SuSE 7.3 vs XP

rutledjw writes: "This should be good for some flame wars. A story on HPWorld that I read about on NewsForge gives an interesting comparison between XP and Linux. I personally think the story wanders a little and wouldn't call it comprehensive, but it is interesting. It does point out a particular bottleneck in how the 2.4.x kernels handle asynchronous IO. Apparently this is being addressed in the 2.5 kernels..." It actually appears quite low-flame and balanced, and unlike some Linux vs. Windows comparisons, goes into decent detail rather than just glib generalizations.

Comments

better?

[spottedkangaroo]

Who cares which one is faster, or better, or more stable. Seriously. I just plain don't like Windows. I dare them to address that. I think I can sum it up: I was typing the other day... a window poped up. Something had happened. I inadvertantly hit enter (since I was already typing) and as a result, still don't know what the message said... Well, that and I lost what I was typing. The irritation factor was a 9.6.

Cygwin almost works... I use that at work. But it's all slow and icky. I've known for a million years that ext2 is slow, but I like that filesystem a shatload more than some of the faster ones... Mostly, I think that's because I know how it works. I can look it up. ls -l shows me a bit more under linux, ya know?

The kicker's in the tail

[Rogerborg]

• Until now, conventional wisdom held that Windows wizards were a key factor in holding down TCO by countering the initial licensing costs with lower maintenance costs and lower skills requirements for the maintainers. OpenBench Labs' initial foray into the unconventional world of Windows XP puts that conventional wisdom about TCO into serious question

Well said. I have to admit, when I moved to Suse7.3 about six months ago, I really missed the handy-dandy pop-o-matic wizards that made Win98 such a no-brainer. It was a bitch having to figure everything out from scratch, with FAQ's either stopping too low down the clue scale or starting too high. I very nearly gave up (as I had done with RedHat 6.x a while back), but I stuck with it, and now I'm starting to get a clue.

Then two months ago, I upgraded from Win98SE to WinXP on another machine. I realised that I was suffering Linux cognitive dissonance (overvaluing the utility of it simply because it was hard to learn), and resolved to come to XP with an open mind. I was particularly looking forward to returning to the "one way to do it, it's our way, and we'll do it for you", which (be honest) is what Jane Homebody or Garry Gameplayer(me on that machine) really needs.

But oh dear. What's with the vile animated crap? How do I turn it off? Stop asking me if I want a passport account. Where's the network info? STOP ASKING ME IF I WANT A PASSPORT ACCOUNT. OK, I've set up TCP/IP, but how do I change the workgroup, it's not on the identification tab any more? STOP ASKING ME IF I WANT A PASSPORT ACCOUNT. Where's my single click interface? Hey, I thought I told you to stop animating those menus. No, I've already set up TCP/IP, stop asking me if I want to set up a connection to the internet. It's right there! STOP ASKING ME IF I WANT A PASSPORT ACCOUNT!

Even coming from Win98SE, it took me a long time to get WinXP set up the way I wanted it. If I'd come in cold, it would have been much worse, because I wouldn't even have known the right questions to ask. In all honesty, it's still a little easier than KDE on SuSE7.3, but it's not much easier. The gap has narrowed significantly, and - significantly - it's narrowing from both ends. Linux distros are getting better, but Windows really has got worse.

By trying to hide the inescapable fact that you do need to know what you're doing with WinXP (as you need to know with Linux), Microsoft has actually made it harder for those who do actually have a clue to drive it. How curious.

Re:The kicker's in the tail

[The Pim]

I realised that I was suffering Linux cognitive dissonance (overvaluing the utility of it simply because it was hard to learn), and resolved to come to XP with an open mind. [And then XP sucks.]

That was a really nice revelation. However, I often develop the opposite illusion. When using Linux, and having to do some tedious, unintuitive tweaking, I can't avoid thinking, "It would be so easy to take care of this with a sane config system. I'm sure I wouldn't have to do this in Windows.". But on the occasions I use Windows, I invariably find myself wasting just as much time tweaking, and further getting frustrated at the many things I can't tweak, and the arrogance of a UI that supposes to know better than I. Sure, the baby stuff is easier and more polished, but every foray into Windows reminds me that providing an enjoyable user experince is still a difficult and unsolved problem. This gives me some hope that the race is just getting started.

Re:Why SuSE?

[CynicTheHedgehog]

SuSE prefers KDE, which is arguably more "window-esque" than Gnome, in terms of integration and user interface (Specifially DCOM, and applications such as Konqueror, KOffice, and KDevelop). Furthermore, RedHat lacks GUI tools such as YaST2 (SuSE) and Control Center (Mandrake).

And probably to be fair they picked the distro that you have to pay for (if you want the pretty install).

I've tried all three of the latest offerings from RedHat, Mandrake, and SuSE. In terms of desktop use (not server use), RedHat is seriously lacking in comparion to the latter two, and SuSE is beating Mandrake by a narrow margin with all of its YaST2 modules (NIS, NFS, and LDAP setup wizards, especially).

Something that isn't pointed out enough

[Flavio]

I can't read the article (it's slashdotted), but there's something about Windows (specially XP) that I rarely hear people talk about: it uses outrageous amounts of RAM. Yes, RAM is cheap, but I find it extremely suspicious when simple applications consume so many resources.

I have 128 MB of RAM and with Linux it's enough for everything I need, _including_ Mozilla (which as we all know, can use a lot of memory).

I find it ludicrous that I can't even boot XP without swapping and it takes forever to open up apps like the media player. Should I face this with a smile and say "well, I'm at fault because 128 MB of RAM clearly isn't enough"?

I can't bring myself to respect an OS which needs this many resources to do nothing. Yet I know people with 64 MB of RAM who praise XP in favor of Linux. I firmly believe that they either don't use their computers for anything productive or they lie.

Re:Linux vs everything....

[nagora]

The best successes I've had moving people off Windows and onto Linux is with the various secretaries and temps we've had here. I simply don't tell them that they're using Linux and Star/Open Office! It works a treat.

The hard ones are graphic designers and the worst are DTP people who can't handle the Linux command line and automatic document production via piped commands chains.

TWW