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<sarcasm> It's true! Amazing, 5 years of work for this! Maybe in this build it can run in a 2Ghz processor and less than 1Gb of RAM. </sarcasm>

It's kicking ass on an Athlon 1600+ with 512MB of ram here, much to my dismay. Memory usage is pegged at about 65%, but the responsiveness is very good. Aero works well too.

Yeah right. Now try to use applications for true work, a Office Suite, an IDE, Email Client, AIM client, and so on..and tell me that 512MB ram is enough!

Can't help you on the IDE, but I've got Gaim, Word 2007, Firefox, and Sonicstage ripping a cd in the background with little, if any, noticable slowdown.

Not that I'm arguing that it's high end, mind you, but it *is* quite usable on this box. On my real machine it'd probably scream.

Edited 2006-08-28 19:39

I dont know about you, but when Im opening Firefox + Netbeans + YM + Outlook + Antivirus + Skype + MSN my computer lags, and its a Windows XP one with 512MB, with no 'girly' looks.

kozo wrote(emphasis mine):
"I dont know about you, but when Im opening Firefox + Netbeans + YM + Outlook + Antivirus + Skype + MSN my computer lags, and its a Windows XP one with 512MB, with no 'girly' looks."

Check your task manager and look for Java...

It's probably the thing that's taking most of your RAM and CPU Cycles(Happpens to me in both Windows 2000 and Ubuntu)

kozo wrote(emphasis mine):
"I dont know about you, but when Im opening Firefox + Netbeans + YM + Outlook + Antivirus + Skype + MSN my computer lags, and its a Windows XP one with 512MB, with no 'girly' looks."

Check your task manager and look for Java...

It's probably the thing that's taking most of your RAM and CPU Cycles(Happpens to me in both Windows 2000 and Ubuntu)

Tell me that 512 MB is enough to do all of that on a modern Linux distro.

Oh, wait -- you can't.

You're right, 512 isn't "enough to do all of that" on a modern Linux distro.

256MB is.

Wrong.

I've been testing out Ubuntu, Suse, and Xandros over the past month or so, and on a box w/384M, Linux begins swapping almost immediately. Open more than a couple of apps and it's swapped out almost 200M.

Wrong.

I've been testing out Ubuntu, Suse, and Xandros over the past month or so, and on a box w/384M, Linux begins swapping almost immediately. Open more than a couple of apps and it's swapped out almost 200M

Try again. Linux isn't confined to Ubuntu, Suse, or Xandros. I have been using Linux on an old laptop with 256MB of memory for years now without an issue. It is very usable.

Wrong.

I've been testing out Ubuntu, Suse, and Xandros over the past month or so, and on a box w/384M, Linux begins swapping almost immediately. Open more than a couple of apps and it's swapped out almost 200M.

Ahh.

That's why I use Slackware + KDE.

Edited 2006-08-28 23:54

Linux will swap unused code and data and fill your memory with disk cache. Linux configures this with the swappiness kernel parameter (default value of 60). To swap less:
echo 10 > /proc/sys/vm/swappiness
but it's recommended you don't change the defaults.

To see how much physical memory your really consuming:
free -m | grep cache: | awk '{print $3"MB"}'

That's because of the way Linux uses swap, i.e. whenever it has any. It's the same when it reports the memory used: uninformed users often scream "OMG! Linux is using 400M of my 512MB!" but take away the memory used for buffers, and if you've got 2 or 3 KDE apps + Firefox running, you end up with about 300MB *free*.

Nevertheless, it doesn't slow down unless there's something seriously wrong.

Oh please. Ubuntu and SLED 10 are the only distros that can come close to competing with OSs like Mac OS X and Vista and both of those distros are bloated and definitely not responsive.

Don't bother trying to convince people that using Damn Small Linux will allow you to run all those apps with 256MB of RAM. Those kind of distros will never be popular among home pc users so it's irrelevant.

In any case, the comparison is difficult. Open Office may use little memory but it's also terrible. Especially in comparison to MS Office 2007. Likewise, Photoshop uses a lot of memory but it's better than anything linux offers like GIMP. I'd rather spend 30 dollars to buy an extra 256MB of RAM and use good software than be a cheap ass and just have to be content with crappy software.

Vista and Mac OS X look better, have more support from software and hardware vendors, are easier to use and have better software than Linux. That's why they people use them at home. Ubuntu and SLED10 were supposed to make huge in-roads for home PCs but they haven't. The avg PC user doesn't care and will never care. By this time next year things will be the same...everyone will be using some OS from Apple or MS at home. The truth hurts, I know.

Ubuntu and SLED 10 are the only distros that can come close to competing with OSs like Mac OS X and Vista

Not really. Debian's goal, for example, is to provide a free, universal operating system. Mac OS X and Windows Vista don't even come close to competing with that.

If you mean what distributions compete with Windows Vista and Mac OS X on enterprises with professional support and on the desktop then IMO only SLED and RHEL are there. But others may consider Ubuntu as well.

As far as being responsive, Mac OS X and Windows Vista are not exactly the most responsive operating systems made. Are you sure you know what you're talking about?

Especially in comparison to MS Office 2007.

Which doesn't exist yet.

Also, one of the two most important things that keep OpenOffice.org from being adopted in enterprises is the cost of retraining users to use a new program. But now, thanks to Microsoft, it might be cheaper to migrate to OpenOffice.org than to Office 2007. So even if you think Office's new interface is great, it could be the best thing that ever happened to OpenOffice.org.

Vista and Mac OS X look better,

Completely subjective. I strongly disagree.

have more support from software and hardware vendors,

Linux supports more hardware than OS X and Vista.

If GIMP is enough for the people who use it, then frankly, who cares if your copy of Photoshop resurrects the dead?

In that case, my friend, I believe (but only in this case...) people would be *really* interested in that little copy of Photoshop that happens to resurrect ppl.

;)

Oh I love these people who just have their opinion and no clue about what they are really saying. So you say it's impossible to work smooth on a linux desktop with multiple apps open and 512 MB of RAM? Are you sure?


No.

I use a modern Linux distribution (http://www.archlinux.org - you can't get more modern than that according to the software's versions). I have 512 MB of RAM. Not because I'm a masochist, I couldn't afford more, or anything else. I just never had to think about additional RAM.

About the apps that run when I develop software: Many terminals, xchat2 for lazyness, Firefox with many tabs on multiple windows open (I like to have everything present when I need it), Tomcat running in the background, MySQL too, Eclipse for development, deploying on my tomcat server for testing (with mysql). Don't forget the music player for some chill tunes in the background.

Forget about various other software like apache webserver etc., because it is not really in use and can be swapped out.

Now I never had any swapping problems... It just worked.

But on my gf's pc, where I also sometimes do developing, it didn't work out. Eclipse and some other apps and switching would swap. That's because she only had 256 MB. So I upgraded to 512, too.


So I can tell you, yes, 512 MB is enough to do all of that on a modern Linux distro. And I doubt any average user would have more apps and windows open than me while I do that work. Sometimes gimp is running on the 4th virtual desktop, too, as I just forgot it there. It's when you use software suspend and never actually reboot, it happens to have some apps forgotten on other virtual desktops.. I just think about, if Windows (any version) would have 512 MB of RAM and an uptime (not AC power uptime, I only turn this one on for work) of 40 days, well, would it work? I can't say anything about that to not do the same mistake as you have done.

Eclipse won't run well on that machine if you have it as the only task running with an OS that didn't timeshare.

Other IDE's, such as VS2005, will run well on that machine with a doggy OS. It runs almost usably on a PII.

<joke>Does AIM run in under a Gig of RAM though?</joke>

Other IDE's, such as VS2005, will run well on that machine with a doggy OS. It runs almost usably on a PII.

I'd really want that PII. I'm using it regularly on a 2800+ with 2gigs with very many things disabled and sometimes it still gets slow. I can also make it simply terminate every now and then just by editing a fairly simple dialog. VS2003 and even VS6 are more usable, by miles.

For serious power-users, the protected-mode IE will be compelling - imagine feeling Really Safe.
For Intel( or even AMD )(( or even any PC maker )), they need Vista, so they need better hardware !

Strategically, you can search Amazon on CO-OPETITION to locate Brandenburger & Nalebuff's concise game-theory-meets-reality masterwork. Microsoft is thus a complementor to Intel when they create demand for more powerful hardware. By imaginary contrast, Intel would consider it HOSTILE for Microsoft to go LEAN-and-mean, it's the nice-features-requiring-upgrade which makes it a COMPLEMENTOR relationship.

To anyone who's tried it: does it still (like beta 2) require a primary partition, and the "active" one at that?

I'm pretty sure it does. Then again, haven't all Windows releases been that way?

I'm pretty curious to see how Vista is received by the general public. Will there be massive hype, will people only get it with new systems?

This may (knowing Microsoft, will) change in a big way as we near the release date - and two months away from the business release, I suspect we ARE actually nearing it now - but right now, I suspect the general public would say, "Windows what?"

Even the OS X "Look A-Like" interface that Vista uses is 100x's worse than OS X and KDE still looks WAY better.

Of course, the Win32 Classic interface looks better than all of them. Lighter on resources too

Now who has better driver support?

Depends. If you run into a piece of hardware that Windows doesn't support out of the box, you install the driver from the CD. If you run into the same thing on Linux, near as I can tell, getting the device up and running involves voodoo and live chickens.

As far as software support goes, have you seen how many packages were in the *Ubuntu repos; or SUSE's repos, or any other distro's repos.

Yeah, saw the one for Debian. It had about 8,000,000,000 apps, except for the one or two I was looking for.

It totally eclipses ANYTHING windows could ever imagine.

Yeah, that's just what I want for my OS. A bunch of lame-ass alpha-quality apps from Sourceforge.

As for all your proprietary applications that you "Need", that's your problem that you are locked into those; no one Else's.

Yes, proprietary apps that are better than their open source counterparts. That seems like a high-quality problem to me.

I'm sure you do know; because I don't worry about virus' , malware, spyware, slow buggy code, and a clunky interface.

Neither do I.

I enjoy a totaly FREE operating system; Free to install what I want, free to watch what I want, free to listen to what I want

Yeah, and if it weren't for DVD Jon, your cheap ass wouldn't even be able to watch DVD's on your computer, let alone the new hi-def stuff.

free to program what I want, free to choose what I want, when I want. Free to modify my interface how ever I want without paying some looser $60 for an application that does it for me. Free...Free...Free

Well, if some of you want to know why you can't get more commercial software ported to Linux, here ya go.

Like the Rush song that I listen to using my free MP3 player, Amarok... Free Will... Yeah, FREE...

Wow, I envy you. I wish Windows had free mp3s players too.

Can you say that; not as long as you are simply RENTING your OS and applicaitons... Mmmmmm FREEEEE

Maybe you should try RENTING a brain, instead of talking out of yoru ass.

Very well said. I'm kind of sick myself of this kind of people distorting obvious facts.

From my experience Linux is fine until you hit some unsupported hardware, or you need to do something more complex than writing a letter to gradma in OpenOffice.

Linux is great for servers and should stay there, unless the developers figure out what common users really want.

From my experience Linux is fine until you hit some unsupported hardware, or you need to do something more complex than writing a letter to gradma in OpenOffice.

"something more" ... does tv watching and recording, video capture, coding (c++, java, perl), sound/radio capture, editing [tex] papers [etc] count as something more ?

for every and each hardware element of ones pc you can find one which is supported; but yes, you need to know what hardware you buy, which is _not_ a bad requirement really, it will only do you good in the long term

"Ok, back to enjoying my FREE OS and watching my FREE DVD's before bed; where I will use my FREE OS installed on my pda to read an electronic book on my FREE reader software..."

Yeah ... that 10cents a day I paid for XP sure hurts the wallet.

Is that all OSS is about? Are all users just tightwads?

Yeah ... that 10cents a day I paid for XP sure hurts the wallet.

Is that all OSS is about? Are all users just tightwads?

No, it's not about the money (well, for some people it is, but that's their story). It's about freedom. What freedom, are hear you ask ? Well, there are a lot of freedoms, most people wouldn't even think about. Most wouldn't even know they need or want that freedom. So they don't care. And it's easy to dismiss other people's wish and stickiness to OS and software-related freedoms, when you don't feel or understand their point of view.

On a sidenote. The other day I received two startrek movie dvds as gifts from my little sister, who knows well how I enjoy startek. But, she happens to be currently in the US, and while she's smart and also not a technical illiterate, she just didn't think about region codes when she bought them, she was just thinking how I would like them. So she bought them and sent them to me. Now, how do you play such dvds here in europe ?
1) lucky enough to have a regionfree dvdplayer - I'm not
2) you are a windows user - hacking your dvd drive's formware to either become regionfree or region change unlimited - I'm not using windows at home
3) you are a linux user, as I am - just pop in the disk, graba beer and enjoy the show

I'm done here.

>>>I've already mentioned that productivity software on linux sucks. Also, I don't care if theres 10 million pieces of software. Everyone knows which software is good..very few. Mplayer for media, GIMP for photoediting, Gaim, etc. How about the 10000 other media players and photo editing software? (snip long rant with no rel point) <<<<

At this point I'm pretty sure you're just trolling.

>>>Yea, I'm sure. I remember using ubuntu and there'd be a lot of small (yet noticeable) delays after I click to open something...even something as simple as gterm.<<<

And now I'm positive you're a troll. You haven't used Linux in any way, shape, or form. For one, there is no such application as "gterm". The closest I can imagine is gnome-terminal and it's fast as hell. Stopped reading after this point.

There is a such thing as gterm but I was referring to gnome-terminal sorry. If you want proof of the slight delays I was talking about with gnome-terminal here you go:
http://www.gnome.org/start/2.14/notes/en/rnusers.html

Secondly, here's a post from me on linuxquestions.org from 2004:
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/showthread.php?t=201817

I've used slackware, DSL, several versions of Ubuntu, Suse (can't remember which version), and most recently SLED 10 which happens to still be dual booted on my system with Windows XP.

I know a lot of people like to start calling others "trolls" when they lose an argument or feel dumb but come on, this isn't first grade.

Edited 2006-08-29 05:59

How come so many games won't run on Linux or they run super slow? I don't care if it's the game's problem or the graphics card vendors problem. It's obvious neither party thinks linux is worth their time and support.

Vicious circle you have there. X doesn't develop software for Y, saying Y isn't worth the effort. Unknowing Z says he won't use Y since X doesn't develop software for it. And since many Zs will think the same, X will have no reason to change his mind.

The problem is, X shouldn't develop software for the unknowing crowd of Zs, they should do it for the real users.

here here!!

people should use the right tool or OS in this case for what there needs are. be that OSX, Linux or Windows.

people should not have to "settle" for something but instead, should use whatever the best thing for them is. and use it.

and should not get blasted for it cuz some thinks there OS is not 'cool'.

as A geek i play with as many OS's s i can including windows. So, I can admin and dev on both. makes me valuable and there I have a decent job as a result.


-Nex6

Windows Explorer Behavior is more unstable than with 5472; I confirmed this by reproducing the unstability on two systems.

Just out of interest, what were you doing at the time?

Regarding your network performance, are you using the windows provided network driver or one downloaded from the hardware vendor.

The Chess game which you were playing, what operating system is it designed for; one has to remember that a good amount of applications and games might not work due to crappy programming by the said software company.

"Just out of interest, what were you doing at the time?"

I was copying a CD content from vista to a windows server 2003 share over a gigabit switch. And on another occasion from windows vista to Fedora Core 5 Server

"Regarding your network performance, are you using the windows provided network driver or one downloaded from the hardware vendor. "

Yes, I was using the Mobo supplied driver

"The Chess game which you were playing, what operating system is it designed for"

It must be designed for windows vista because it's the stock Chess game that comes with vista

Hardware:
Mobo: Asus P5WHD
CPU: Core2Duo E6300 @1.86GHz, Vista Score: 4.5
RAM: DDRII-800MHz 1GB Dual channel Corsair Twin Pack, Vista Score:3.9
HDD: SATA WD 200GB, Vista Score: 4.7
Graphics: PCI-X ATI Radeon X300 with MS stock graphics driver, Vista Performance results were 2.0 for desktop Graphics+ 3.0 for gaming Graphics ie 5.0 total.

I was copying a CD content from vista to a windows server 2003 share over a gigabit switch. And on another occasion from windows vista to Fedora Core 5 Server

That doesn't sound quite right; there is something definately wrong there, especially in regards to sharing straight off the hard disk, then again, I've had some shocking speed when transferring over a 100mbps ethernet between my Mac and PC.

Yes, I was using the Mobo supplied driver

Have you tried a clean (no upgrade) install of Windows Vista, without those drivers, what is the performance like? thas assuming that Microsoft has drivers for their controllers.

It must be designed for windows vista because it's the stock Chess game that comes with vista

Pardon my ignorance, I'm a little unknowledgeable about what games came with Windows Vista; like the networking issue, its sounds quite strange given that it shouldn't occur under normal circumstances.

Hardware:
Mobo: Asus P5WHD
CPU: Core2Duo E6300 @1.86GHz, Vista Score: 4.5
RAM: DDRII-800MHz 1GB Dual channel Corsair Twin Pack, Vista Score:3.9
HDD: SATA WD 200GB, Vista Score: 4.7
Graphics: PCI-X ATI Radeon X300 with MS stock graphics driver, Vista Performance results were 2.0 for desktop Graphics+ 3.0 for gaming Graphics ie 5.0 total.

Although the graphics card is on the low end of the spectrum, over all, the machine should scream running Windows Vista, the only suggestion I could suggest would be lodging a bug report with Microsoft, outlining the attrocious performance when running Windows Vista on the above configuration.

Sure, yeah...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Features_new_to_Windows_Vista

Wait a second, if we all just want to bash Windows how come this comment
http://osnews.com/permalink.php?news_id=15651&comment_id=156656
got such a high score?
Maybe it's simply fun to bitch about whatever bothers you with any OS?

Also notice the amount of Windows articles on OSnews.
My guess would be that there are more linux guys here because most Windows guys tend not to care about OS topics.

But you know OSnews longer than I do so I'll give you the benefit of doubt...

I am not trolling but I have given up on this website.

OK...

Most of the people on here are just retarded anti-microsoft morons that run some flavor of linux and have no idea what reality is.

What was that you were saying about not trolling?


I know it sounds like I am trolling but this forum has gone down hill so much that I think most of it is worthless.

While you're at it you can blame the Windows users for a lot of it, too.


I have no problems with linux or open source.

Judging from your earlier comments, coulda fooled me.

I do have problems with people that have political agendas and want to try to bully their way (yes I said bully) into getting things their way.

Newsflash: EVERYONE has a political agenda. And I don't know a company (besides Apple) that "bullies" people as much as MS, whether or not their software rocks.

Some good ideas there. For OS news (no capital N) i read Newsforge and Linuxtoday (yeah I know, but it has some good articles; obviously I don't read the Get the FUD stuff) and drobe.co.uk. Can't help you on Windows or MacOS newssites, though, sorry.