap in Assembler. We simply can't do that and still support the wide variety 
of hardware that we support, and without a huge bankroll like M$ has. In the 
world of free software and open source, it's all give and take. Sacrifice 
some speed for stability and security? You bet, any day.

> XP though - that and the .NET (Nazis Everywhere Technology) crap are going
> to be a real nightmare.  My company is planning to go to W2K this year, in
> part so that we don't end up having to consider XP as soon as we would if
> we stayed with NT4.
Uh oh, Nazis were mentioned, this thread has officially come to an end. Thank 
you very much.

> So while Microsoft continues to bloat it's code with features for the
> average-and-below idiot, and worms it's way in to our desktops to watch our
> every move, Linux is slowly and quietly cleaning up, tweaking, improving
> and moving on.
This I couldn't agree on more, but already it's fairly easy and trivial to 
get linux just as fast, or faster than, even windows 95.

Sorry for the rant, but I think I needed it. :)

Rich