Is Linux really faster than MS Windows ?

[James Wilkinson]

Ben Sheron wrote:
> Fedora has a lot of stuff added to the kernel;

Erm: that's ambiguous.

Fedora contains a lot of programs that it runs on top of the kernel. But
the Fedora kernel is not heavily patched: see
http://people.redhat.com/davej/patchlist-fc3.txt for a full list of what
was in a fairly recent update, and note that most of the patches are
very small "fix" patches.

But it's the programs that run at startup that slow down Linux booting.
And a lot of those just aren't found in a typical Windows desktop: there
won't be a mail server or proxy server. There probably won't be a
network time daemon, web server, or ftp server. There will be a much
less versatile firewall.  There'll be much less support for network
services beyond what Samba provides.

Also, Fedora's automatic hardware detection and configuration is better
than Windows (and that's saying something: it's one of the areas that
Microsoft has really concentrated on). The price is a slightly slower
boot as Fedora redetects all the hardware.

James.

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