Windows XP vs. X11 GUIs [was: Re: [plug] [OT] Looking for cheap P4]

[Tim White]

Being an eX-windoz users I'm going to add my 2c worth.
I was a user of Micro$oft products since DOS 3 (and yes I am only 17)
I have used, Win 3.1, 3.11, 95, 98, NT 4, 2000, XP, Server 2003.
I am currently removing all windows stuff from my computer but am 
keeping dual boot for the odd occasion that wine doesn't work for an App.

Cameron Patrick wrote:

>James Devenish wrote:
>
>  
>
>>I also thought that a lot of the bundled visual material (e.g. the
>>appearance of buttons, windows, etc.) was done by people who were just
>>filling in time before going home on Friday.
>>    
>>
>
>:-)  I'd say that the icons in Windows XP look a lot nicer than those
>on Linux desktops of the time -- although recent KDE and GNOME have
>improved quite a bit in this department.  I find the default XP
>"teletubby" look pretty revolting though.
>  
>
I thought the teletubby look was kinda cool when XP was first released 
as linux didn't look that nice but it got very anoying after a small 
amount of time and the themes slowed down the computer. So I uninstalled 
them.

>  
>
>>On the "plus" side, I did
>>not find XP to be "slow" except when logging in/out/shutting down.
>>    
>>
>
>!? My experience is that XP starts up and shuts down a lot quicker
>than any Linux machine I've used (and better than the most recent Macs
>I've used, "recent" being the old 366MHz iMacs they have in the MCL at
>UWA).  The file manager is amazingly slow when browsing SMB shares on
>remote machines, even over 100Mbit networks, and seems prone to random
>'pauses' accompanied by thrashing the hard drive even on local
>directories.  File manager windows sometimes spontaneously decide to
>hang (don't redraw, can't be dragged around the screen, etc).
>
>But hey, it /starts/ quickly :-)
>  
>
Hmmm, I can get linux to start just as quickly. Try disabling some 
services and play around with your /etc/rcX.d/ directory. If there is 
something that you don't need to load instanatiously (webserver, ftpd, 
sshd, mysql, etc) then move them after things like Xwindows. That way 
you can use the computer quicker with out waiting for them to load. Just 
thinking, it would be nice to have them wait maybe until the system is 
idle before loading so that you can login and start work immediatly.
Windows Explorer is the slowest thing at everything. Nautalis creates 
thumbnails much quicker and when trying to browse a 20Gb directory with 
4000 files Windows Explorer nearly has a heart attack while Nautalis 
loads it fairly quickly and displays it as quick as possible slowly 
loading the rest that isn't onscreen yet.
Also windows is always doing something to my disks. The only thing I 
like about windows is that power management is /very/ nice. I love S3 
suspend. If I was a programmer that knew what I was doing then a Linux 
project I would be working on would be to get better powermanagement 
under Linux.

>My (brief) experience with using CDE (on Tru64) was that, unlike
>Windows, it has a decent terminal emulator -- and if you try hard
>enough, you can even run bash on it instead of csh, so you have a
>usable shell too :-)
>  
>
Mmmmm, unix-tools, a bash shell under windoz with some common linux tools.
My 2c worth.
Tim White