Linux consultant, Tom Adesltein, has begun a short series for Linux Journal online which offers a number of suggestions for tweaking the performance of the Linux desktop.
Part I focuses on three different memory management tips for optimizing swapdisk/RAM behavior, disabling unused virtual terminals and increasing OOo’s graphics cache settings.
Anyone who considers Openoffice.org’s modules slow to load, for example, should find that these tips will improve OOo’s performance and increase the overall performance of the desktop, too.
LINUX IN GOVERNMENT: Optimizing Desktop Performance, Part I | Full Article
Ubuntu is already pretty snappy on my desktop, but i’m building a PC for my brother out of somewhat older parts i have around my room. Its not quite as snappy.
This article is cool, but i’d like to see a lot more tricks.
Ubuntu is already pretty snappy on my desktop, but i’m building a PC for my brother out of somewhat older parts i have around my room. Its not quite as snappy.
This article is cool, but i’d like to see a lot more tricks.
Yes, however, I use Kubuntu, and I’ve been noticing some slowness in KDE (especially konqueror/firefox), but now that swappiness is at 10 instead of 60, its much faster.
It’s also made my laptop’s harddrive less warm, I’m quite impressed.
Now… why the hell won’t openoffice.org open?
I hear what you are saying……
I have been searching for a distro/DE/setup that would match the speed of XP at opening and closing programs.
I have found that running a debian system with a kernel for an athlon, and reiserfs, gnome de to be nice and snappy
what I did notice with kde, was that even picking a different style under look and feel had a detrimental effect on speed sometimes.
HOWEVER>>> what people must understand, is that the developers want to have the programs running perfectly, before they start to optimise them.
Have a look at the speed difference between kde 3.1 and kde 3.3 for example.
The next Gnome (2.12) is supposed to have improvements in performance and memory use. Version 2.8 memory hog.
http://live.gnome.org/RoadMap
http://live.gnome.org/MemoryReduction
I can’t wait. Version 2.12 will be out about September.
Yeah, except that they’ve been saying that about GNOME since the 2.0 –> 2.2 transition. It’s easier said than done.
Half of the responsiveness problems aren’t even attributed to the DE. For instance, Firefox takes 2x longer to start (after already having been cached) on Linux than it does in Windows.
If you installed OOo 2 than you need a jre installed.
Windows prefetches a lot of those little programs you run so they launch quickly.
There are Linux articles that explain pre-binding in Linux, pro/cons and how hard it could be to do properly.
The impression I got is that it’s not so easy, probably better off left to major distro rollers to spin off than an at home Do-it-yourself tweak.
There’s a simple reason for Windows seeming to be snappier than Linux or BSD desktops. The Windows GUI is part of the kernel, just like explorer and IE is, where as Xorg/Xfree86 run as an application in *nix. There are workarounds, such as giving X a very high priority through nice, but it’s not quite the same as having the whole GUI as part of the kernel.
No, the gui is not part of the kernel in windows.
That said, XP never felt particulary snappy to me and certainly don’t see a speed problem with Linux Guis, but if you guys insist on a stupid flamewar, have fun.
text editors: KWrite and GEdit are ‘heavyweight’ text editors.
They do much more than notepad. For something small and very fast try leafpad.
terminal: gnome-terminal takes a while to load(i vaguely remember gnome devs saying that it should be optimized). Though, in my impression, konsole is quite snappy. Also note that both offer WAY more functionaliy than cmd. If you want something light, try rxvt(which still offers more functionality than cmd).
File managers: I think both nautilus and konqueror start up quite fast(though nautilus is somewhat slow afterwards:))
Office Suite: Well….OpenOffice really takes a while to load and this sucks.
Browser: Explorer starts up faster because most of the process’s data is already there when Windows starts. KDE does something similar with konqueror btw.
Don’t compare Konsole or Gnome-terminal to CMD, they’re far too featureful (and gnome-terminal EXTREMELY slow).
Just try opening rxvt or, at most, xterm. Then you’ll see how quickly they open.
I never thought of this, but a couple of these suggestions will help a machine I have in mind… It has a VERY slow hard disk…
@Zealothater,
Im with Ralph, Xp has never overly impressed me with its blazing speed. Explorer on XP with a xp3200, 1gig ram, and 300gig 16meg maxtor sata drive still takes about 1.5 seconds to open. Thats not exactly blazing. Now under Gentoo dual booting same system KDE 3.4 Konq takes almost exactly the same time to open. Now im not using any bench program to get it down to miliseconds but it feels so close to the same I can not tell any definable difference. Further more Firefox under gentoo linux starts *Maybe* a hair slower than xp but not hands down eternities slower. And im not running some super uber tweaked install of gentoo. All i did was to follow the instructions in the install guide. Hopefully you can tell i use both windows and linux. So im not a zealot in either camp. Both systems have their strenghts and weaknesses. On a side note, the JFS file system is actually a nice snappy FS that is very under utilized for some strange reason. Not bashing any other FS in linux just putting one more on the table for you to try out. Ive had great luck with JFS, as ive had very good luck with ext3, and Reiser. For some reason i keep going back to JFS on my installs and it does a nice job for me.
Anyhow,
Happy computing everyone
This ‘ZealotHater’ guy is on to something. Linux only has a few percentage of the market, and it should provide as many incentives as possible to switch! Performance matters, and those who try Linux only to find it slower are going to be disappointed. They really do – I’ve seen it first hand.
Right now, the speed of Gnome, OpenOffice.org etc. is unacceptable. I know there’ll be loads of posts from people with ultra-fast boxes saying how great they are, but there are HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS of people on lower-spec boxes for whom the current Linux desktop performance is poor.
People need reasons to switch. Bloated, buggy desktops and apps don’t help. All the Gnome coders on their 2005-built machines don’t realise that the vast majority of the world is on older machines, and finding Gnome to be slow and weighty.
And as the original poster says, proposing Fluxbox or similar is crazy – why can’t we have integrated, fully-featured desktops at the same speed as Windows? In fact, considering all the talk of crappy Microsoft programming and feature-creep, why can’t we have FASTER?
What happened? Why are we bogged-down in this complexity and bloat? Do people not realise how much this turns-off newcomers?
When Windows can run on multiple architechures, then maybe you’d have an arguement. I find Windows dead slow on PowerPC … i mean just dead.
Comparing software like CMD.EXE to Konsole etc, Notepad.exe to kate (try load a 64K+ file in Notepad), is comparing lightweight (MS) to heavyweight (*nix).
And how do you do the same in Windows i.e. modify the system to go faster or slower in the same way as described above?
Speed issues for software loading is mainly a pissing contest for the immature. And if you didn’t know there are tricks employed in Windows to make you think its faster then i don’t really think you should comment like a zealot until you understand more. Have you never questioned why your XP desktop comes up quickly and why you cant do anything on the network until a lot later?
One reason just from the top of my head:
konsole, gnome-terminal, xterm – they all do much more then the console window in Windows.
bash, tcsh – they all do much more then the wannabe shell cmd.exe
more functionality -> bigger code base + more libraries linked -> a little more time to open.
I plainly don’t believe that on your machine (Athlon 64 3000 @ 2.3 GHz, 2 GB of RAM, 7200 RPM/8 MB cache/SATA hard drives), it takes 2 seconds to run konsole or gnome-terminal. It takes 1 second (guess, not scientifically measured) on a [P4-M/1.8 GHZ, 5400 RPM PATA notebook disk] machine. Obviously, it takes a bit longer the first time. Next time, the binary is already cached and starting takes even less time.
Not that it kills me, that my terminal window starts one second.
No, the gui is not part of the kernel in windows.
Graphics routines are part of the Windows kernel. It’s already a well-known fact that Microsoft and a lot of operating system books already discuss. This was the design compromise MS made to improve rendering performance. Unfortunately, this is also a vector wherein exploits can be made, as controlling graphics rendering would require machine privileges.
anyone knows why more time windows is running more time it takes to shutdown? (linux takes always the same time, i don’t know about other OSes)
why big apps seems to take the half of the time to load (to show a window) but when you click on the menu the other half starts to load?
why if you let windows with several gui apps waiting for a time, they goes to swap even if it is not needed? (i notice it when i break the screensaver, in linux i can guess if i only launch something like open office, other app has to goes to swap)
Objectively it appears in my experience that XP is faster on my laptop with lower memory (128MB) and was actually surprised that the Sun 5 Sparc with 256MB running gnome was faster than the before mentioned laptop with just 128MB.
Now, that being said, my laptop with a faster processor and 512MB of memory I feel that Ubuntu (cpu optimized kernel available via apt and with DMA turned on) is at least as fast as XP and yes I am running gnome as my desktop.
Firefox starts faster and so does gaim which I use in Windows as well.
I use AbiWord and gnumeric and rhythmbox and bluefish and Evolution which going against my Exchange server at work is slower on initial loading of my messages I admit but the searching is faster and the speed difference goes down now that on the XP side the newest version of Outlook is a dog.
The short of this being that Linux on a fast box with 512MB or more sees easily as fast and in some cases faster.
The key is that one has to know to install the cpu optimized kernel available for your distro (no compiles needed) and how to turn on DMA for your harddrive and CD/DVD drive.
Even Ubuntu that I love should have better detection for these things and prompt the user and give the choice to do this automatically.
Windows is more responsive than Linux eh. Well, you’ve been tricked again by the biggest trickster in history.
Mr. Gates says that if you show them the desktop they’ll think it’s booting up faster.
So the joke is one you.
Laugh!
A few kilobytes, perhaps? What’s the point?
Disabling virtual terminals to free up memory to use with OpenOffice.org is laughable. Nothing against OO.o, but it’s so bloated, it would gobble up that extra 100KB without even stopping to chew.
As for text editors, GNU-Emacs is worth the five-second load time. Notepad is a joke.
OpenOffice is a hulk, but stand-alones like Gnumeric and Abiword are fine.
I just recently upgraded my OLD OLD Win98 desktop to XP, and it zips right along, even on an old 660-MHz Celeron with 64MB RAM. Granted, I only use that machine for playing Quake…
If you have the hardware (at the very least, a recent Athlon XP, 512MB RAM), and are willing to tweak a few things, such as the page-table cache, etc., ‘nix is very nice.
If you DON’T have the hardware, or aren’t willing to commit the hardware, than WinXP is the way to go.
If you have the hardware (at the very least, a recent Athlon XP, 512MB RAM), and are willing to tweak a few things, such as the page-table cache, etc., ‘nix is very nice.
If you DON’T have the hardware, or aren’t willing to commit the hardware, than WinXP is the way to go.
I never thought I woud see the day. I remember when it used to be the other way around. Ah well, that was back a few years ago. Although I have had some luck with Slackware for the last two years. Debian isn’t too bad either, that just my home PC though, milage always seems to vary system to system.
“Should anyone suggest Fluxbox, XFCE, etc. etc., I will yell at you. I will not use a WM/DE with 1/10th the functionality of Explorer only to reclaim the same performance. A laughable “fix” for a very real problem.”
What does a WD/DE have to do with a file browser? You can use several different file browsers / file managers with any environment. Just curious.
Your technically correct, it isn’t intergrated; however the GUI runs in kernel space not in the userland. Running in ring 0 can cause some havoc with the OS if there is a badly written driver (crash).
————————————————————–
“No, the gui is not part of the kernel in windows.
That said, XP never felt particulary snappy to me and certainly don’t see a speed problem with Linux Guis, but if you guys insist on a stupid flamewar, have fun.”
———————————————————
“Under Windows NT, there are only two I/O privilege levels used, level 0 & level 3. Usermode programs will run in privilege level 3, while device drivers and the kernel will run in privilege level 0, commonly referred to as ring 0. This allows the trusted operating system and drivers running in kernel mode to access the ports, while preventing less trusted usermode processes from touching the I/O ports and causing conflicts. All usermode programs should talk to a device driver which arbitrates access.”
———————————————————-
Those days, debian/sid gnome/2.8 (no, sid has not 2.10 yet) celeron 400/128mb of ram, I was a bit tired of those swaps.
Moving from 60 to 10, I feel more happy: THANKS!
Just a thought.
Because swapping some memory to an HDD is time consuming,
why not instead of swap a big piece of RAM why not trying to compress it and keeping it in memory compressed ?
Then if it’s necessary you can uncopress it, it will take less time than doing read/write to HDD.
OK, the compressed zone of memory won’t free the RAM as a swap so maybe what I’m saying is not possible…really an impossible concept ?
yes, imagine an hardcored alghoritm into the processor, so as fast as the sylicon, that with a single instruction you can compress a part of memory.
example:
compress source_address,source_lenght,compress_address
(the first longlong of compress_address will contain the lenght of the compression)
uncompress compress_address,dest_address
okk, do I need some coffee ?
@gnukid
By ZealotHater (IP: —.vc.shawcable.net) – Posted on 2005-05-17 06:06:32
WTF? You’re suggesting I wait 5 seconds for a text editor to load? You’re suggesting I use *EMACS* to write a quick note for myself?
Get off the crack.
gedit takes less than two seconds to load on my box and I am sure there is a KDE equiv. Do you load Word on XP to write yourself a note? I usually use Notepad.
But anyway, with Ubuntu on my box it takes Abiword a full fledged just under 3 seconds to load so I still do not get what the heck you are getting at.
I am not sure why *Nix heads talking Windows fans tend to throw out vi and emacs like its still the 80’s or something.
There are a ton of alternatives that are gui and very adept at that.
Unless I missed something, none of his suggestions should do anything!
1. Decrease swapiness: as you can see from the system monitor screenshot, he is using 0 swap in the first place, decreasing swapiness will not change anything! And this guy has a Gig allocated for swap! who does that anymore!? (oh btw since I know somebody is gong to bring this up, that thing about having twice the swap as memory is no longer relevant with paging, if you have twice the swap as memory you can have a process using all of physical memory and be able to write it to disk, and then read a 2nd process from disk that uses all of physical memory, but with paging you can just switch out (page) small chunks of anything now, no need to swap out entire processes)
2. Decrease number of terms in inittab: oh please, any idea how much processor time/memory these things use? extremely little, especially if you don’t use them. They probably just block when they’re not active, and if you have swap and are low on memory, they will be paged out (not that they use hardly any memory in the first place). If you are going to do something like this make sure you aren’t running services on your desktop you don’t need/use like apache/samba/ftp/ssh/etc (unless you use those on your desktop machine). disabling those _will_ have a significant impact on startup time and memory usage (along w/ closing up some ports which is always good).
3. Speeding up OOo’s launch: He increased the graphics memory cache sizes. I really don’t know how this is going to help startup time. I suppose if you have a graphically intensive document you are opening it could actually help. The better thing to do is to preload openoffice using one of the utilities for both KDE and Gnome available (they’re under suggested/recommended or something in ubuntu/debian for OOo).
Anyway I was hoping he would talk about renicing X (which I honestly haven’t tried) or Apple’s new init system or something, but he gave 2 useless tips and one not-so-useful tip. Wonder if the other articles will be any better.
Lowering swappiness is a very good idea on systems with little memory and/or slow disks like laptops. With the default swappiness of 60 my gentoo box allowed some 250Mb (of 512) to be used by programs. The rest was aparently reserved for caches and buffers and stuff.
After setting swappiness to 20 I saw memory usage going up to about 400 without swapping. I could keep many more windows open without suffering from constant HD crunching.
btw. can anyone comment whether the auto_swappiness patch included in some patchsets is any good?
“Less than two seconds” is unacceptable for a text editor. The fact alone that you have “two seconds” in that phrase gives away the fact that performance is sluggish.
On a 2.3 GHz Athlon 64 with 2 GB of RAM, I expect nothing less than instantaneous response when loading small applications. I get this with Windows XP.
@Johnathan
By ZealotHater (IP: —.bchsia.telus.net) – Posted on 2005-05-17 19:19:40
“Less than two seconds” is unacceptable for a text editor. The fact alone that you have “two seconds” in that phrase gives away the fact that performance is sluggish.
On a 2.3 GHz Athlon 64 with 2 GB of RAM, I expect nothing less than instantaneous response when loading small applications. I get this with Windows XP.
Less than two seconds. Give me a break that is exactly — 1.4 seconds on a timer.
That is not just to the window draws either but when I get the full window with the blinking cursor ready to go.
And yes since I am running on:
Model: Mobile IntelR PentiumR 4 – M CPU 2.00GHz
Memory: 512 MB
I imagine with your tricked out Athlon 64 with 2GB of RAM it would be quite instantaneous.
That is the whole less than two seconds. Trying not to be a zealot and reflect my experience accurately.
You are trolling despite your moniker and trying to confirm your own dislike of the system.
This is from someone who believes fiercely that detection of cpu and assignment of an optimized kernel and activation of dma or at least the choice are two things ever distro install should have and still many do not for example.
This is from someone who has also said that performance on less able (low-mem boxes) is not what it should be (ie the memory footprint for example of gnome my preferred desktop is too large).
I prefer linux but you appear to be quite rabid in your assertions. What are the apps that on your tricked out box tends to react so slowly? How slowly?
You imagine wrong, then. I recently tried FC3 on the very same machine (custom installation, disabled useless crap), and it was in no way nearly as snappy as Windows XP. Perhaps you don’t understand what I mean when I say “instantaneous”. 1.4 seconds is not instantaneous. 1 second is not instantaneous. Instantaneous is when the program shows up, ready to receive input, the *very instant* I release my mouse button while holding it down on a quick-launch icon.
Oh, and trust me — custom compiled 2.6 kernel for the CPU, DMA enabled on all drives, and all that other fancy junk. The entire UI of FC3 just doesn’t feel as snappy. I have no quantitative measure for it, but opening applications, redrawing windows, moving windows, resizing windows, and other graphics-related operations just are not as fast as they are in Windows XP. Before you ask, yes, I installed drivers for my X800.
increasing the memory allocatable to data structures won’t help increase startup time.
the way the thing is mesured is useless, files have been cached in the Os’s cache after the first startup, from this comes the speedup
@John
By ZealotHater (IP: —.bchsia.telus.net) – Posted on 2005-05-17 20:12:28
You imagine wrong, then. I recently tried FC3 on the very same machine (custom installation, disabled useless crap), and it was in no way nearly as snappy as Windows XP. Perhaps you don’t understand what I mean when I say “instantaneous”. 1.4 seconds is not instantaneous. 1 second is not instantaneous. Instantaneous is when the program shows up, ready to receive input, the *very instant* I release my mouse button while holding it down on a quick-launch icon.
Oh, and trust me — custom compiled 2.6 kernel for the CPU, DMA enabled on all drives, and all that other fancy junk. The entire UI of FC3 just doesn’t feel as snappy. ….
And I said that if you started gedit up on Ubuntu with a tricked Athlon 64 with 2GB of ram like that then it most certainly would be instantaneous. Hence I do understand what you mean.
FC3 huh? That is part of the problem right there. On FC3, I swear they enable everything with the slow flags turned on high.
I do know that Firefox opens from a cold start 2 seconds quicker on my Ubuntu than in Windows XP on the same box. Its a work box and I need Remedy for tickets.
Btw, you don’t need a custom compiled kernel most distros provide cpu optimized versions of their kernel if you just choose them in yum, or apt.
Typical excuses.
“Linux is so slow. I installed FC3 and it runs like crap.”
“OMG FC3 is the slowest. Get _____.”
Feh. 🙂
*No* modern distro has been faster than Windows XP, unless you count the specialized small-sized distros that use a silly, barely-functional window manager.
Instantaneous is when the program shows up, ready to receive input, the *very instant* I release my mouse button while holding it down on a quick-launch icon.
What is the “very instant” thing anyway?
The next cpu instruction? – not possible
Next milisecond – not possible, you have to fetch the binary from disk, at least the first time
Then you need to do at least one context switch, flush CPU caches, etc, etc. You do need _some_ time to start an application, no matter how fast your CPU is.
I agree that small applications could come up very fast on a state-of-the art machine. On the other hand, you mentioned writing a note. How long will it take until you write it? How long, until you click the “save” button? How long until you think of a filename? How long, until you navigate to the correct directory and click OK. Now compare the sum of these values to the value of 2 seconds.
Does it really matter, if gedit starts 0.5 or 2 seconds, when you will spend 30 seconds writing that note and 15 seconds saving it? (wild estimates).
I think you should compare Wordpad to editors such as gedit. gedit does significantly more than notepad.
typical flawed logic
“Linux is so slow. I installed FC3 and it runs like crap.”
“OMG FC3 is the slowest. Get _____.”
You judge whatever-hides-behind-“Linux” by your experience with FC3. You should have said “FC3 is slow. I tried it, it runs like crap”. Actually, the poster agrees with you that FC3 slow and has a better experience with $SOMETHING_ELSE. If you are seriously interested in Linux, you should try it. If not, don’t make generalizations.
*No* modern distro has been faster than Windows XP, Unless you count the specialized small-sized distros that use a silly, barely-functional window manager.
Well, my current WM takes 10 MiB of memory and has more features then XP’s “window manager”. How it looks dependes entirely on the theme.
Saying “*no*” modern distro, have you tried them all?
Saying “unless you count…”, specialized small-sized distros aren’t modern?
Saying “faster”, what do you mean by that? Boot time? Time to launch a program? (Note that unless you run the _very_ same program, you are comparing apples and oranges). Smoothnes of moved windows? (That does not have much to do with the speed of the OS.)
No, 2 seconds does not matter in the overall picture, but it begs the question “What did the developers do to make things so fat and slow?”
BTW, I just fired up Wordpad on my XP2000/512 MB work machine running XP SP2. First try took about 1 second. Subsequent tries took approximately 80-100 milliseconds for the Wordpad window to come up and wait for input. That’s still a far cry from the ~1800 msecs it takes for *gedit* to open.
If the difference between Wordpad and gedit is so great, then how can anyone expect the entire DE to be as responsive as Windows?
I’ve tried SuSE 9.2, FC 2, FC 3, RHEL 3, Gentoo (Stage 1), Debian, Knoppix, Mandrake 9.2, Slackware 9 and 10, Linspire, as well as a number of smaller fringe distros. Each and every one of them was slow in one way or another.
All of them were slow booters, not a single one of them could properly support my X800 XT out of the box, and everything but Slackware and Debian were as responsive as molasses. Slackware and Debian still maintained an acceptable level of UI responsiveness, though still a far cry from XP.
Oh, and Explorer is much more than a window manager. I’ll take 10x the functionality of Explorer over something like Blackbox any day.
PS: How is inter-application copy/pasting working out in Linux for you? Last time I tried copy/pasting more than simple text, I was severely disappointed.
I think it was nobody’s goal to make things fat and slow.
* gedit links to many libraries, wordpad probably just to the windows core library
* X runs as a user process, AFAIK the graphics subsystem in XP (through it’s NT 4.0 heritage) runs in ring 0.
* X is a network transparent protocol (and I personally I’m not willing to give up this feature),
* different toolkits used (win32 vs. gtk+) are also skewing the picture. If they are part of “OS”, that is to be discussed. I do not believe so, as you can have gtk+ on Windows.
My conclusions are
a) we are still comparing apples to oranges.
b) comparing OS speed by program-start speed is not very correct
One-step better comparision would be starting the same version of firefox. At least, it is the same application. Though different toolkit and display process still prevail.
Anectodal measurements:
* debian sid, updated to latest stuff yesterday, custom built 2.6 kernel
* P4-M running at 1.2 GHz (on battery)
* 512 MiB RAM
* 5400 rpm notebook disk
* gedit version 2.8.3, no pluggins (that is one big difference to wordpad, other small one would be tabs)
* first start cca. 2 seconds
* subsequent starts below 1 second.
* measured on a handwatch
not a single one of them could properly support my X800 XT out of the box.
I admit that HW support might be lacking. Unfortunately, that is something that cannot be solved while HW vendors are refusing to provide necessary info.
I never understood, how info on how to _use_ a thing you are trying to sell is a trade secret. I don’t need to know the schematics of a chip to be able to program it.
Oh, and Explorer is much more than a window manager. I’ll take 10x the functionality of Explorer over something like Blackbox any day.
I never mentioned explorer. I was only talking about that piece of XP, which draws titlebars, resizes windows, etc.
* It cannot be themed properly in a way documented and encouraged by MS – you are limited to 3 color variations, need 3rd party utilites for more stuff
* Keyboard shortcuts cannot be re-assigned. Why does Alt-F4 close a window? Why not F3? Why not F12? And why oh why can’t I change it? Registry hacks don’t count, if there are any. A way documented by MS counts
* mouse actions cannot be re-defined
* no option to maximize window in one direction only
* no option “maximize” window in a way that does not cover other windows
* no virtual desktops (ok, there is a utility by MS, but it sucks and does not come with XP by default)
* no tabbed windows (more xterms under one titlebar)
* no shaded windows
* no way to move/resize a window by alt+mouse movement (not 100% sure about this)
* no option to change focus behaviour.
I admit a few of these would confuse noobs, but you _can_ have features and sane defaults.
PS: How is inter-application copy/pasting working out in Linux for you? Last time I tried copy/pasting more than simple text, I was severely disappointed.
Can’t comment on this one, sorry. What I do on a computer (web, mail, IM, remote administration, writing docs, a bit of programming) does not require me to copy-paste anything else but plain-text. However, I do remember that copying from Firefox or OOo into GAIM includes the formating (which pisses me off, actually).
Good points. However, I don’t agree with the level of customizability that you wish in Windows. Not only would it confuse noobs, but it would rid Windows of the consistency that you come to expect from it.
Suddenly you can’t give generalized instructions to people using Windows, because they might have a different setup.
I’m not expecting the described customizability from Windows.
I simply explained, why I consider my window manager (http://pekwm.org/) better then its counterpart in XP.
Also, the instruction problem can be solved
* big red button to reverse all to default settings
* don’t allow users to change certain options (you can do that today in Gnome, though I haven’t tried personally)
Noobs would be handled by sane defaults and having these options under some “advanced section”.
Also, if somebody is knowledgeable enough to change his wm theme and shorcuts, sure you can instruct him saying “close all windows” instead of “move your mouse top right, click that little x” or “press alt-f4 repeatedly”.
Hrm, fine. 🙂
However, you’d be surprised what people can fuck up. I’ve fixed computers that were missing half their Windows directories because the user, in a moment of extreme cunning, deemed the files unnecessary “because they had silly names” (and I quote).
I found the swappiness=10 to be very handy. Responisveness of my system has improved greatly overall and handling of media and entertainment software is greatly improved.
Archlinux
Gnome 2.10
Dual AMD MP2000
GF6600GT
For gamers the swappiness change is a boon. Eg Doom3 running 1280×1024 Full Detail totally smooth on my system. Something not comparable on Windows XP Pro. Exiting from Doom3 is also greatly sped up and other programs in general.
Other tips not really worth it.
When you say something not comparable on Windows…what exactly do you mean? I dont have the powerful card you have…I have a mobile 9800 running XP Home so I am interested in your comment.
First you admit that even Notepad takes a second to load. 1 second versus 1.4 seconds is not much if you consider that gedit supports syntax highlighting for source code and other features that Notepad completely lacks.
But then you finally appear to clarify yourself in further posts. If you had initially said the following criticisms of linux I would have agreed with you:
If you had said Linux starts longer to load from bootup than XP. Yes, its server OS origins comes out really loudly in this regard. Its being worked on but it is still an issue.
If you had said the gui was not as smooth (window redraws comments hint at this) I would have said yes this is true. You will still find window movement and redraws more jerky than Mac OS X or XP.
If you had said linux hardware support is not as good as XP then I would have said – duh! – it is not the default OS used on the vast majority of all machines installed by the hw provider. I remember the day before the imac and Mac OS X when hw support began waning for macintoshes even back in the day. Everything outside of XP is an alternative OS and that is part of living in an alternative world.
If you had said OpenOffice is bloated and slow. I would have said yes this is true and I never use the damn thing because it is bloated and slow on linux or Windows.
Abiword opens as quick on Linux as in Windows and Firefox opens quicker in Ubuntu linux that I use.
You mention Window Managers or lightweight environments with derision. But XFCE for example is both lightweight and feature-rich and able to take advantage of the apps and support of the gnome apps. I use it on my box with just 128MB of RAM. It works very well.
damn, guys. it is clear linux gui’s are mostly slower than XP’s. of course, XP is over 3 years old and can’t do 1/10th of KDE, while KDE is indeed slightly slower.
the slower startupspeed of applications is mostly due to linker issues. apps under linux link to more libraries, which aren’t almost always loaded as in windows, and have to be dynamically allocated – in windoze, the libraries don’t change, so you can rely on them. in linux, they are enhanced quite frequently. so the lower startup performance is the price you pay for a faster development cycle. tricks like prelink can help here.
Also, gcc does not create binaries as fast as the windows compilers. just a plain fact, no gcc developer would say this is not true. of course, no windows compiler can handle 1/10 of the languages and platforms gcc supports, but thats an entirely different issue. gcc 4.1, btw, will improve on this situation a lot – much much more speed.
I think KDE 4.0 (at least -20% memory and disk storage usage) compiled with gcc >4.0 (4.1 will enhance c++ performance a lot, as did 3.4.3 with its visibility=hidden) will kick win XP’s ass anytime. not to mention longhorn.
yep, kde 3.3 with gcc 3.3.5 is slower than XP. period. so is gnome 2.10 with gcc 3.x, and kde 3.4 (barely). but gnome 2.12 will be faster than 2.10, and kde 3.4 is faster than 3.3 is faster than 3.2 is faster than 3.1 -> believe me (who does not?) longhorn won’t be faster than XP, so within 2 years there won’t be any dispute about the speed of longhorn vs linux.
and KDE 4.0 (may 2006) will already feature most what Longhorn can doe (and much things longhorn can’t), so within 2 years, feature-wise, linux also kicks longhorns ass. bye microsoft. (oh, wait, quality does not predict success. well, microsoft still has a chance)
Compared to Windows XP on my system, Doom 3 is a studdering afair. There is no way I can get smooth gameplay at the resolution and detail level I have stated under Linux with the swappiness=10 tip. Even under Linux under that with a value of 60 Doom 3 studdered at 1024×768 full detail. Now it runs smoothly at higher resolultion.