h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Is Linux faster than Windows, given a similar hardware setup? Would this then represent a cheap/free upgrade, requiring no hardware tinkering?

I don't know. I expect someone does.

Hideo.

It's "faster" providing you compile your own kernel only using modules relevant to tasks you're actually going to use the machine for. Think "Racing Car vs. SUV"; they may have the same horsepower under the hood, but the Linux racecar is stripped of all but the essentials and tweaked to fit its owner precisely. It needs a lot of knowledge to set it up optimally before each "race", and if you succeed in crashing it you might as well just scrap it and start again.

The Windows SUV on the other hand is far slower because it's carrying the weigght of all those extra seats. It's already got all the "comfort extras" fitted, along with things which, while they are performance drains initially, will statistically be used at some point in the machine's life. It's aimed at people who want to do the "school run" of computing, and not have to take their machine in to the garage for a refit every time they need a seat for an extra child, or a towbar fitted - they are all included in the default package.

Windows is built for comfort, Linux is built for speed. Each has its place; you wouldn't enter a plush new SUV in a race, and you wouldn't be allowed to drive a formula one car on the road. This is reflected in the fact that software for one generally won't run on the other, unless it was written specifically for Linux then ported to Windows at a later date. With a very few noteable exceptions, most games and "big" applications force you to use Windows.

My personal experience (based on a double bootable machine which "runs" Windows ME on one side and SuSE Linux 8.2 on the other side of the coin):

I did no additional hardware tuning/tweaking, both installations are basically out-of-the-box (except for setting up a dedicated swap partition for Windows, too).

Linux seems to be a bit faster. Not really dramatically, but just enough to notice it. My personal benchmark to prove that is my SETI@home client. I can do an average of app. 2 units per day with windows and 2.3 per day with linux.

From that point of view, I don't really have valid points against Linux. If you want to finetune your machine to your needs (as Peet mentioned above), Linux would be the thing to go for, as it offers you all those little bolts and screws to tweak. But that's still beyond my horizon.

Jeremy

Jeremy, moving Windows' swap file to a different *partition* does nothing productive; you need to make sure it's on a physically different *drive* to see a performance boost. The idea is to stop the drive heads from having to continuously seek back and forth between the application data and the swap file...

It is a valid question, but needs to be qualified. What are you neededing the computer (Operating system) to do? Is it play games, word processing, or internet surfing?
To compare a windows machine against a Mac is not fair, just as saying Windows is better than Linux.

To compare Macintosh computers to IBM computers without a fair rating scale would be like comparing a Jaguar to a Hummer.




pedboy

Well...

As a dual-booter myself (using Redhat and Mozilla at the moment), I can honestly say Linux is MUCH faster. I've got all kinds of "daemons" running in the back, and if not being used, they're truly "idle" - which allows other things to run at full tilt.

On the Windows side, things are smooth - until I open up a window or two, then the machine slows down to a crawl. I'm talking about waiting a good 45-60 seconds for the icons to pop in view. I've disabled and uninstalled everything running in the background, but it still does this. I'm stumped.

Linux, on the other hand, can browse the net, get mail, and play my MP3s at the same time without any slowdown (opening a new browser tab may cause XMMS to "hiccup" for a second, but that's it...).

To say this isn't a fair comparison is nonsense - it's the exact same machine running both OSs. It's completely fair!

All in all, I prefer Linux - but Amigas are still the best!

banzai "Boinger" kai

Do not BAH me without reading my qualifiers first. Try playing any multiplayer networked game ona non-pc without a winblows O/S. Then BAH me.




pedboy

Which multi-player game?

My kids are into the age of empire series, which has now mutated into age of mythology. I had beefed up 3 of their networked PC's with 32 Mg video cards, so that they could all play the Mythology.

After the long winded process of getting the game installed and working on all the machines, getting the game started on each machine, we finally reached the moment when the eager young things could reach nivarna - multiplayer game!

A glimmer of heaven and - BANG - all 3 games crashed down to earth. Tears and recriminating looks to the man - me - who had been hailed as the conquering hero not 5 minutes ago.

And the reason why? The minumum requirements stated on the box, were for single player. When you are multiplayer, the machine that is hosting the game needs memory lots and lots of it. 512Mg for 3 players! 600 Mg + for 4 and onwards and upwards.

AOM is nothing but a single player game hacked.

Ditch Windows, upgrade to Linux and find some new, far less expensive, games to play.

Oh God, it's the 'which end of the egg do we break first?' argument all over again.

This collaborative entry is about UPGRADING PC's, and that implies a considerable degree of continuity with what has gone before. If someone is running Windows, don't tell them to 'upgrade' to Linux and vice versa. You might as well tell a German to upgrade to speaking English.

Ja!

When I upgrade my computer, I expect it to be a better tool that it was before. When I upgraded my first PC to Linux from Windows, it was a better tool. It was faster, more reliable and less prone to virus attack.

It took my wife and children 5 minutes to find their way around the new GUI 'desktop' and feel comfortable with new setup.

Funny that you should mention Germany. The Munich local government offices are 'upgrading' all of their PCs to run under Linux EVEN after a worried Microsoft had offered them a 90% discount on the cost of licences.

When you have upgraded your machine to Linux, you can go out and buy a 2nd machine and a wireless network with the money you have saved and really start to enjoy this brave new world.

The point I am trying to make is that an upgrade should have very little impact upon a user's working practices. I've used both Windows and Linux professionally and I *know* what a step change in usability is involved. Plus the fact that some of your old software won't work and needs to be thrown away. This is too much for the average user to bear.
Myself, I don't need to upgrade my OS to 'enjoy a brave new world'. I just go and open the front door and step outside. I suggest that others who repeatedly get mired in this sterile and pointless argument try it as well.

I don't think it is a "sterile and pointless argument". I think that's what Microsoft would like us to think.

If Linux will make my existing machine run quicker, surely that's an upgrade - and for less than the cost of a faster processor or whatever. If there's a learning curve, is it much bigger than the one I'd go through to learn enough to know what upgrade I need? Or for that matter how to operate the next version of Windows, if I upgrade now from '95? (yeah, I know...)

I emphasise, I don't know - but Linux MUST have some advantages, or it wouldn't be doing so well.

It's got a cute penguin called "Tux"...

It is free, Hideo.




pedboy

Remember that we are talking about the PC. With PC standing for Personal Computer. I am the father in a family of 5. That means that I want to have at least 5 Personal Computers up and ready to use.

Until recently I have been simply breaking my licence agreement with Microsoft and have been doing multiple installs of Windows 2000. With XP, Microsoft have closed down that cheap upgrade path.

I am now upgrading my household to Linux and bringing on-line old computers that I would have other wise have thrown out by using the Linux OS for very little extra cost - I am having to install wireless network cards. I can invest the money I am saving in gettting TFT monitors.

Go over to Linux. It makes sense and save money for more important things. Please read my Open Source: Return of the Jedi thread.

There is a very serious side to all of this talk...

I tried to make taht post for quite a whlie during the last 20 hrs, so I hope it will make it now:

Peet,

of course the swap file is on a dedicated drive. I have 3 HDDs in my machine:

One for Windows (80 GB with a 15GB C:/ and a 65GB D:/ drive where D:/ contains only user-specific data and C:/ contains all the stuff that has to be re-installed from time to time)

One for Linux (80GB, same partitioning as above: 65GB for /home/..., 15GB for the rest)

One for the SWAPs (4GB: 2GB for the Windows swapfile, 2GB for Linux). I know that this is a waste of disk space, but I had the 4GB HDD cannibalized from anothe machine anyhow.

Jeremy

I had four 4GB drives going spare (well, actually I had three, and I traded a 6GB for one, but my reasons will become clear...) so I went to Maplin and spent £19.95 on a PCI RAID controller; the four drives are gaffer-taped together and connected as a simple RAID-3 (striped for speed) to hold my swap file and "Temp" directory. It's made a great improvement in performance, and because it just shows up as a 16GB really fast BIOS drive I can use it in any OS.

When really fast drives become cheap, I can still stay "ahead of the game", as this will operate up to UDMA-133, four of which would be equivalent to a large UDMA-532!

It's not that easy. If you have grown up with MS, it takes some guts to thow it all out of the Windows (pun intended). I have done that step and have set up a dual booting PC (I didn't succeed in setting up my homebanking with Linux, so I have to swith back from time to time).

In my opinion a change from MS to Linux is far more that just an upgrade. It is a step forward, no doubt about that, but if you talk about upgrading your machine, the operating system isn't really important.

My advices for upgrading would be as follows:

Priority #1:
Get as much RAM as possible. RAM is the cylindrage of your system, the more, the better.

Priority #2:
Get additional HDDs and separate data from executables. Try to move your swap file to a dedicated separate drive that does nothing else.

Priority #3 (the big cleanup):
If you have moved all your valuable data to a separate drive (let's just call it D:/ for the moment) eradicate and format the other drive (C:/ for the moment). Don't forget to write down all your dial-up accounts/passwords etc. ... (that's what I used to do ). Reinstall your system from crap, starting with the OS (let's just call it Windows for the moment), continuing with the firewall software, then the antivirus software. Go online and update both. Install the rest of your software and update it. Now is a good moment to make a drive image (just for safety reasons). Scan all your data for virusses, worms, troyans, the like, before you even think about opening a single file.

The basic rule is: Never, that is *NEVER EVER* run a system that will send all your valuable data down the drain if you 'just' have to reinstall it. If you have all your data on a separate HDD, you can make the mega-easy upgrade: Go to the store, buy a new machine, install your data drive into the new one and have fun.

The same rules basically apply to Linux as well (and propably to MAC, but as my MAC erxperience can be measured by minutes, I don't know that).

Jeremy

I notice the one thing you *don't* mention us upgrading your CPU... Granted, nowadays, pretty much any recent CPU will run all modern software, but on older machines you can still make a hell of a difference, often for pennies.

For example, if you have a socket 7 motherboard with an early Cyrix CPU (the ones characterised with a "+" sign at the end of their speed rating) you may find that Windows is running quite smoothly, at a tolerable speed, but on the whole your application performance is disappointing, and switching to Linux actually makes your machine seem *slower*!

The clue here is the little "optimised for Windows" logo on the processor lid - it means exactly what it says. These CPUs were tweaked to give the fastest possible performance on the few most common 32-bit GUI calls used in the Windows interface, at the expense of application performance overall.

Wander around a computer fair, and you should be able to spot someone who will sell you an AMD K6/2 (or, if you're really lucky, a K6/3!) CPU which, on the same motherboard, at the same "effective" clock speed, will make your applications run up to 50% faster, at a one-off cost somewhere between £2 and £5. (Don't forget to ask about cheap memory while you're there!) I know this is a rather extreme and specialised example, but you should bear in mind that around the time Windows 95 was released all the chip manufacturers were falling over themselves ( ) to come up with ways of making their systems look better on paper so they could cash in on the number of people "upgrading" to the new OS. Cyrix was a particularly bad culprit; until the release of their MII series, their chips were acknowledged as the slowest in the industry. The "166+" was clocked around 150MHz, and performed slightly worse than a 150MHz AMD of the same era; this was indicative of the whole range. If you have a machine built in the last 5 or 6 years of the 20th century, and it says it's fitted with a Cyrix CPU, run, don't walk, to your nearest computer fair!

btw, remember you can't just swap the chips over... There are jumper settings on the motherboard to deal with first. Read your manual carefully; if you don't have a manual try typing in all the numbers you can see printed on the top of your motherboard into Google - most decent motherboards have a PDF manual online somewhere.

(Footnote - around 1998/1999, Cyrix released some "all-in-one" systems where the CPU die also contained the graphics processor and sound card. These only fitted on the associated Cyrix all-in-one motherboards, and were sold to various manufacturers to wrap a pretty case around. Compaq certainly made one, a 133MHz model that was slower than an Intel P90, and I suspect Packard Bell used them too. These are *not* upgradable in any way. They came in 133MHz and 166MHz variations, and the only thing you can do is to overclock a 133MHz model to 166MHz as a stopgap till you find a dustbin big enough to hold it. I briefly had a Compaq one, which had a nice CD ROM drive and speakers on the front of the cabinet. I tried using it as a CD player for a while, but I got sick of the two to five minute delay before Windows got round to autoplaying the discs. )