Regardless of how slow Mac OS X does or does not 'feel', applications do have a tendency to respond and startup slowly. Some figures (measured right after logging in on a iBook 700Mhz/384MB/20GB using Mac OS X 10.1.5):
mozilla 1.2 beta startup: first run: 13s second run: 6s
chimera (the 'fast' mozilla) startup: first run: 8s second: 2s
terminal application (the console): first run: 11s second: 2s
MS Word: 6s, XDarwin: 24s, etc...
Even compared to far slower PC's running Windows or Linux, I find those figures nearly unacceptable. Bouncing icons are neat to look at, but they do get boring after a while...
Aside from these figures, there _is_ the subjective OS X 'feel'. I noticed a lot of posts talking about how 'nice' and 'fine' OS X runs (on G4 CPU's with lots of RAM, of course). That's just how OS X feels like: it's responsive 'enough'. When you click something: it almost instantly responds. Almost. Luckily, while all the eye candy is heavy on CPU load, Apple made sure that Mac OS X gives you feedback enough to make sure that you know it's doing _something_ (the dreaded pinwheel of death excluded). Mac OS X definitely misses the snappiness of Windows or Linux though... but I guess a lot of users percieve this as a 'stable and solid' feel.
Oh and, Jaguar reportedly cuts off approximately 1-3 seconds of the mentioned startup times. But shelling out more than 100 bucks to make my apps start a sec faster? I don't know about that...
By the way, a very interesting read about the performance in general of the Mac OS X versions can be found here.
Personally, I chose gentoo because of its clear and step-by-step installation guide, attractively presented and prominently featured on the website.
It really explained every little thing you had to do to get a decent system running. In a way, it's giving you loads of mini-howto's of programs, which makes it easier to dig into manpages to be able to really finetune those programs. Though it is not meant for newbies, they can learn a lot of this distribution. I myself haven't had too much experience with linux. In the past, every time I encountered an error or bug in some program, I didn't have a clue on how to solve it, and quickly resorted to reinstalling or upgrading whole portions of the distro (and then you're treating your distro like a windoze, which of course is a shame). Second, an 'installation guide' like Gentoo's quickly helps you to test and try out some apps to get your work done. Need an email client? You can emerge mutt. Need system to send mail? Try postfix, but sendmail works fine as well. They're not pushing the user towards specific programs, they're giving the user valuable clues and advice.
At work I run Debian Unstable, and I'm very happy with it, but I needed an experienced user to get it properly running. Perhaps all the information I needed was somewhere out there though.
Gentoo, you could say, is much more 'difficult' to install, and yet everything just worked. I've got a really cool system running here, and having it installed 'the Gentoo way' makes you darn proud of it too:)
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Regardless of how slow Mac OS X does or does not 'feel', applications do have a tendency to respond and startup slowly. Some figures (measured right after logging in on a iBook 700Mhz/384MB/20GB using Mac OS X 10.1.5):
mozilla 1.2 beta startup:
first run: 13s
second run: 6s
chimera (the 'fast' mozilla) startup:
first run: 8s
second: 2s
terminal application (the console):
first run: 11s
second: 2s
MS Word: 6s, XDarwin: 24s, etc...
Even compared to far slower PC's running Windows or Linux, I find those figures nearly unacceptable. Bouncing icons are neat to look at, but they do get boring after a while...
Aside from these figures, there _is_ the subjective OS X 'feel'. I noticed a lot of posts talking about how 'nice' and 'fine' OS X runs (on G4 CPU's with lots of RAM, of course). That's just how OS X feels like: it's responsive 'enough'. When you click something: it almost instantly responds. Almost.
Luckily, while all the eye candy is heavy on CPU load, Apple made sure that Mac OS X gives you feedback enough to make sure that you know it's doing _something_ (the dreaded pinwheel of death excluded).
Mac OS X definitely misses the snappiness of Windows or Linux though... but I guess a lot of users percieve this as a 'stable and solid' feel.
Oh and, Jaguar reportedly cuts off approximately 1-3 seconds of the mentioned startup times. But shelling out more than 100 bucks to make my apps start a sec faster? I don't know about that...
By the way, a very interesting read about the performance in general of the Mac OS X versions can be found here.
Personally, I chose gentoo because of its clear and step-by-step installation guide, attractively presented and prominently featured on the website.
:)
It really explained every little thing you had to do to get a decent system running. In a way, it's giving you loads of mini-howto's of programs, which makes it easier to dig into manpages to be able to really finetune those programs.
Though it is not meant for newbies, they can learn a lot of this distribution. I myself haven't had too much experience with linux. In the past, every time I encountered an error or bug in some program, I didn't have a clue on how to solve it, and quickly resorted to reinstalling or upgrading whole portions of the distro (and then you're treating your distro like a windoze, which of course is a shame).
Second, an 'installation guide' like Gentoo's quickly helps you to test and try out some apps to get your work done. Need an email client? You can emerge mutt. Need system to send mail? Try postfix, but sendmail works fine as well. They're not pushing the user towards specific programs, they're giving the user valuable clues and advice.
At work I run Debian Unstable, and I'm very happy with it, but I needed an experienced user to get it properly running. Perhaps all the information I needed was somewhere out there though.
Gentoo, you could say, is much more 'difficult' to install, and yet everything just worked. I've got a really cool system running here, and having it installed 'the Gentoo way' makes you darn proud of it too