The study described in the following article was done by Mirosoft, so run to the kitchen and get some grains of salt. "Microsoft's Linux and open-source lab on the Redmond campus has been running some interesting tests of late, one of which was looking at how well the latest Windows client software runs on legacy hardware in comparison to its Linux competitors. The tests, which found that Windows performed as well as Linux on legacy hardware when installed and run out-of-the-box, were done in part to give Microsoft the data it needed to effectively "put to rest the myth that Linux can run on anything." Do with the results as you please, but the topic is interesting nonetheless. What are your experiences?
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Member since:2006-01-04
Member since:2005-07-06
Member since:2005-07-06
Member since:2005-09-23
Who said anything about doing that?
If you're speaking from not reading the article, it sayd this in the article:
"There was this pervasive belief that Linux could run on older PCs and that Windows could not, he said, adding that Microsoft thus decided to test this premise by installing Red Hat Enterprise Linux, SUSE Pro 9.2, Mandrake 10, Linspire 4.5, Xandros Desktop 3.0, Fedora Core 3, Slackware 10.1, Knoppix 3.7; Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 out-of-the-box on older hardware to see what happened."
If you're talking about commentors, DSL or Puppy Linux is no less capable out of the box. Hell, they come with complete suites of apps, and Xorg, and hardware detection. You seem to have a strange definiton of "cut back".
Member since:2005-07-06
Member since:2005-09-10
Actually I have real experience with this. We have some rather old hardware in a computer lab I maintain. 64Mb ram at most with 2 IBM 300 (I think) machines being the fastest (they run @566Mhz) and 2 packard bells with 300Mhz celerons being the slowest (one of them has 32 Mb ram).
Putting win98 on them sucks - they don't last longer than a couple of weeks. People mostly use these puters to browse the net, chat, im, listening to music, the likes (just like the more modern machines). Now after two to four weeks, internet barely works (putting opera - firefox is rather slow - on them doesn't help either, they'll use IE anyway) if it works at all.
So one day (because there is no money for upgrade right now) I decided to end this crap, and put FreeBSD 5.3 on them. I built the packages on my home machine, put the binaries on an FTP, pointed pkg_add to my repo, and installed everything (they were p2 optimized builds) in less then an hour. They have blackbox as the default desktop. Each machine has a different background (with aquafruit themes - we have mango, banana, peach, etc. machines - most people wouldn't think how much this helps putting users at ease when they encounter an unfamiliar system). They have a very simple menu, with 6 + 3 items: browse the net (Opera), Instant Messaging (GAIM), FTP (gFTP), Neptun (rdp system used for signing up for courses - basically rdesktop neptunc.unideb.hu), music (starts up xmms), Filemanager (ROX filer), disks with 3 submenus: usb - yeah, they have usb ports, floppy, cdrom. I put one page (A4) near them with instructions how to use them. And they are perfectly usable this way. In fact, I haven't looked at their direction for half a year, and they were still running. (well, one machine's PSU broke down actually, and since then, another machine died).
Now that is what you can't do with windows. Win9x is a nightmare to administer. Win2k/XP won't run on 64Mb ram, no matter what you do. And that is what Linux (or in my case, FreeBSD) is excellent for. That is what the article tries to disprove, by making a somewhat fair comparison but reaching a false conclusion (win runs as good as lin on old hardware - that is pure bullshit).
Member since:2005-07-06
Member since:2005-06-29
"If you're going to compare performance of the two on the same hardware, you may as well choose a distro that is *just as capable* as whatever version of Windows you're comparing to."
Windows can be tweaked to run better on old hardware too. So how do we know whether any of it was tweaked or not, how much it was tweaked, and whether both were tweaked equally to keep the competition fair?
Member since:2005-07-06
If you're going to compare performance of the two on the same hardware, you may as well choose a distro that is *just as capable* as whatever version of Windows you're comparing to. That doesn't mean an 80 MB distro with Blackbox as its window manager, because the feature equivalence is not there.
Find me a modern Windows distribution targeting legacy hardware and I'll gladly do a fair comparison.
The problem is that there aren't that many windows distributions to choose from...
Member since:2005-11-14
Member since:
2005-07-06
If you're going to compare performance of the two on the same hardware, you may as well choose a distro that is *just as capable* as whatever version of Windows you're comparing to. That doesn't mean an 80 MB distro with Blackbox as its window manager, because the feature equivalence is not there.
Hell, if we start cutting back on features and justifying it, I can claim "A kernel and shell are faster than anything and take the least RAM! SO THERE!". Stupid.