> If only Microsoft can make Windows affordable, they can kill all competitors instantly.
Yeah maybe for the consumers market, but that's already the case with Piracy anyway. But price is not the only issue, Windows is just horrible in so many ways that there's a number of people who will not come back to it even if it's 100% free. I keep Windows (7) as dual-boot on my desktop PC, where I run OpenSuse most of the time, and whenever I have to boot into Windows the sluggishness of it all (on the very same hardware) makes me want to pull my hair out. The very same application (Firefox) is way less reactive on Windows. And just opening a window (no pun intended) takes way more time, too... the overall experience is just deplorable. I only boot into that environment when I really HAVE to.
Are you trolling? What's the hardware configuration?
(Just to make things clear before what follows, I'm not a Windows fanboy and I use like 70% of the time Windows and the rest Ubuntu or Fedora. And I'd choose Linux over windows anytime. But the current state of Gnome and KDE is deplorable! ...both from a UX/I perspective and from a performance perspective. Actually the only DE that doesn't make me wanna push my fist through the display after ~30min is Xfce and it's what I daily use.)
"Default config" Windows 7 and 8 feel as responsive as KDE, Gnome or Unity to me. If you want more speed, there are lots of things to tweak and trim down, but I never felt the need, not even on very cheap netbooks! The only real performance improvements I got by tweaking were from tweaking individual app's obscure perf settings (like Matlab or Photoshop).
About "just opening a window": admitedly, windows explorer does very weird things from time to time, but just because you're on Windows it doesn't mean you have to stick with the default file manager - find one that suits you (and btw, some third party alternatives are actually faster than explorer).
Also it's a well know fact that some apps have better performance on some OSs than other: Firefox has always been visibly faster on Linux, Opera (the old Presto engine version) has always been visibly faster on Windows etc. Also, since about ~5 versions ago the Firefox devs really got their shit together and got rid of some of what seemed to me like "Windows only memory leaks" and probably did some ui thread optimizations to make things feel more responsive, so the perceived performance feels as if it increased by about ~60% on Windows, even if the actual webpage rendering speed is probably close to the same.
Again, it may seem that I'm a Windows/Microsoft fanboy, but even if feature-wise the Linux DEs are way better, if you compare each feature with its equivalent, you'll see that there are zillions of little details that Linux "failed to learn from Windows." And the current DEs seem to play some stupid iOS/MacOS-copycat-ing game instead of stealing more of the true UI/X innovation that came with Windows 8 for example (and yes, I'm actually one of the people that love the Win 8 hybrid tablet/desktop gui and apps concept - I just think that Microsoft blew it by over-geeking it, as any kind of "hybrid" UI will appeal mostly to "geeks" and much less to "average joes" that prefers a "one-piece uniform experience", even if it's really suboptimal).
Windows 7 crawls on my personal laptop and office desktop. Both have i5 processors and 4 GB of RAM. It takes several minutes to cold-boot or wake up from hibernation and load Chrome. Minutes of non-stop HD reading.
OTOH Linux Mint boots up faster and is way more responsive. It's actually faster to cold boot Mint than to wake up from hibernation on Windows.
It's anecdotal evidence, but for me Linux is very superior in this aspect.
Interesting to know about the difference. I never cared about boot time or wake up from hibernation. I always keep my mobile systems charged and in stand by when not used and I do a shutdown and cold boot maybe once a week (I know, waste of power and battery cycles and all :) ).
The cpus are irrelevant here so it might be a real filesystems perf difference. What do you use, ext4?
4 GB of RAM costs about $35. My main PC at home has 16 GB of RAM, an i7-3770 and a 128 OCZ Vertex 4 SSD as the boot drive. Boot time from off to Windows 8.1 login screen is 6 seconds. That's not hibernation or sleep mode - that's from completely off.
The entire system cost $850. Is that an unreasonable price to pay for a desktop computer?
Definitely something with your machines. My 3 year old ThinkPad X120e with the miniscule AMD E350 processor runs fine with Windows 7. Even my old single core XBMC machine with 2GB memory ran fine until I switched it to Linux (not for performance reasons, though)
You must have some other issues then. I have the same setup and the system just flies, and I'm not even using a SSD. Boot and wake happen in about half a minute.
There is lot of crapware on Windows (even in default installation) which slows down system a lot. Antivirus, toolbars, keyloggers...
Also Linux (and nix) in general IS FASTER*. Especially the filesystem operations and multitasking. I use Java and the same build takes 2x time on Windows.
In windows it is generally needed to disable some services to get some performance back.
About the copy-cats, I think Ubuntu tablet is a better way to the hybrid tablet/desktop, for the simple reason of not having market/store restrictions about it. It is still not released to production, or even finished as the Win8 is. But I think in the long term it will be much better.
Really? Chrome has always been considerably faster on Linux but I was under the impression Mozilla always had an easier time optimising their Windows builds, at least in the past. Certainly the hardware acceleration is better on Windows.
I was not referring to the page rendering which includes hardware acceleration. It may be better on Windows, I dunno. But the UI responsiveness was definitely worse on Windows.
By UI "responsiveness" I mean that there are two very different things: a browser can be dog slow at rendering a page and at doing animations or even at network transfers, and at the same time it can start "instantly", open/close a tab instantly, react instantly to me clicking on a link etc. I think you can see this best on a multiprocess browser like chrome: sometimes a page with high res pics and animations is snail slow, sometimes the inspector works in slow-motion or ups your cpu to 60% because of a weird script, but at the same time these things happen, the "chrome ui" can still feel pretty snappy, opening/closing stabs in an instant, opening/changing settings, doing non-page-related suff via extensions or maybe even clicking a lin inside an otherwise slowed-to-a-crawl page can go to that link "instantly".
I'd take an always responsive UI over "real speed" anytime (and yeah, Windows' DE can suck at this, but except for specific apps it sucks just as much as KDE or Gnome).
On my machines, a Dell v131 and an Acer Aspire One, Linux is noticeably snappier than Windows. While it's bearable, it's far less fluid and I can understand why someone would find it less than ideal.
You may be amazed at how much "really have to" covers for a lot of people. There are not nix-based versions for much of the software that people actually use (unless you stretch things far enough to include OS X in the "well, that's nix" category, ignoring the specific requirement to run OS X). The world isn't all about futzing with code and using browsers.
I've used GNU/Linux for around 3 years. The only way I could even consider using Windows again would be with cygwin. The programs I use on a daily basis don't have easily available counterparts for Windows. It very much goes both ways.
I also haven't used Windows as my main OS in over a decade. I only ever use it when I absolutely have to - and these days, the list of reasons is dwindling and diminishing at a great pace.
I think I did: lack of reactivity between the time you click on something and something actually occurs on screen (talking about OS feel in general), same applications running much slower on Windows, higher general memory consumption, extreme sluggishness when running multiple applications in parallel, extensive usage of scratch disks while OpenSuse seems to be able to use RAM more effectively...
I find it hard to believe something else isn't going on because some of those things are the exact opposite of my experience. Firefox has always been more responsive on Windows. Its acceleration architecture is still more advanced on Windows. In fact, everything is more responsive and opens faster on Windows. The scheduler is way better for desktop use. Windows never becomes unresponsive for me because of background applications even though I have the scheduler set to prioritise background processes, whereas even quite recently on Linux I have still found compiling or such in the background can lead to X temporarily becoming unresponsive. Windows is certainly leagues more stable than KDE (if that's what you're using). In fact no part of Windows has crashed for me in years.
These are just my experiences. I have other problems with Linux on the desktop too mainly relating to GPU stuff. Personally, while I love many aspects of Linux on the desktop and use my Linux VM all the time, I would say I still find the overall experience to be "just deplorable"
It's strange that we have both very much opposite experiences. I'm not sure what you are using when you mention "linux" because responsiveness depends a lot on the distro. I wouldn't use Ubuntu, for example. As for Firefox, I guess it depends on your config/RAM/processor, but i have a i5 with 4 gigs of RAM and opening Firefox with saved tabs is slow as hell on Windows 7 while much faster on OpenSuse. By the way I'm using KDE and I don't think it's that bad in terms of stability, while I have experienced a few crashes (maybe once a month or something). It's true that Windows (from 7) has become very stable, nothing like what XP used to be: it does not crash to blue screens anymore, but it still can become very sluggish when I do audio/video editing and basically nothing much runs in parallel because it's just unusable.
It is strange. I've used gentoo for years, arch, debian, ubuntu and probably others variously. All pretty similar experiences though I agree on ubuntu.
I don't know, maybe it is only my experience, but I have tried Ubuntu quite a few times over the last years, on three different machines, and every single time I experienced problems, especially GPU related, speed is always an issue as well. Just try to search for something in Ubuntu and it just doesn't feel responsive.
I'm in no way saying that windows is a better platform, but if you have enough RAM, it is a fast OS.
I eventually found that turning off Aero and 90% of the stuff in Performance -> Visual Effects made a huge difference on my Core i7 laptop with external monitor. (Windows 7).
The giveaway was high memory usage by "dwm.exe"; it seemed to have enough memory pressure that unused windows would have their decor paged out, so switching between applications had to wait for a page fault to be serviced from disk.
all of these points were significantly more of a problem in windows XP, especially responsiveness under ram pressure and 100% cpu load.
Windows 7/8 has made all of these issues significantly better. If you are comparing XP to modern linux, its not much of a fair comparison to compare a 13+ year old OS to a modern one.
My favorite one is being unable to delete an open file - this has consequences on upgrading software that has to stop running and release its files before the upgrade starts. There are also the various ways Windows Explorer fails with very long paths. Or the subtly different ways the CMD.EXE fails on the same use case.
Yeah maybe for the consumers market, but that's already the case with Piracy anyway. But price is not the only issue, Windows is just horrible in so many ways that there's a number of people who will not come back to it even if it's 100% free. I keep Windows (7) as dual-boot on my desktop PC, where I run OpenSuse most of the time, and whenever I have to boot into Windows the sluggishness of it all (on the very same hardware) makes me want to pull my hair out. The very same application (Firefox) is way less reactive on Windows. And just opening a window (no pun intended) takes way more time, too... the overall experience is just deplorable. I only boot into that environment when I really HAVE to.