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Significant Interactivity Boost in Linux Kernel
An anonymous reader writes "The Linux kernel team is at it again. Linux creator Linus Torvalds recently proposed a patch to offer interactive processes a boost, greatly benefiting the X desktop, as well as music and movie players. O(1) scheduler author Ingo Molnar merged Linus' patch into his own interactivity efforts, the end result nothing short of amazing... The upcoming 2.6 kernel is looking to be a desktop user's dream come true."
Massivly scalable SMP kernel, or instantly responsive desktop kernel... make up your mind leenux, you're confusing me!
You shouldnt need a high end video card to make X11 nice and smooth or have to use a stripped down UI.
Why not? You need a very high end graphics card, a very, very high end CPU and 512M of RAM to make Windows 2000 moderately useable, why should Linux be any different?
My box is not low end by any means. I'm running a Thoroughbred Athlon OC'd to 2.4GHZ with 1GB of PC3200 running a RAID-0 on two 120GB special edition drives. In my experience, Linux performance has been poor at best as far as it's GUI goes. When I boot back into windows, the GUI just flies. It's not a huge issue, but it's a pet peeve nonetheless.
Well, crummy videocards are usually not very popular with the technically literate, ie the people who write the linux drivers.
Thus, these cards dont get very well supported, and so run slow.
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Sarcasm aside, recognizing what really sucks is a good idea. NFS and AFS, termcap, lpr, lprn-ng do belong to that list. Oh, C++ also of course.
Of course, the reason Linux users actually want this feature is so that they can play their pirated MP3s in the background while using X-windows.
But from what I've read on Slashdot, Linux is already perfect! How could they possibly still be fixing problems with it?
Makes me wonder what other problems are lurking around the Linux experience that the zealots blatantly overlook until there's a patch for it....
NO CARRIER
I'm glad you asked - I _have_ written X applications. Albeit using QT. Even C# and VB perform better when it comes to GUI. About the only thing slower than X is Java.
Now THAT was a flamebait. I can't believe my other comment was moderated flamebait. I tell people the truth - X needs change - and they moderate it as flamebait?!!! Moderate this one as flamebait not my other comment. This is nuts. If everyone is supposed to love EVERYTHING about Linux, then how is any change going to happen? It's the zealots that ruin everything. If you make the slightest negative comment about some part of linux, implying that it needs change, the zealots will instantly attack you with some knee-jerk reaction. I wish the Linux community was more open to change and more willing to have conversations about how to improve something the OS instead of turning everything into a religious argument about how much better the Linux religion is than Microsoft. The point is Microsoft's GUIs are faster - accept it and learn from it. Copy them. Whatever, just make it better. Don't deny it because you don't like to hear that Microsoft is better at something. That won't help anybody.
Good point - X isn't even good at what it's supposed to be doing. The sacrifice (performance) for its feature (networked GUI) isn't worth it when you consider XVNC will perform many times better. It's time for X to change or die for the sake of Linux.