The greatest gift of all to mankind is the friendship and understanding that which we have cultivated with each other and in cooperation.
Nice site Tim. A little backstory on how I found myself here. I found your site while looking up Phillip S. Callahan after reading about him in Dan Barber’s Book, The Third Plate. You have some interesting info on him as well as what I have seen so far on calendar discrepancies.Clocks, calendars, precision timekeeping are other interests of mine and I enjoyed those posts. After that I checked out your categories and that led me here to this post.
I will be speaking from personal experience with what I have experienced on my machines and others that I have worked on. There is a bit of a chronology to this as well.
Back when Windows started, I was a late adopter. I stayed in the command line, the DOS world, until Windows 95. It was out when I was in college and I briefly had Win3.1 until I could install 95 on the machine I had at that point. At the same time I was using the universities computers, a bank of Win95 PCs was located in a convenient computer lab. The Internet was really coming on hard and fast, so the inevitable occurred, the room was packed to the gills with students and there was a waiting line most of the time. But, there was another computer lab mostly for computer science majors, full of Sun Sparcs running UNIX, barely used at all. The room was cooler and quieter too, a bonus. This was when I got a feel for what a non Microsoft OS could be like. I would up learning it enough to use it with fair competency, a struggle at time to remember how to do something at times, but worth the effort to stick with it as it ran so smooth. I wondered if there was anything like this that I could load on a PC. A few years went by and I started to do this with Linux.
The first few machines I used Linux on were set up with dual boot. Red Hat/W98 and later Ubuntu/XP combos on two separate machines, one after the other in time. Setting up Red hat was a pain at the time and not for anyone that is not “good” with computers. Ubuntu was easy to set up, almost as easy as setting up Windows. But, it was much easy to work with than the earlier Red Hat 9.0 and that was the key. It was easy enough for my non-technical minded spouse to use, she was not lost in it in other words and could actually could use it without a lot of questions or frustration. On top of that the performance of both machines was hands down better with Linux. Things like time from a cold boot to the time you could click and open a program were faster. More programs could be run simultaneously without bogging the machine down. Moving around on the screen and opening files went faster as well. On Linux there was minimal weird behavior and very infrequent total lockups, requiring a reboot. There was no degradation either. What I mean is that it seems after having a Windows install running on a machine for years and then loading programs on it one after the other over time, it seems to get more unstable and flaky over time to the point that a fresh install is needed. This has gotten better at least with Win 8, I have noticed. On a machine that I had after the XP/Ubuntu, one was to be the last Windows machine. A Xeon machine (XP/Lubuntu) that had 1GB RAM, it was expensive RDRAM and I chose to ride it out a while as is, Linux seemed to run a bit better with less memory. In other words it would take longer to hit the out of RAM wall and start to swap to the drive and when it did it was less aggressive and didn’t do a lockup for a long time like it did while running XP. A lockup meaning the time you have to just wait for the machine to start responding again as the disk just grinds. As I said, this was the final Windows machine for me, with expensive memory, it paid to toss the PC and get a newer used machine for the same amount of money as an upgrade. This is the machine that I am on now, 6 years old and running Mint XFCE. Right now I am actually composing this while on it running Slackware in a Virtual Box, to test it out a bit. She, my spouse, has basically the same machine, same age, same CPU, with Windows 7 ( after a brief try at Windows 10, which was short as the performance was sub-par, plus the fact that when it did updates it “inhaled” 100% of the bandwidth on my connection for long time periods was frustrating), the speed difference is quite noticeable between the two machines, Win7 vs Mint XFCE. On a cold start with Mint, I can click and open something like Firefox or Word Processor, as soon as the network card is recognized, about 9 seconds after boot. The Win 7 machine takes at least 3-4 times longer. It also performs much more sluggishly overall when it finally “arrives” after a few minutes. My estimate of the speed at which I can maneuver on the Win 7 machine is along the lines of equivalence to when I tried Ubuntu on a Pentium 4 machine, single core, circa 2004, so 14 years old. One final comparison. I had a neighbor with a new machine, a budget one, but new, with Windows 10 and it still moved a lot slower than the 6 year old machine that I have with Mint.
The difference in performance is just what I have experienced and motivated me to move to Linux 100%. Not to mention the stability as well, less odd behavior and virus and malware issues are bonuses. Linux has come of age, it once was a tool that was too technical for the common user but, at this point most people could get up to speed with it fairly quickly. A little learning upfront is an investment that will save time in the long run with all of the spare seconds saved over waiting for Windows to respond to human inputs.
Microsoft has had a few hits, XP and 7 come to mind, but the product seems to go off the rails badly almost every other release, Vista and 8 come to mind. I wonder why 9 was skipped, maybe it was going in the wrong direction early on and that was realized in house before launch, I don’t know the history with that.
To all the readers, happy computing to all, with whatever OS you run,
Erick
