The very comprehensive DEs like GNOME and KDE are very bloated, but the more stripped-down DEs and WMs (XFCE, fvwm, ICEwm etc) still run very fast, if you won't miss all the functionality of GNOME and KDE.
Happily, the Linux Desktop developers are aware of this and are actively optimising everything all across the board, from Kernel to X to the desktop libraries to the DEs themselves.
GNOME and KDE will probably never run well on, say, 96MB of RAM, but at least the trend is to get faster and less memory-hungry - unlike the OS of a certain rival purveyor;)
Re:Hardware Translucency in Linux
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I think Ubuntu are planning on incorporating XGL and Luminosity in Breezy (due October) as installable add-ons. This should give something similar, I think.
There are problems with what happens when you select Copy and then close the app you are copying from before you Paste - the contents of the clipboard (which could have been html, or a portion of a OO.o document) are reduced to plain text; this may be what the OP was talking about as, as you say, the other bits seem to work fine for me. If this is the case, then this should be tackled at the desktop level (rather than at the X level) - I think freedesktop.org are working on a solution to this at the moment.
GCJ can compile a lot of Java apps to native code (and possibly toolkits...?). There are compiled versions of Eclipse (and maybe Azureus, too) floating around somewhere.
I don't see gripes over Linux distros coming with Konqueror (which is a godawful P.O.S.)...
Oh good - I was wondering when this troll would surface again, just as it has on every other story relating to this topic:) The difference here is that a) Linux has nowhere near a monopoly on operating systems and b) Konqueror is not an attempt to lock people into closed standards as is IE (with it's broken HTML/CSS, and ActiveX that is often cited as one of the Top 5 reasons why companies do not convert to Linux). As for Apple and iTunes, I'm less sure - they have the music download business pretty much sewn up, and may or may not use a proprietary format - I'll let someone more knowledgeable address this one.
Why do nearly all online content providers provie Quicktime and WMV streams, but not DivX/ XVid/ Theora? I suppose at least one of the former can have DRM embedded in it, which is a plus for the providers, but apart from that, what are the advantages of the former over the latter? Do they give significantly better quality for the same filesize? Or is that.WMV will play, out of the box, on about 90% of PCs (Windows PCs, that is)?
This is the problem - Microsoft have used their effective monopoly to create yet another defacto (closed; patented) standard that everyone uses, irrespective of it's actual merit. In other words, they have leveraged their monopoly in one area (OS's) to gain a near monopoly (with bonus lock-in!) in another (media), which as I understand it is flat-out illegal. For recognising this and actually (shock! horror!) attempting to lay down the law, I can only applaud the EU. However, as others have stated, the proposed sanctions were utterly misguided, and impacted only the consumer, if anyone at all.
I'm not entirely sure what the perfect solution to this would have been - the only ones I can think of are banning not WMP but the.wmv codec itself from inclusion in the default install, or specifying that Microsoft must include DivX, XVid etc playing abilities (if they don't already) out of the box. But both of these are just as lame, and I think this particular transgression simply can't be punished in any sane way, alas. Maybe the other case - with the EU asking MS to open up the Samba spec so that OSS groups can use it - will be more successful, but an article the other day suggests that it won't. Oh well.
That's cool - does anyone else? I'm surprised it's not much more prevalent in non-source based distros, as I know that in at least Debian, every.deb contains a manifest of all files that will be installed by the.deb, and I think a md5 of each one, too. It strikes me that it should be easy to create a "dummy" deb that verifies that the old version has not been tweaked and, if not, simply replaces just the necessary files with fresh copies.
Possibly - God knows I'm always putting my foot in my mouth whenever I go off on one of my rants:) One of the perils of a communication medium where all of the usual verbal cues and body language are removed, I guess...
HTH, and again I'm sorry if I came across as being mean. I'm at work so I'm moving quickly:D
It's all good, dude:)
I haven't actually done it recently, but AFAIK you can't upgrade the kernel using the GUI tools
Ah, that would explain a lot.
Oddly enough, this one stumbling block is the thing that put me off Mandrake (onto Gentoo of all things! But I'll wipe that soon and replace it with Kubuntu, like I have with my laptop). Other aspects were the fact that downloading the updates to repository listings sucked up a *huge* amount of bandwidth - one of them (main? updates? I forget which) was a 20MB download, whenever something changed (which was admittedly rare). Kubuntu is much more sane - it must do diff-style repository listing updates, so it looks like I can update all my repositories very quickly and with very little bandwidth - which is a good thing as I intend to replace my mum's Mandrake install with Kubuntu at some point, and she is on 56k.
Anyway, on the whole I did like Mandrake a lot (it was my first distro) but niggles like this put me off, and I'll probably stick with Kubuntu, from now on:)
This was my experience; I searched through with the GUI tools for an actual binary, but couldn't find it anywhere...? Perhaps it was named oddly, but I couldn't find anything but the kernel source itself. If I'm wrong on this, I apologise. It seemed odd at the time (as I knew that e.g. Ubuntu gave kernel binaries), but I was buggered if I could find the damn thing!
What an appalling display of "toeing the slashdot party line", and putrid arrogance and condescension, as well. Whoever modded this transparent tripe up should be ashamed of themselves.
The amount of "CPU time" "Windows users" spend patching holes is a few minutes every month. And get off your high horse, here: while Linux distros provide updates for a more comprehensive range of apps, it's also the case they you have to download far more (in terms of raw megabytes) far more often. I'm willing to bet right now that, timing from the release of FC3, FC3 has required more and bigger updates than Windows.
I'll never forget the time, earlier this year in fact, when Mandrake provided a security "update" for the kernel (you may remember the much-publicized priviledge escalation vulnerability around the end of last year). This "patch" consisted of the whole kernel source (maybe 40MBs of it) which you would have to manually compile and install (no nice binary rpm, here). With this one single update, Mandrake users have exceeded the "CPU time" required for a few months of Windows updates. And let's not forget the hefty kdelibs security updates, which basically amounts to downloading the whole of kdelibs again, since none of the distros seem to provide diff-style patching. The same with Firefox (8MB on Linux...?).
Also, while we are free from worms and viruses here, note that there is nothing innate to Linux that precludes phishing and spoofing attacks.
Maybe as an engineer who uses computers to actually accomplish something I just have a different point of view.
Gates shed some light on his own hard-nosed business philosophy. "Although about 3 million computers get sold every year in China, but people don't pay for the software," he said. "Someday they will, though. As long as they are going to steal it, we want them to steal ours. They'll get sort of addicted, and then we'll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade."
Linux is merely a kernel; Lindows is a full distro with X-server, graphics toolkits and trillions of apps. This is more than just being "a form of Linux" in much the same way that a car is more than "a form of tires":) The point he was probably trying to get across is that by having the kernel running, it opens up a whole world of possibilities that can be built on top.
My answer? Because the last time I tried installing Linux (about 2 years ago)
2 years in a very long time in the Linux world; two years ago I found Linux to be utterly unusable as a Desktop, but now I really like it. If you're willing to give it another try, burn a copy of the latest Knoppix. No need to install - just bung it in the CD drive and see what hardware it detects. If it gets everything right, maybe go for a full-install. If it doesn't, well, just power down and throw the CD away - all you've lost is about 10 minutes or so:) It's a nice hassle-free way to test it out with no strings attached.
Hee hee haw haw, WHEN? My Windows drive *still* crawls like a mummy booting up, IE *still* takes a coon's age to find a webpage, and the only reason I'm spared my weekly ritual of staying up all night with Windows picking the malware out of it is that I could automate the process from Linux with Bash shell scripts, accessing Windows as a mounted vfat partition!
Booting time: How about some hard figures? I've clocked 1 minute 18 seconds to get Kubuntu to the login screen, let alone the desktop. I'll concede that IE takes longer to resolve names, for whatever reason. As for malware, you should probably switch to Firefox, if you haven't already. All I get is cookies. Also, vfat is a crap filesystem:p
have no idea what color the sky is in your world, but *every* copy of Windows *still* BSOD's on a regular basis. What's gone are those "(A)bort, (R)etry, (F)ail?" prompts, because Windows crib-deathed DOS. Bloat...count the megabytes on a Windows partition and a Linux partition. Look at the footprints. Case closed. And "Clippy" still comes with Microslop products, being sold on shelves today!
As for BSODs, I guess we'll never know - I hear equally often about people running Windows datacentres or whatever that they bluescreen regularly, or never at all. In my experience, they don't. As for the hard-drive space per installed apps, I agree readily - I can install software with a trowel on Linux, and never get it over 4GBs. As for speed and memory consumption, in my personal experience Windows is currently faster and lighter, but the F/OSS community is more focussed on getting it optimised than Microsoft is.
Don't lie, you hate F/OSS and it shows...
Go back and check through my posts, and see how wrong you are. Check through my posts on the Ubuntu forums (userid; I've entered ssj_195 into the ICQ field to prove it's me). Of course, if it comforts you to believe that anyone who complains about some aspects of F/OSS "hates it and it shows", then that's your prerogative, and lands you squarely in the group of damaging people I was complaining about.
Gee, the huge development teams behind the dozens of major Linux distros sure are sorry that they can't come up to your high standards! Like still being free, still being open source, still being able to run on a wider variety of hardware, not using Mafioso tactics to try to bully the whole world into paying them money to use their software, coming with more programs for free than you can possibly buy for Windows with all the money in the world, having system documentation that's actually helpful, coming in a hundred different flavors/varieties/distributions to suit every taste (I wouldn't mind a "Windows from scratch distro!"),
Fair enough, though note that at least some of these are more philosophical than pragmatic. I apologise for using the term "has many advantages over", as Linux clearly does have many, many advantages - I withdraw it completely. But Microsoft is going after the quantifiable ones with gusto, and I'm sick of people burying their heads in the sand about just what a well-motivated Microsoft can pull off.
and finally...what's now coming into bearing as Linux-user's newest gain to crow about, actually being *easier* to install and configure than Windows is: as anybody will plainly see, installing Windows and Linux cold on the bare iron, as opposed to naively running the first piece of software that they had installed at the computer store for them.
On my laptop and desktop this is true (except there won't be reliable 3D acceleration on my laptop until next year, probably). For other people, the exact reverse is the case. Having said that, Linux perhaps has the upper hand due to the sheer volume of open source drivers (which can then of course be provided in every distro, and automatica
That whole post was an attack, of sorts, against the vocal minority of F/OSS "advocates" (if they deserve the term) who would apparently would rather die than see Windows get better than Linux. If I can be said to have a goal, it is to expose these people as the nuisance they are and, hopefully, get them to wake up and change their ways. Some hope:(
Why do you care if Linux "wins" other than the fact that Linux is better in some way? I
I'm not entirely sure what you mean. I prefer Linux mainly due to its philosophy and idealogy rather than any pragmatic advantages it may have. Does this answer your question, at all?
I choose to use Linux (or any other OS) because it is better in some respect (BTW, in no small part because of a good shell).
I also choose based on this, but also based on how "Free" it is; for example, I would be unlikely to switch to Mac OS X even if it were better in every (pragmatic) sense, as some hold it to be (I've never tried it, myself).
I think most of us actually wish Microsoft well if they want make a product that is more stable, less buggy, less irritating, more useful, less expensive, {fill in you definition of better here}.
I'm sure most people do. "Most people" weren't the subject of that post, though:)
If Linux lost it's superiority in all areas, then would you continue to argue for its use? If so why?
Strictly speaking, I don't really argue for its use even now - at least, not in real life. Linux can't lose its superiority in all areas until Windows is open-source, so I'll assume you mean "in all (pragmatic) areas". At this point, I'd continue to use it, because I like it. At this stage, though, I wouldn't recommend it to anyone else without explaining to them the pros and cons of using it.
Common knowledge? Well, as I said, it is faster for me. It depends on what services you are starting. Also, how are you gauging when an OS is finished booting? Windows displays the desktop long before it is really ready to use.
I thought so, yes. I've just got back from work, and timed Kubuntu's start-up on my laptop (a Mitac 7321) (I no longer have an XP install at home, so I can't time that). From GRUB starting off the boot process to the KDM login screen took 1 minute 20 seconds. Starting up KDE is hard to time fairly as it performs session management, which Windows can't do. Going through the KDE initialisation thingy takes 15 seconds. Harddrive flurry ceases after a further 30 seconds, having restored a Konsole with three tabs, a Konqueror instance, and Firefox. "top" reports 231788k used (no swap used at this stage) with 94608k cached.
That memory swapping is just linux in general. XP has a different memory management.
I heard that XP swapped more aggressively than Linux i.e. you could have a Gig of RAM and Windows will, utterly retardedly, start swapping anyway(!). If this is the case, would this not show that KDE is taking up more RAM? Anyway, this will hopefully be moot by the time delicious KDE4 comes around:)
I also see a problem with the MSH. Microsoft has this habit of complicating the fuck out of everything. So you write scripts for version 1.3 of MSH and then it goes to version 1.4 and all your scripts are broken. Jee thats really fucking helpfull. I'm not saying thats how it is or will be but it's seems very possible with Microsoft running the show.
Heh - sure:) As always, we'll have to wait for Version 3.0 before it's anywhere usable;)
Thanks. Seriously, while some people seem to (understandably, I guess) view it as a troll, it was really intended as a wake-up call - people who will defend something to the death completely denying it has any flaws is not only something that I find personally annoying, but also damages the cause - especially if they over-sell its capabilities which, as I outlined in an old, old post, very nearly put me off Linux for good when it did not meet up to the absurd hype that was fed to me by these kinds of people. The fact that they are so damn loud and drown out the voices of saner people makes it even more depressing:( If I have a dream in this life, it will be to go around slapping everyone like this in the hope that they might see some sense:)
The "dragging windows over Firefox leaves horrible trails" thing seems to meet with either "hear, hear!"s or "what?!"s depending on who I ask, so it could be some weird occasional bug in X, although it's worth noting that I've always seen it when dealing with Linux, on both my home desktop (Athlon ~2500 XP, 512MB, nvidia 5200, RenderAccel on, which currently runs Gentoo, but has seen 3 iterations of Mandrake prior to this) and my Laptop (Kubuntu). The boot-up time for Kubuntu on my laptop is very long - well over a minute (I have timed it, but can't remember the exact results offhand). A fresh install of XP on the same machine took 45 secs, but then XP installs degrade more than Linux ones, so this might not be a fair comparison. DMA is enabled on the harddrive. Linux's slow boot sequence is something that I thought was common knowledge (the Ubuntu devs have set having a faster boot-up time as a high-priority task, if I recall - although they also say that it is currently "on par" with that of Windows, which is confusing), as is XFree's slowness (though xorg have been making great strides) and the slow start-up time for KDE apps (although GCC3.4's -fhide-visibility or whatever apparently helps to cure this) so I don't think I count as a "sample size of one".
he cracks about basing your self-worth on perceptions of your operating system are doubtless right on for an incredibly sad and incredibly small subset of users, but you present it almost as a universal. It's not.
This was really not my intention - "a surprisingly large" was a poor choice of words.
Linux is still far superior to Windows in terms of stability and bloat. Are the new NT-based Windows 'XP' versions more stable than the old DOS based ones? Yes, definately. Are they more stable than, say NT4? Not by much, if at all. Are they more bloated than NT4? Absolutely. Is it *possible* to install a bunch of bloat on a Linux system today? Absolutely! Is it necessary? Nope. So Linux still wins hands down on both comparisons - you can get a stable, lightweight linux install with very little work, you can get a stable, but still bloated, Windows install, but it takes more work.
Again, I can only tell you that I have never seen a BSOD (though I have seen one legitimate crash for XP). Also, KDE and GNOME most definitely are (currently) bloated - are we talking about Linux as a Desktop here, or as a server? I was referring to the former. The kernel itself remains excellent.
Windows is still given to BSODs, so that is hardly an outdated criticism. (And yes, we all know that if you know what you're doing and put in the time to properly configure it, you can get it pretty damn stable. Linux doesn't require a lot of tweaking and freaking to be stable. Like I said, in this respect the situation is pretty much how it stood in the days of NT4.)
I've honestly never seen a BSOD under XP. We have about 20 computers here on 24/7, all of which are installed by the programmer who works on them. They needed no tweaking at all for stability. I really just don't know what to tell you other than this - I find it hard to believe that we all just got lucky.
Clippy may have been abandoned, but it will always stand as a shining example of what's wrong with the MicroSoft way, so it remains a timeless reference.
OK, if that is indeed the spirit in which all of these jibes are made, then I'll concede the point:)
So, from my perspective, your post misses just about every point.
Slashdot Mirror
Happily, the Linux Desktop developers are aware of this and are actively optimising everything all across the board, from Kernel to X to the desktop libraries to the DEs themselves.
GNOME and KDE will probably never run well on, say, 96MB of RAM, but at least the trend is to get faster and less memory-hungry - unlike the OS of a certain rival purveyor ;)
http://udu.wiki.ubuntu.com/XEyeCandy?highlight=(Di stroSpec)
There are problems with what happens when you select Copy and then close the app you are copying from before you Paste - the contents of the clipboard (which could have been html, or a portion of a OO.o document) are reduced to plain text; this may be what the OP was talking about as, as you say, the other bits seem to work fine for me. If this is the case, then this should be tackled at the desktop level (rather than at the X level) - I think freedesktop.org are working on a solution to this at the moment.
Huh - I don't need a compass to tell which way the wind shines. Looks like from now on, I'm riding in a wolf pack...of one.
GCJ can compile a lot of Java apps to native code (and possibly toolkits...?). There are compiled versions of Eclipse (and maybe Azureus, too) floating around somewhere.
I went to school with one of the guys who wrote that. Wonder what he's up to now...
Why do nearly all online content providers provie Quicktime and WMV streams, but not DivX/ XVid/ Theora? I suppose at least one of the former can have DRM embedded in it, which is a plus for the providers, but apart from that, what are the advantages of the former over the latter? Do they give significantly better quality for the same filesize? Or is that .WMV will play, out of the box, on about 90% of PCs (Windows PCs, that is)?
This is the problem - Microsoft have used their effective monopoly to create yet another defacto (closed; patented) standard that everyone uses, irrespective of it's actual merit. In other words, they have leveraged their monopoly in one area (OS's) to gain a near monopoly (with bonus lock-in!) in another (media), which as I understand it is flat-out illegal. For recognising this and actually (shock! horror!) attempting to lay down the law, I can only applaud the EU. However, as others have stated, the proposed sanctions were utterly misguided, and impacted only the consumer, if anyone at all.
I'm not entirely sure what the perfect solution to this would have been - the only ones I can think of are banning not WMP but the .wmv codec itself from inclusion in the default install, or specifying that Microsoft must include DivX, XVid etc playing abilities (if they don't already) out of the box. But both of these are just as lame, and I think this particular transgression simply can't be punished in any sane way, alas. Maybe the other case - with the EU asking MS to open up the Samba spec so that OSS groups can use it - will be more successful, but an article the other day suggests that it won't. Oh well.
That's cool - does anyone else? I'm surprised it's not much more prevalent in non-source based distros, as I know that in at least Debian, every .deb contains a manifest of all files that will be installed by the .deb, and I think a md5 of each one, too. It strikes me that it should be easy to create a "dummy" deb that verifies that the old version has not been tweaked and, if not, simply replaces just the necessary files with fresh copies.
Possibly - God knows I'm always putting my foot in my mouth whenever I go off on one of my rants :) One of the perils of a communication medium where all of the usual verbal cues and body language are removed, I guess...
Oddly enough, this one stumbling block is the thing that put me off Mandrake (onto Gentoo of all things! But I'll wipe that soon and replace it with Kubuntu, like I have with my laptop). Other aspects were the fact that downloading the updates to repository listings sucked up a *huge* amount of bandwidth - one of them (main? updates? I forget which) was a 20MB download, whenever something changed (which was admittedly rare). Kubuntu is much more sane - it must do diff-style repository listing updates, so it looks like I can update all my repositories very quickly and with very little bandwidth - which is a good thing as I intend to replace my mum's Mandrake install with Kubuntu at some point, and she is on 56k.
Anyway, on the whole I did like Mandrake a lot (it was my first distro) but niggles like this put me off, and I'll probably stick with Kubuntu, from now on :)
This was my experience; I searched through with the GUI tools for an actual binary, but couldn't find it anywhere...? Perhaps it was named oddly, but I couldn't find anything but the kernel source itself. If I'm wrong on this, I apologise. It seemed odd at the time (as I knew that e.g. Ubuntu gave kernel binaries), but I was buggered if I could find the damn thing!
The amount of "CPU time" "Windows users" spend patching holes is a few minutes every month. And get off your high horse, here: while Linux distros provide updates for a more comprehensive range of apps, it's also the case they you have to download far more (in terms of raw megabytes) far more often. I'm willing to bet right now that, timing from the release of FC3, FC3 has required more and bigger updates than Windows.
I'll never forget the time, earlier this year in fact, when Mandrake provided a security "update" for the kernel (you may remember the much-publicized priviledge escalation vulnerability around the end of last year). This "patch" consisted of the whole kernel source (maybe 40MBs of it) which you would have to manually compile and install (no nice binary rpm, here). With this one single update, Mandrake users have exceeded the "CPU time" required for a few months of Windows updates. And let's not forget the hefty kdelibs security updates, which basically amounts to downloading the whole of kdelibs again, since none of the distros seem to provide diff-style patching. The same with Firefox (8MB on Linux...?).
Also, while we are free from worms and viruses here, note that there is nothing innate to Linux that precludes phishing and spoofing attacks.
Ugh.http://news.com.com/2100-1023-212942.html
Key quote:
It'll be a golden age for the repo business, though ... one that will never end!
Best game on the C64 bar none, in my opinion.
Linux is merely a kernel; Lindows is a full distro with X-server, graphics toolkits and trillions of apps. This is more than just being "a form of Linux" in much the same way that a car is more than "a form of tires" :) The point he was probably trying to get across is that by having the kernel running, it opens up a whole world of possibilities that can be built on top.
Booting time: How about some hard figures? I've clocked 1 minute 18 seconds to get Kubuntu to the login screen, let alone the desktop. I'll concede that IE takes longer to resolve names, for whatever reason. As for malware, you should probably switch to Firefox, if you haven't already. All I get is cookies. Also, vfat is a crap filesystem :p
As for BSODs, I guess we'll never know - I hear equally often about people running Windows datacentres or whatever that they bluescreen regularly, or never at all. In my experience, they don't. As for the hard-drive space per installed apps, I agree readily - I can install software with a trowel on Linux, and never get it over 4GBs. As for speed and memory consumption, in my personal experience Windows is currently faster and lighter, but the F/OSS community is more focussed on getting it optimised than Microsoft is.
Go back and check through my posts, and see how wrong you are. Check through my posts on the Ubuntu forums (userid; I've entered ssj_195 into the ICQ field to prove it's me). Of course, if it comforts you to believe that anyone who complains about some aspects of F/OSS "hates it and it shows", then that's your prerogative, and lands you squarely in the group of damaging people I was complaining about.
Fair enough, though note that at least some of these are more philosophical than pragmatic. I apologise for using the term "has many advantages over", as Linux clearly does have many, many advantages - I withdraw it completely. But Microsoft is going after the quantifiable ones with gusto, and I'm sick of people burying their heads in the sand about just what a well-motivated Microsoft can pull off.
On my laptop and desktop this is true (except there won't be reliable 3D acceleration on my laptop until next year, probably). For other people, the exact reverse is the case. Having said that, Linux perhaps has the upper hand due to the sheer volume of open source drivers (which can then of course be provided in every distro, and automatica
Thanks. Seriously, while some people seem to (understandably, I guess) view it as a troll, it was really intended as a wake-up call - people who will defend something to the death completely denying it has any flaws is not only something that I find personally annoying, but also damages the cause - especially if they over-sell its capabilities which, as I outlined in an old, old post, very nearly put me off Linux for good when it did not meet up to the absurd hype that was fed to me by these kinds of people. The fact that they are so damn loud and drown out the voices of saner people makes it even more depressing :( If I have a dream in this life, it will be to go around slapping everyone like this in the hope that they might see some sense :)
The "dragging windows over Firefox leaves horrible trails" thing seems to meet with either "hear, hear!"s or "what?!"s depending on who I ask, so it could be some weird occasional bug in X, although it's worth noting that I've always seen it when dealing with Linux, on both my home desktop (Athlon ~2500 XP, 512MB, nvidia 5200, RenderAccel on, which currently runs Gentoo, but has seen 3 iterations of Mandrake prior to this) and my Laptop (Kubuntu). The boot-up time for Kubuntu on my laptop is very long - well over a minute (I have timed it, but can't remember the exact results offhand). A fresh install of XP on the same machine took 45 secs, but then XP installs degrade more than Linux ones, so this might not be a fair comparison. DMA is enabled on the harddrive. Linux's slow boot sequence is something that I thought was common knowledge (the Ubuntu devs have set having a faster boot-up time as a high-priority task, if I recall - although they also say that it is currently "on par" with that of Windows, which is confusing), as is XFree's slowness (though xorg have been making great strides) and the slow start-up time for KDE apps (although GCC3.4's -fhide-visibility or whatever apparently helps to cure this) so I don't think I count as a "sample size of one".