Linked by Bob Marr on Thu 10th Jun 2004 05:48 UTC
Consider these memory requirements for Fedora Core 2, as specified by Red Hat: Minimum for graphical: 192MB and Recommended for graphical: 256MB Does that sound any alarm bells with you? 192MB minimum? I've been running Linux for five years (and am a huge supporter), and have plenty of experience with Windows, Mac OS X and others. And those numbers are shocking -- severely so. No other general-purpose OS in existence has such high requirements. Linux is getting very fat.
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I know I'm going to get martyred for this but the article is right, sure its not Linux itself but the include apps that are the problem. As much as I like Linux I will not deny that ever since I started using it I kept wondering where I was supposed to find all that extra speed everyone was talking about.
In my case I've found KDE 3 to start apps faster then Windows XP home but in KDE I use Konqueror and KMail and in Windows I use the Mozilla suite which is heavier (more features) then Konqueror and KMail and therefore an exception can be made for the extra few second it takes to load.
I can't say anything for Microsoft office because its been a long time since I've used it but Corel WordPerfect Office in Windows has a lot more features then OpenOffice.org and starts up faster (albeit OO.o is also available on Windows, Linux and MacOS).
I know how miserable it is to try and install any Linux distribution (except for the antiquated Debian woody) on old hardware never mind run it because the minimum requirements have been increasing so fast, using an old distribution isn't always an option because those don't meet the software requirements for running new apps any more so the only two options now are either to use source based distributions or buy a new computer every two years.
IMO Linux will survive for a long time to come because of the $0 price tag on most distributions and the free developer tools and KDE of course but something does need to be done to resolve the minimum requirements issue or the next free OS with free developer tools that comes around is going to outperform Linux and get all its users.
I get the impression that a lot of the people who commented either didn't bother to read the entire article or didn't bother to read it at all, there is mention of source based Linux distributions being a possible solution but as the article said how is a newbie supposed to manage installing a distribution like Gentoo (yes newbies do end up having to do their own installs, they don't all have a seasoned Linux veteran to turn to).
Its getting to the point now where it would be more worth people's time to buy a used copy of Windows 95/98 off eBay and use that with free tools like Zone alarm, Grisoft AVG and Spybot Search & Destroy rather then use one of the latest Linux distributions even if a lot of them are free.