On Sun, Jul 06, 2003 at 11:30:46AM +0100, 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?
I wouldn't be surprised if running Linux with KDE on computer with specs like you said is a lot slower than running W2K. You need to notice that the "thing" that make it possible your Linux box to give GUI is X-server, and it is really a server, and needs more resources. Also you need to find out what kind of services are you running on the machines? are you also running mail server, portmap, ftp server, etc. etc. ?? How's the result of ps -waux, top, and free? Lastly if the system with Linux is a lot slower, try it with Win XP, and which one is slower, especially because XP has the capability to run Terminal Server (Remote Desktop) by default although limited only for one user.