On Sunday 06 July 2003 06:30 am, expatriate wrote:
Hello My wife is considering "upgrading" all of her company's PCs to Linux instead of continuing on the Microsoft wagon. In order to test the impact on the average user, she requested I convert her home machine to dual-boot so she could experience the issues. Her home machine is an ASUS P2BF with a Pentium III 450MHz , 128MB RAM , 120GB 7200rpm IBM HD (33MHz ATA though on the Motherboard) and a Diamond Viper V770 (NVidia2 TNT2). I chose KDE since I have many niggling issues with GNOME. Her first impressions so far are: "It is slower to boot" "It does not start up applications as quickly as W2K" (OpenOffice definitely loads more slowly than Office2000) "Repaints take longer" (When shifting windows around)
Mind you, she has an MSEE and is definitely not a Microsoft drone having studied UNIX in college. However, she is concerned that her organisation will have trouble adapting to a ""less responsive" OS on the older machines that are now running Windows 97 and 2000.
Does anyone have a different experience?
TIA & cheers ===================
Sounds like you just need to do a bit of tweaking to your Linux setup to get the same results the Windows side gives you. The machine should be acceptable, but remember too, if you want all the bells and whistles a GUI like KDE or Gnome2 has, it helps to have added horsepower to run them. In order to get a faster GUI response with the older machines, a "lighter" interface would help. One of the other provided window managers might be more appropriate in comparison. I have have had SuSE installed on a 233mhz, 96mb, 4mb graphics card machine with acceptable behavior in KDE, so your 450 should do some better. Another point, if you are comparing oranges to oranges, is to preload the programs, so that they come up quicker. OpenOffice has a QuickStarter program now and it would be advisable to use that in this instance. That's what Windows does in order to seem "faster", so do the same thing on your Linux side. Booting can be optimize probably by cutting off some things that aren't needed by the machine. Hardware scan, checking for old configuration files & usb scan are a few things that come to mind right away. If it were Windows, boot time would bother me, because of all of the possible reboots, but this is Linux, 2 or 3 minutes out of your day is acceptable to boot a computer, I would think. ;o) The fact the OS is more stable, safer, easier to fix and generally more fun to work with should be a consideration when switching also and I believe Linux is such. Derek should not hold back and tell us how he really feels, I suppose. I would say I completely disagree with all his points! Linux is quite ready for the desktop, if one has a good desktop to put it on. :o) Pat -- --- KMail v1.5.2 --- SuSE Linux Pro v8.2 --- Registered Linux User #225206 On any other day, that might seem strange...