During my 8 years of Linux on and off usage I have tried more distros than I have chocolate bars. Each one of my previous encounters meant that I had to spend at least 2 days configuring before I have a desktop that I was somewhat comfortable with. With Ubuntu Feisty Fawn's latest test beta --for the first time ever-- this was not the case. I was up and running with all the niceties I wanted within 2 hours.
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Member since:2005-09-01
Member since:2005-07-07
Showing menu's and other actions in the applications, switching between apps, and responsiveness on high load - all better in linux. Menu's often don't respond in Windows, and are generally slower than linux. I often click the taskbar menu twice, waiting for a response!
Windows also quickly shuts down when you try to use many apps concurrently, esp if some off them are heavy. Loading several files at the same time (select 10 files, hit enter. Explorer even WARNS you it's not smart to do that - no problem on linux...)
Filebrowser performance differs for several reasons. Explorer seems faster, but just does less - showing previews is much slower, and it doesn't get the filetype right in many cases (linux looks IN the file to determine it's filetype. So for example Konqueror will pretty much identify files correctly, explorer relies on their extension - I hate this when copying files from my linux to windows, as I don't add extensions on linux - why should I?).
But reading this metadata takes time. I know KDE is working on this, I'm actually preparing a blog about this - the new strigi-based KFileMetaData replacement is anywhere between 25% and 80 times (!) faster (depending on cold vs warm cache)...
Also, windows apps themselves freeze much more often than linux apps do. Try adding somebody's agenda to Outlook, and wait until you can use the app again... If the server takes his time, it can take minutes!
Member since:
2005-07-07
Linux is generally more responsive compared to windows anyway, and it's getting better. Redraw speed is still slower, as is application startup, but those are being worked on by projects like Cairo for Gnome and Qt4's arthur for KDE 4 in the drawing area, and other optimizations in both KDE and Gnome.
And lower in the stack, X is getting work, as is the kernel in the scheduling area, so expect responsiveness to improve even more in the future.