Linked by Thom Holwerda on Fri 26th Jan 2007 15:00 UTC, submitted by editingwhiz
"The OSDL's Desktop Linux Working Group has published its first year-end report on the state of the overall desktop Linux ecosystem. The report provides insight into the year's key accomplishments in terms of functionality, standards, applications, distributions, market penetration, and more."
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Member since:
2005-07-06
> Linux isn't /significantly/ faster than Windows. It boots in about the same time as my well tweaked, much loved custom XP install.
That should be "Linux's boot time isn't significantly faster..." surely? Boot time is a minor issue when with Linux you only have to do it when powering the PC on first time in the day or when you apply a new kernel and want to run that kernel right away. With Windows, it's often whenever you install a new driver, application or the desktop simply hangs on you.
Work is indeed going on at speeding up Linux's init system - there are several projects out there that map out a dependency tree for the startup sequence and start as many things as possible in parallel to improve boot times. We may eventually see Linux actually boot faster than XP (though I find that the "crud" you have to add to XP that's run at start-up often negates XP's advantage) - and as for Vista, well that's slower than XP to boot unless you buy faster hardware to run it :-)
The problem with a lot of people resistant to Linux is that they tried a distro 3-4 years ago (when things were indeed hairy - not much in the way of GUI config tools, auto hardware detection or device drivers that we see today), struggled with it and refused to go back to it, quoting stuff about "editing xorg config files" (which you haven't had to do for a couple of years, what with fancy ATI/Nvidia installers that do it all for you now - and some distros even auto-configure the 3D drivers for you automatically).
Personally, I find vanilla XP such a barren landscape in terms of out-of-the-box drivers and applications, that I *loathe* having to install it now - it takes me about 2 solid days to get all the bits I need for XP before I'm comfortable with it. This may improve a bit with Vista, but I'm in no hurry to try that yet (a new PC will inevitably be the only sensible way to get that).
Compare that with most Linux distros out there - they ship with almost all the apps I need (I pick up a few "stray" ones third-party, but that's about 10-15 minutes of effort) and *all* my PC hardware is correctly detected and works out-of-the-box [yes, networking and audio included, which fail to work in vanilla XP!]. 2 hours is all I need to get a new Linux distro up and running exactly how I like it - beats XP hands down...