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A Quick Look at Longhorn Build 4053
An anonymous reader writes "Even though the next generation Windows product is not due until late 2005 or even 2006, here is a look at what Microsoft has in store for it's future operating system. 'Without a vast amount of tweaking, this build is a resource hog. At idle, with no applications running, the commit charge is at a whopping 483 MB!! Obviously, the final release or even the beta releases will not consume this much of the system resources.'"
Bill Gates: 483MB will be enough for everybody.
It's maybe possible to save ram by compiling stuff you don't need as modules, like:
:)
* IE
* The clipper thingie in office
* The animated, fading menues from the start button
And other stuff which obviously live in the kernel
It may be the new Microsoft business model, low cost software, high cost hardware -- just like inkjet printers (low cost printers, high cost ink)
If Microsoft gets there hands into trusted computer hardware platforms, and ram, they can lock you into platforms that only Microsoft gets money from. And doesn't Microsoft make money from ram now?
Of course the early builds are debugged enabled and fat, but I have no doubt that by the time it is released, it will be much bigger. Microsoft programmers are lazy, why write efficient code when you can just add more hardware? And don't forget that no one will ever need more than 640k.
Fight Spammers!
You cannot compare "Linux" to "Longhorn" because it is meaningless. I know (or care) little for Microsoft products but I am assuming that a Longhorn machine will function as a desktop or as server machine.
In Linux, a purely server machine does not require any form of desktop functionality so there is little point in installing a "heavy" desktop like KDE or Gnome - you might install X-Windows and a light Window manager in which case the memory footprint will be much smaller. With Windows, you are always required to run the GUI environment with all the overhead that requires.
If Longhorn currently has a 480-odd MB memory imprint then if you use it for desktop work, you will probably find 1GB RAM to be more an ideal amount of memory once you start running Office and graphics applications - otherwise, you will get a lot of slowdown due to file-paging.
Memory is not a real issue because of its cheapness but the type of Linux distribution you use will heavily impact memoey usage - Mandrake, SuSE or RedHat are likely very memory hungry distributions whereas Slackware and Gentoo can be slimmed down very considerably.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
Personally, Can't say I give a toss, really. My association with MS ended with Win 2000, which I'm still using, occasionally. Aside from all the viruses, worms security problems and so on, their products are simply boring and uninteresting. At home, I'm letting Win2000 wither on the vine, while Linux gradually takes over for me....
-- Fuck Beta