The toman diaries

Back to SuSE, 9.1 this time

mandag, juni 07, 2004

As you've read, I've gone back to Linux again, after doing some on and off with Windows XP. I found that going to Windows was faster (that time), but the Windows management has me frustrated. Its almost impossible to manage seriously without having some kind of schooling.

Linux on the other hand, has millions of user groups that, through figuring out things by themselves, has really learned how the system actually works. - Of course Linux is also completely open, so it is possible to figure things out. And it was made for managing etc, etc... I'm as comfortable on the command-line as I am in the UI.

Now. Speed. Linux kernel 2.6 still isn't as fast as Windows XP if you do very few things. But one place it really outshines Windows is in its memory management: It doesn't page to swap things that you are likely to use again anytime soon. Windows just put whatever it feels like in the swap when it needs to, resulting in an awfully slow return to the desktop for instance. Another thing is the 2.6 kernel improved resource prioritizing. I can do a lot of things at the same time wihtout even noticing it becoming slower. I can run KDE 3.2.1, listen to streaming mp3, run Opera with 30 heavy pages open, edit a big html file with colorcoding and instant scrolling. Even run a high-end screensaver on top of that without as much as a hickup. On a pentium 2 300Mhz with 256MB memory. So overall, Linux really IS faster.

Why Suse over fedora then? I loved my first suse installation, which was 9.0. When I recently installed Fedora, I found it to be lacking a lot of polish: Icons were missing, I couldn't specify port ranges in the redhat firewall config tool, it didn't recognize my digital camera as being 'a valid block device', it didn't automount my USB drive, it couldn't play video without installing extra packages, I had to manually configure the sound-card. - Granted, all these things are things that can be figured out, but I'm a Linux newbie.

Suse 9.1 does all these things. A welcome change from 9.0 is that it even configures my ESS es1869 sound-card properly.

There are some SUSE 9.1 reviews at desktoplinux if you want to read more about it: SuSE 9.1 review roundup

Update 11 june: OSNews is running an article on the slowness of linux, and people seem to have opinions on it there too.