5 ms·

Are you trolling? What's the hardware configuration? (Just to make things clear before what follows, I'm not a Windows fanboy and I use like 70% of the time Wi

by nnq 13y ago

Are you trolling? What's the hardware configuration? (Just to make things clear before what follows, I'm not a Windows fanboy and I use like 70% of the time Windows and the rest Ubuntu or Fedora. And I'd choose Linux over windows anytime. But the current state of Gnome and KDE is deplorable! ...both from a UX/I perspective and from a performance perspective. Actually the only DE that doesn't make me wanna push my fist through the display after ~30min is Xfce and it's what I daily use.) "Default config" Windows 7 and 8 feel as responsive as KDE, Gnome or Unity to me. If you want more speed, there are lots of things to tweak and trim down, but I never felt the need, not even on very cheap netbooks! The only real performance improvements I got by tweaking were from tweaking individual app's obscure perf settings (like Matlab or Photoshop). About "just opening a window": admitedly, windows explorer does very weird things from time to time, but just because you're on Windows it doesn't mean you have to stick with the default file manager - find one that suits you (and btw, some third party alternatives are actually faster than explorer). Also it's a well know fact that some apps have better performance on some OSs than other: Firefox has always been visibly faster on Linux, Opera (the old Presto engine version) has always been visibly faster on Windows etc. Also, since about ~5 versions ago the Firefox devs really got their shit together and got rid of some of what seemed to me like "Windows only memory leaks" and probably did some ui thread optimizations to make things feel more responsive, so the perceived performance feels as if it increased by about ~60% on Windows, even if the actual webpage rendering speed is probably close to the same. Again, it may seem that I'm a Windows/Microsoft fanboy, but even if feature-wise the Linux DEs are way better, if you compare each feature with its equivalent, you'll see that there are zillions of little details that Linux "failed to learn from Windows." And the current DEs seem to play some stupid iOS/MacOS-copycat-ing game instead of stealing more of the true UI/X innovation that came with Windows 8 for example (and yes, I'm actually one of the people that love the Win 8 hybrid tablet/desktop gui and apps concept - I just think that Microsoft blew it by over-geeking it, as any kind of "hybrid" UI will appeal mostly to "geeks" and much less to "average joes" that prefers a "one-piece uniform experience", even if it's really suboptimal).

ubercow13 13y ago
>Firefox has always been visibly faster on Linux Really? Chrome has always been considerably faster on Linux but I was under the impression Mozilla always had an easier time optimising their Windows builds, at least in the past. Certainly the hardware acceleration is better on Windows.
- nnq 13y ago
  I was not referring to the page rendering which includes hardware acceleration. It may be better on Windows, I dunno. But the UI responsiveness was definitely worse on Windows. By UI "responsiveness" I mean that there are two very different things: a browser can be dog slow at rendering a page and at doing animations or even at network transfers, and at the same time it can start "instantly", open/close a tab instantly, react instantly to me clicking on a link etc. I think you can see this best on a multiprocess browser like chrome: sometimes a page with high res pics and animations is snail slow, sometimes the inspector works in slow-motion or ups your cpu to 60% because of a weird script, but at the same time these things happen, the "chrome ui" can still feel pretty snappy, opening/closing stabs in an instant, opening/changing settings, doing non-page-related suff via extensions or maybe even clicking a lin inside an otherwise slowed-to-a-crawl page can go to that link "instantly". I'd take an always responsive UI over "real speed" anytime (and yeah, Windows' DE can suck at this, but except for specific apps it sucks just as much as KDE or Gnome).
qwerta 13y ago
I think it is you who is trolling. There is lot of crapware on Windows (even in default installation) which slows down system a lot. Antivirus, toolbars, keyloggers... Also Linux (and nix) in general IS FASTER*. Especially the filesystem operations and multitasking. I use Java and the same build takes 2x time on Windows.
boobsbr 13y ago
Windows 7 crawls on my personal laptop and office desktop. Both have i5 processors and 4 GB of RAM. It takes several minutes to cold-boot or wake up from hibernation and load Chrome. Minutes of non-stop HD reading. OTOH Linux Mint boots up faster and is way more responsive. It's actually faster to cold boot Mint than to wake up from hibernation on Windows. It's anecdotal evidence, but for me Linux is very superior in this aspect.
- deletes 13y ago
  You must have some other issues then. I have the same setup and the system just flies, and I'm not even using a SSD. Boot and wake happen in about half a minute.
- nnq 13y ago
  Interesting to know about the difference. I never cared about boot time or wake up from hibernation. I always keep my mobile systems charged and in stand by when not used and I do a shutdown and cold boot maybe once a week (I know, waste of power and battery cycles and all :) ). The cpus are irrelevant here so it might be a real filesystems perf difference. What do you use, ext4?
  - boobsbr 13y ago
    yeah, ext4.
- 300bps 13y ago
  4 GB of RAM costs about $35. My main PC at home has 16 GB of RAM, an i7-3770 and a 128 OCZ Vertex 4 SSD as the boot drive. Boot time from off to Windows 8.1 login screen is 6 seconds. That's not hibernation or sleep mode - that's from completely off. The entire system cost $850. Is that an unreasonable price to pay for a desktop computer?
  - boobsbr 13y ago
    In Brazil, yeah, pretty unreasonable. We get crap hardware and exorbitant prices for anything other than the low-end stuff.
rbanffy 13y ago
On my machines, a Dell v131 and an Acer Aspire One, Linux is noticeably snappier than Windows. While it's bearable, it's far less fluid and I can understand why someone would find it less than ideal.
Shorel 13y ago
In windows it is generally needed to disable some services to get some performance back. About the copy-cats, I think Ubuntu tablet is a better way to the hybrid tablet/desktop, for the simple reason of not having market/store restrictions about it. It is still not released to production, or even finished as the Win8 is. But I think in the long term it will be much better.

by nnq 13y ago

ubercow13 13y ago

>Firefox has always been visibly faster on Linux Really? Chrome has always been considerably faster on Linux but I was under the impression Mozilla always had an easier time optimising their Windows builds, at least in the past. Certainly the hardware acceleration is better on Windows.

nnq 13y ago
I was not referring to the page rendering which includes hardware acceleration. It may be better on Windows, I dunno. But the UI responsiveness was definitely worse on Windows. By UI "responsiveness" I mean that there are two very different things: a browser can be dog slow at rendering a page and at doing animations or even at network transfers, and at the same time it can start "instantly", open/close a tab instantly, react instantly to me clicking on a link etc. I think you can see this best on a multiprocess browser like chrome: sometimes a page with high res pics and animations is snail slow, sometimes the inspector works in slow-motion or ups your cpu to 60% because of a weird script, but at the same time these things happen, the "chrome ui" can still feel pretty snappy, opening/closing stabs in an instant, opening/changing settings, doing non-page-related suff via extensions or maybe even clicking a lin inside an otherwise slowed-to-a-crawl page can go to that link "instantly". I'd take an always responsive UI over "real speed" anytime (and yeah, Windows' DE can suck at this, but except for specific apps it sucks just as much as KDE or Gnome).

qwerta 13y ago

I think it is you who is trolling. There is lot of crapware on Windows (even in default installation) which slows down system a lot. Antivirus, toolbars, keyloggers... Also Linux (and nix) in general IS FASTER*. Especially the filesystem operations and multitasking. I use Java and the same build takes 2x time on Windows.

boobsbr 13y ago

Windows 7 crawls on my personal laptop and office desktop. Both have i5 processors and 4 GB of RAM. It takes several minutes to cold-boot or wake up from hibernation and load Chrome. Minutes of non-stop HD reading. OTOH Linux Mint boots up faster and is way more responsive. It's actually faster to cold boot Mint than to wake up from hibernation on Windows. It's anecdotal evidence, but for me Linux is very superior in this aspect.

deletes 13y ago
You must have some other issues then. I have the same setup and the system just flies, and I'm not even using a SSD. Boot and wake happen in about half a minute.
nnq 13y ago
Interesting to know about the difference. I never cared about boot time or wake up from hibernation. I always keep my mobile systems charged and in stand by when not used and I do a shutdown and cold boot maybe once a week (I know, waste of power and battery cycles and all :) ). The cpus are irrelevant here so it might be a real filesystems perf difference. What do you use, ext4?
- boobsbr 13y ago
  yeah, ext4.
300bps 13y ago
4 GB of RAM costs about $35. My main PC at home has 16 GB of RAM, an i7-3770 and a 128 OCZ Vertex 4 SSD as the boot drive. Boot time from off to Windows 8.1 login screen is 6 seconds. That's not hibernation or sleep mode - that's from completely off. The entire system cost $850. Is that an unreasonable price to pay for a desktop computer?
- boobsbr 13y ago
  In Brazil, yeah, pretty unreasonable. We get crap hardware and exorbitant prices for anything other than the low-end stuff.

rbanffy 13y ago

On my machines, a Dell v131 and an Acer Aspire One, Linux is noticeably snappier than Windows. While it's bearable, it's far less fluid and I can understand why someone would find it less than ideal.

Shorel 13y ago

In windows it is generally needed to disable some services to get some performance back. About the copy-cats, I think Ubuntu tablet is a better way to the hybrid tablet/desktop, for the simple reason of not having market/store restrictions about it. It is still not released to production, or even finished as the Win8 is. But I think in the long term it will be much better.