----- Original Message -----
From: "Jon Pennington"
--- Karol Pietrzak
wrote: I do, however, feel I am correct when I say that Linux workstation software is limited. It's almost a fact.
Okay, I'll grant this one. What do you want to do, though?
We have all seen Samba and Apache benchmarks, but a desktop workstation comparison... Windows would win _completely_, especially with Windows 2000.
I'm not sure about that at all. Hell, Win4Lin makes win32 applications run faster on my Linux box than Win98SE/98Lite runs them NATIVELY on the SAME hardware. Win2k is fast, but it ain't all that. Are you sure that your Linux box is tuned properly? This is one thing that Linux could sincerely benefit from...automatic hardware tuning for things like disks and such; hdparm is really a bit too cumbersome, even though it's a set-and-forget tweak.
StarOffice sucks, KDE sucks, but they're each getting better and faster by the day. If Rasterman's proposed OpenGL tweaks (to his own software like E and EFM) were to be effectively implemented on KDE (using the hardware 3D engine to do things like drawing windows, placing text and icons, et cetera), I think that KDE's overhead would increase but performance would improve significantly for those of us with modern hardware.
There are really a very limited number of things you can test apples-to-apples, even in the UNIX world. Take Blender, POVRay, and GIMP for example; they do run on all three platforms ("Real" UNIX, Linux, and Win32), but how many people have taken the time to test them head-to-head? If I were to venture a guess, I'd say that Linux could hold it's own in tests of these applications, since they all started as semi-POSIX-compliant code. Last I checked, there was no performance testing routine for StarOffice, either, so WinBench-type numbers are hard to come by. What exactly do you want to see performance numbers on?
Keep in mind, folks that, in the hardware/software world, there are three kinds of lies; lies, damned lies, and benchmarks...
I don't personally care too much for benchmarks. If one is ten seconds faster than the other, who cares? I look for usability. Can I use this to get what I want done in a manner pleasing to me? Even though I am a Linux newbie, I love the command line and drop down to it regularly. So what is pleasing to me would suck to a Windows XP user. I will agree that Star Office and KOffice have a hell of a long way to go before catching up to MS Office or for that matter MS Works. Feature for feature no Linux "Office" app can compare. However, Star Office handles my needs quite nicely. I have no use for all or even fifty percent of the goodies in MS Office. Try using MS Office for a couple of weeks, then write down all of the features you use. I bet that 90 percent or better of what most of us use is already included in Star Office. I know that there are somethings that just can't be compared, Power Point, Access and really detailed spreadsheets. For those people, Hanscom's Office based on QT will be the answer and at one third of MS office's price... In any case, I think it boils down to, what is pleasing to you and what shortcoming are you willing to put up with.