No more linux for me...

[Tomas]

I agree that linux is far from the best OS on desktop. I certainly believe it is better than windows though, much faster on my system atleast, even my k6 450.

Remember to not install unecesarry services and programs that you will not use, removing those will highly increases both boot speed and memory.

I kinda like debian, even fast on older hw, but is a bit more complicated than mandrake and such.

You could also try knoppix, which is a live-cd distro based on debian, but includes a install script  :-)

[Tomas]

KennyR wrote:

By the gods! It's even more bloated than Windows!

I can't wait to hear the justification for this one...

Windows only comes on one CD.

linux comes on one single floppy  ;-)

[Tomas]

I still think the best OS for x86 pcs was BEOS... booted fast, no reboots, stable and VERY user friendly, without limiting the more experienced users.

[Tomas]

BeOS had one flaw.. It did not have much support for hardware, but that is not reallly the fault of the OS, but the giant monopoly that microsoft has.

2) There was some stupid "tip-of-the-day" crap,but it had no obvious way to

I did not have such a problem, i have never tried yellowtab zeta though, but BeOS itself "5.0" had for sure no such problem.

The biggest strength of beos is that there was rarely/no need for reboots.. you could install a new nic card, gfx, soundcard and so on without rebooting at all!

The best PC-OS I ever came across (not counting Amithlon  ) was QNX,

I had a very different experience with QNX on x86... It sure looked nice, but locked up in less than 5minutes without any reason at all..
Though this is also probably due to lack of decent drivers due to the evil monopoly of microsoft.

[Tomas]

well, simply try to run windows 95 on a 486/66 and then run redhat 5 for example... scary uh? not scared yet? now load openoffice in linux and office in windows...

I had debian 3.0 running on my 133@200 p1 "overclocked", 64 megs of ram... It ran far better on debian than both win9x, win2k and winNT 4.0 did, i even had a bunch of servers running, web server, routing,  irc server and so on...

I am pretty sure you install the default package, which means there is loads of stuff installed that you usually have no need for... also redhat in itself seems to be slow, debian is by far faster on my systems  :-)  Also with such a low end system, it might be wise to recompile the kernel.

[Tomas]

yeah, would be nice to see some alternative to xfree86 someday...

[Tomas]

but all they do is copy windows

It sure goes the completly other way too... Take for example the linux login managers, XP one is starting to really look like the ones on linux. Also the new start menu feature"that multiple opened programs/folders end up under same button" that is in XP, seems to have been stolen from KDE. KDE had this feature before XP. WinNT, 2k/xp has alot of bsd code underneat also.

[Tomas]

Why Windows Media Player 8 (or Media Player 9 for that matter) defined as crap in your view?

It cannot even play svcds in right aspect ratio, it also pretty slow. However i like Windows Media Player 6.4, the gui is small and plays nearly every format correctly as long as you have the codec.

Nothing beats xine and mplayer on linux though.

[Tomas]

In regards to speed, it's dependent on hardware and driver interactions (I have no speed problems running Mpeg 1 on following hardware

Forgot to state that it was the startup time i meant. I think it is very slow to startup, compared to other mediaplayers.

[Tomas]

It loads about 1 second(s) when using my PC (2) (click from XP's quick launch icon bar)....

over 3 seconds on my old XP2100+, 512mb sdram, asus a7v133 kt133a. The hd it runs from is not the very fastest, but damn . even wmp6.4 starts up much quicker on the same system.

Mine also does it in a sec, if i load it first, so that it is stored in memory.

But anyway  7.x, 8.x and 9.x all sucks since they cant handle svcds correctly. I also miss the keyboard keys for functions, like volume control, pause and so on.