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SuSE throws desktop Linux at Windows (vnunet)
Vnunet takes a look at
SuSE's new business desktop offering. "Dan Homolka, technical sales
manager at SuSE, claimed that the vendor's Linux environment actually runs
Microsoft Office faster than Windows "mainly because Linux is much better
at context-switching"."
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SuSE throws desktop Linux at Windows (vnunet) Posted Jan 20, 2003 21:12 UTC (Mon) by tjc (guest, #137) [Link] Dan Homolka, technical sales manager at SuSE, claimed that the vendor's Linux environment actually runs Microsoft Office faster than Windows "mainly because Linux is much better at context-switching".That would have to be a pretty bad context switching implementation to be slower than a system that has the additional overhead of running CrossOver Office. Does anyone know for sure if this is right? I don't really trust anyone who has the string "sales manager" in their job title, no matter who they work for. ;-)
SuSE throws desktop Linux at Windows (vnunet) Posted Jan 21, 2003 18:24 UTC (Tue) by DanHomolka (guest, #9224) [Link] Ahh... OK. That's what I was led to believe... However, as someone else pointed out, it is more of a subjective thing. How does it "feel"?To my mind using the applications seemed much smoother, for instance application load was much snappier than under Windows. Like most of the rest of the world I have used Windows extensively, 3.1, 95, 98, 2000, XP, etc. so I feel that I have a reasonable basis for comparison. I have NOT done any quantitative analysis on relative performance, but qualitatively the experience seemed better, but that could have been psychological! :-) [Incidentally I did once develop, although engineering fluid dynamics and 3D visualization is somewhat different to kernel hacking :-]
SuSE throws desktop Linux at Windows (vnunet) Posted Jan 22, 2003 11:31 UTC (Wed) by robinr (guest, #9236) [Link] That would have to be a pretty bad context switching implementation to be slower than a system that has the additional overhead of running CrossOver Office. Does anyone know for sure if this is right? I don't really trust anyone who has the string "sales manager" in their job title, no matter who they work for. ;-) You assume CrossOver introduces "additional" overhead, which is does not. For the most part it just implements Win32 API's directly, which isn't much different than any shared library. I haven't measured, but IE feel much faster under Linux, which implies that the Wine libraries are sometimes better than the "original". An exception is launch time which is slower than in Windows.
SuSE throws desktop Linux at Windows (vnunet) Posted Jan 20, 2003 21:42 UTC (Mon) by pwaechtler (subscriber, #5075) [Link] Well, on ibm developer works there was a benchmarkshowing windows2000 is faster on intra-thread switching when avoiding pipes on windows (using critical sections). Perhaps Linux is now better with NPTL and futexes? But the FEEL of an app depends on more than some tech buzz words.
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