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Submitted by Xenoveritas on
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Anonymous (not verified)

Noticed your post here, while looking up boot time data. The issue with responsiveness of the gui is probably due to Windows prioritizing the gui process, whereas linux usually doesn't. This makes your mouse get choppy, windows get harder to move, etc. This is a good thing if you're doing simulations or the like, but a bad thing if you like to load up a lot of software and move windows around.

Sat, 01/19/2008 - 05:49 Permalink

So I recently switched my work laptop over to Linux, because Windows XP was running incredibly slowly. Now I know that the usual cause of "Windows XP is running incredibly slowly" is simply "spyware" but in this case, it's "corporate required spyware" (Norton Antivirus, asset tracking software, etc.). It's slowing the thing to a freaking crawl.

It turns out that there's an official way you can get out of having to run the asset software and all that other corporate software: run Linux. (This also gets you out of having a supported PC, but I can cope.)

So I installed Debian Testing on it. And the laptop boots much, much faster now. (We're talking a good two minutes to load everything versus something like 20 minutes under Windows. Not kidding.) It runs faster. About the only thing slower is that, for some reason, GNOME feels slower than Windows. (KDE too, but Debian defaulted to GNOME, and I haven't decided to change it yet. Eclipse and Firefox both use GTK+, so, I'm basically just using GNOME software anyway.) But it's really not that big a deal, because minor things like compiling and running the software are faster.

Which brings me to the title of this post. I have two machines on my desk, currently: the 2.2GHz laptop running Debian, and a 3.0GHz Xeon machine running Windows XP Professional. Guess which one boots faster? That's right, Debian gets me to the logon prompt first.

But there's an added bonus. Windows XP hasn't actually finished booting when you see the login prompt. It's still loading crap. By the time GDM starts, Debian has already finished loading all the various services it's running. The Windows XP machine hasn't. It's still grinding away, loading whatever it needs to load.

(To be fair, the Xeon machine takes longer to make it through POST than the laptop, and I'm currently counting POST time. However, if I counted until Windows XP finished loading stuff versus Debian finished loading stuff, it'd still lose.)

In the end, Debian just works better for what I'm doing. The one problem is that I'm missing IE, which means I have to still test things on the Windows XP machine. But other than that, for the work I'm doing, Debian is just flat-out better than Windows XP.

(Ignoring minor glitches, like the fact that Debian doesn't appear to support docking and undocking of a laptop, even with hotplug. Although I may simply not know how to configure that.)