Two ways Microsoft sabotages Linux desktop adoption

[Mike McCarty]

Craig White wrote:
> On Tue, 2006-02-14 at 15:25 -0600, Mike McCarty wrote:
> 
>>Les Mikesell wrote:
>>
>>>On Tue, 2006-02-14 at 14:05, Mike McCarty wrote:
>>
>>Not my experience. I have a well-loaded Win95 and a
>>well-loaded Win98 machine, both of which load up
>>Word more than 10x as fast as Open Office loads
>>on my Linux machine. The 300 MHz Win95 machine even pulls it
>>across a LAN faster than my 2.71 GHz Linux box can load OO
>>from its local disc. I just clicked on the "OpenOffice.org
>>Writer Word processor" icon on the task bar at the bottom
>>of my screen, and it was 58 seconds before it was ready
>>to take a keystroke, on my 2.71 GHz Linux machine. On my
>>400MHz Win98 machine, Word loads in less than 5 secs.
>>
>>YMMV
> 
> ----
> #1 I believe that Microsoft does some pre-loading of their Office shared
> libraries.

Machts nichts. WinXP boots faster on this machine than Linux does.

> #2 I believe that you could speed the time on Linux by doing some
> pre-linking or whatever it's called (brain dead moment - but I recall
> this being a large topic of discussion in FC-2)

Prelink does run, though I wish it wouldn't. It takes over my machine
for 20 minutes at a time, making keystrokes echo slowly, and mouse
cursor movement very difficult.

> #3 I don't have any numbers to back my 'runs like a dog' statement and
> I'm not gonna get sucked into doing it either. In fact, the only reason

That's fine.

> #4 My comment about WinXP running like a dog was predicated on Windows
> 98 era systems...i.e. =< 128Mb RAM, =< 600Mhz Pentium III and evidently

Umm, I have a Pentium 90HMz 32MB machine which runs Win98 like a champ,
but just barely chugs with Linux. I haven't loaded WinXP on that
machine. Linux takes about 30 minutes to boot (Knoppix). I'm not sure
XP would fit.

> you chose to ignore the predicate of my statement. Some people are

Stong language. I don't recall choosing to ignore that, so I missed it.
Sorry if that caused some talking at cross-purposes.

> actually loading and running Fedora on this class of machine and wonder
> why the performance is lousy. Heck...I recently installed FC-4 on my
> Sony VAIO PictureBook C1X (64Mb RAM, 266 MHz Pentium II, 4 Gb HD), don't
> ask why, I would like to think it was lack of lucidity and boredom from
> my motorcycle accident. Talk about a dog...it hunts though...I installed
> NXclient on it and it's a hot performer (once it finally boots...gets
> connected to network...totally thrashes desktop environment into vm
> pages and can get NXclient application loaded...all of which takes the
> proverbial patience of Job).  ;-)

I bet!

> The faster load times of various Microsoft applications on the Microsoft
> platform are merely window dressing though...that's an incredibly narrow
> yardstick to measure system performance.

Eh? One measures with the yardstick which one uses, you know.
I use "terminal" windows, which take a lot longer to start
than "console" windows using WinXP. I use on occasion Open
Office to view documents that others have produced (I don't
use it for creating documents), and it takes about a minute
to load. Acroread also takes a long time to load, which is
how I view PDFs on the web. It takes Mozilla 7 seconds (just
measured it) to start a new window, when it's already loaded.
IE on Win98 takes less than a second on a machine with
1/7 the CPU speed, and an equal amount of memory, under
similar circumstances. (I haven't used WinXP for browsing,
so I don't know how that compares.)

Why is it that the very things which I find I need to use
are the ones I'm not permitted to use for comparison?

Mike
-- 
p="p=%c%s%c;main(){printf(p,34,p,34);}";main(){printf(p,34,p,34);}
This message made from 100% recycled bits.
You have found the bank of Larn.
I can explain it for you, but I can't understand it for you.
I speak only for myself, and I am unanimous in that!