On 9/11/05, Carl Hartung <suselinux@cehartung.com> wrote:

On Saturday 10 September 2005 23:57, Jonathan Lutz wrote:
> The installation of RC1 went very well.. very smooth. I quite like the
> aesthetic of everything thus far.
>
> Two concerns however:
> 1 - Performance is pretty poor compared to my Windows 2000 partition on the
> very same box. By 'performance' I am largely referring to load times in
> Gnome.. Firefox for example takes at least twice as long to load. :| Is
> there any way to improve this? Am I doing something wrong?
> 2 - The right side of my screen is 'chopped off' by several mm. Is there a
> way to correct this software wise or am I stuck adjusting my monitor
> settings each time I boot into linux?
>
> The machine is 1.3ghz with ~800mb RAM.
>
> JON

Hi Jon,

Last question first: Log out of your desktop, switch to tty1 ("Ctl+Alt+F1"),
log in as root, drop to run level 3 ("init 3") to shut down X, then run
"sax2" to reconfigure your monitor settings. On the very last screen, before
"finalizing" any changes, you get the option to test first. That test screen
lets you resize and reposition the display using your mouse.

As far as performance goes, we've got fairly similar base configurations. I
find that Firefox in any Linux I install on this machine appears to open
slower than it does under XP. However, that is not really a competent measure
of performance. Other differences I know of:

-> I never have to update SpywareBlaster on Linux
-> nor Ad-Aware
-> nor Hijack This!
-> nor Spybot Search and Destroy
-> nor ZoneAlarm
-> nor AVG anti-virus (no mail server running)
->nor TrojanHunter
Yes, I have sometimes frequent YaST Online Updates, but they don't involve
hours of scanning time twice a week (or more) and it isn't the same thing as
having to constantly clean out malicious scriptlets and Trojan Horses and
viruses that have already landed, and are *always* landing, on your system in
the background if you spend any time surfing the Internet.

And on the Linux side, I can be on the phone (Skype) while listening to the
radio (shoutcast/xmms) while running my mail client/calendar/contacts manager
(Kontact) and surfing in Konqueror *and* Firefox and have a couple of shells
open and also a pdf document and be editing a web page (jEdit) while also
editing a photo for that web page (GIMP)... and I can even move 700MB CD
images (iso's) from drive to drive... and my music doesn't skip a beat... not
once... not ever. Whereas, when I'm listening to the same station using
Winamp on XP, if I just open up a single large document in Acrobat reader
while I'm surfing the Internet and editing a web page, the music *always*
skips and stutters. Always. That tells me that Linux knows how to use my
hardware much more efficiently; that the load balancing and shifting across
apps is truly graceful; light years ahead.

I've also installed a utility which gives me four virtual desktops in XP.
Yeah, I'm no longer stuck with just one desktop there and the idea is great,
but the execution sucks... the difference in speed when switching between one
desktop to the next is like day and night. In Linux, I click and I'm there...
not so in XP. When I click to switch there, it sometimes takes two or three
whole seconds while it juggles the loads and pages memory. That might not
seem like much, but if you work like I do, with many apps open at the same
time, each opened up to a different part of the same project, you'd
understand that I sometimes jump from desktop to desktop and program to
program as much as fifteen or twenty times a minute, depending on what the
project is. Under this scenario, the race isn't even a close *third*

So, be careful how you judge performance. It is very application specific and
you must factor in all the side benefits and disadvantages, such as security
(vs. insecurity) and privacy (vs. none) and price (real TCO) and the ability
to study every line of source code installed on your computer (one says "yes'
the other slams the door in your face). From all these perspectives, I don't
think comparing "load times" of one application is a rational process.

regards,

- Carl

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