Is it just me or does linux feel slower than win98?

[GNU/br0wni3]

Could it be that being the newbie i am i did not specified enuff swap space.. or i have misconfigured the system.. or something like that?

I dont know, but i feel X in general, much slower than windows... speaking of quickness to execute comands, load windows, and such.

When installing star office, i thought the system had hanged. it just tooked TOO long to respond.

Thanks for all the input
:cool:

[element-x]

Ok, first off, StarOffice...that's just slow for almost everyone. Personally I haven't seen it run all that fast on any linux machine that I've ever had a chance to browse around on.

Other programs being slow, well I don't know about that. I've only ever had a problem with netscape 6/mozilla 0.7/staroffice loading slowly, everything else loads up faster than I've ever seen any program load up in windows.

I suppose you could look at it this way, if you're running X with a P100 with 16mb ram, and using KDE or GNOME as your WindowManager, then yes, it would probably run slow as hell. But I initially ran linux with a PII 350, 64mb of ram, using blackbox or wmaker, and both ran superb. As the year and a half passed on, I moved from 64mb ram to 128mb ram and then on to 256mb ram, so now pretty much everything runs smoothly. I've never had a problem with anything being slow.

Anyways, I'm just rambling, but if this doesn't answer your questions, then feel free to post more detail (how much ram, processor, swap space) and so on.

[GNU/br0wni3]

Sure.. my machina specs are:

PIII 550 256mhz cache
128 megz RAM
6 gyg HD (for linux exclusively)

my swap space, red hat's installer took care of it automatically.. so i really dont know how much disk did the swap area got assigned.

thanks for the input! :D

[digital_spawn]

staroffice is slow to start-up even in windows..
'what is your machine config ? - fastness also depends on the desktop environment you are using - if it's gnome or kde , you will have to sacrifice a bit of fastness compared to blackbox or fvwm.... it's even slower if you turn on all the bell and wistels in your gnome desktop, also if you load too many applets in the panel

... oh, i got your machine config !!!
ram okay, what about your vdo-card is it fast enough ..... try tweaking the /etc/X11/XF86Config file - like adding that "no_accel" option


so you know what to do ?
:D

[ 14 February 2001: Message edited by: digital_spawn ]

[pbharris]

my linux box simply is much faster than win98, win95 was about a tie. for many things it is faster (seti@home), browsing the web is not quite as fast as in windows with netscape6, it is in netscape4.7, but i like the way pages render better in netsape 6. i use applixware for an office suite, and it is sooo much faster than anything i have seen. only VI opens more quickly.

[Craig McPherson]

Linux is a lot faster than Windows on the same hardware, as long as you're not running X.

Throw X into the mix, and, well -- if you have a lot of RAM, X will probably be the same speed or faster. If you have a wee bit of RAM, MS will probably take the gold.

[GNU/br0wni3]

thanks everybody! :D

well, my VDO card is old. its got 8 memory megz.

is that a factor for slowness as well?

thanks! :cool:

[optech]

Originally posted by br0wni3:

PIII 550 256mhz cache
128 megz RAM
6 gyg HD (for linux exclusively)



first off, that would be 256 kb cache, not mhz. second, megz? megz?!? do you mean megs? perhaps megabytes? and what's with your spelling of gig? gyg?!? you must by elite... arg!
sorry, i'm cranky... it's 6am and i haven't slept yet, and it's cold

:confused:

[GNU/br0wni3]

Optech:

First of all, yes, i made a mistake, cache is measured in kb,so sue me.

Second, yes, megz meant "Megabytes", wich also can be described with the acronym MB, by the way. I assumed everybody knows by default RAM is measured in MB, so i just typed megz for no particular reason.

I spelled it "gyg" because i made a mistake again. See, english is NOT my native language, so sue me again.

Oh and by the way, no im not 31337. yet. LOL :D

Go get some sleep.

[mangeli]

Have you added the append="mem=120M" to your lilo line and then rerun lilo at the command. This will enable your computer to use almost all of your ram....

Something it sounds like it currently isn't doing. This could most likely increase your speed...

[ 15 February 2001: Message edited by: mangeli ]

[GNU/br0wni3]

Nope, i hadnt!

thanks for the great tip. i'll try it as soon as i get home! :)

[Blackknight]

You only need that for old kernels. The newer kernels can automatically detect and use all RAM.

[jrbush82]

about that, linux only detected 64 megs ram when I installed it, but i manually put in 128 (mandrake 7.2) and it uses the kernel 2.2.17 If I added that line, would it make any difference? or is the kernel to current?

[mangeli]

I believe that it is only the 2.4 and up kernel that can do that. With 2.18 and lower you still need to pass the append line to the lilo.conf file...

[AWebDesign]

I hate the following linux box

Athlon T-Bird 700mhz
voodoo 3 2000
128 meg pc133 ram
WD 15gig, ata66 7200rpm hdd
52x cdrom

To me windows is faster. I don't know, it's just the way it feels. I dual boot that machine w/ 98, and 98 runs faster. KDE is really slow from what i've seen, so I use gnome. I know their are others, but i don't feel like learning them.

Aaron