Vista Aiding Linux Desktop, Strategist Says (eWeek) [LWN.net]

Vista Aiding Linux Desktop, Strategist Says (eWeek)

Posted Aug 9, 2007 21:16 UTC (Thu) by johnkarp (subscriber, #39285) [Link]

What you say doesn't contradict the quote. It seems to me like he's
talking about how strong of a tendency a given OS has towards
installation-rot, registry-rot, virii, spyware, and cruft.

Whereas you're talking about stability and desktop responsiveness for a
particular Dell. And without knowing more about your system (e.g. whether
its using proprietary drivers, whether its hardware generally complies
with the standards it claims to) I don't think its fair to assign blame or
generalize based on your instance.

Tuning Linux for the desktop

Posted Aug 9, 2007 23:49 UTC (Thu) by ncm (subscriber, #165) [Link]

It's true that Fedora isn't tuned as a desktop OS, by default. You might get better results with Ubuntu, which is.

Or, do some tuning yourself. Start by changing your disk partition mount options to add "noatime": in /etc/fstab, change each occurrence of "defaults" to "defaults,noatime". You can change this safely on a running system from the command line, without rebooting, with

  mount -o remount,noatime /

and likewise for any other partitions you have mounted (typically e.g., /home, /usr, /var).

People report easily perceptible performance improvements after this change.

Vista Aiding Linux Desktop, Strategist Says (eWeek)

Posted Aug 10, 2007 1:32 UTC (Fri) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330) [Link]

You need to work on your reading comprehension.

The Dell guy is saying that companies are rejecting Vista and moving back to XP. That doesn't contradict your claim that XP works well; it does for the most part.

And then for you to accuse him of being a liar based on your misreading really lacks class.

Vista Aiding Linux Desktop, Strategist Says (eWeek)

Posted Aug 10, 2007 7:15 UTC (Fri) by edschofield (guest, #39993) [Link]

"You need to work on your reading comprehension."

This is patronizing and rude. Such comments don't belong on LWN.

Vista Aiding Linux Desktop, Strategist Says (eWeek)

Posted Aug 10, 2007 7:18 UTC (Fri) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

But `blatant, fanboyish lie' does?

Sorry, but `you need to work on your reading comprehension' is
condescending and *correct* in this case. (The OP also needs to learn that
the plural of anecdote is not data. In my experience, XP is notably less
prone to rot than earlier Windows releases, and when it *does* rot you're
SOL just as badly as ever: there is *nothing* you can do to diagnose or
fix the problem other than to wipe and reinstall everything.)

Vista Aiding Linux Desktop, Strategist Says (eWeek)

Posted Aug 10, 2007 8:53 UTC (Fri) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]

> there is *nothing* you can do to diagnose or
fix the problem other than to wipe and reinstall everything.

Yep..

Every Linux install I've ever used on the desktop has always been salvagable pretty much no matter what. But Windows is always been a black box to me in comparision.. If you take two setups were you have savy administrators in charge of a bunch of Linux machines vs a bunch of Windows machines then the majority of the time the Linux machines are going to take more effort to initially setup but be more stable and less of a PITA in the long run.

This is from personal experiance. Windows machines are always more of a hassle to deal with.

One big example is how Linux uses ~/.filename and ~/.directorynames to store user preferences vs. Windows with it's registry. The Windows registry is fast as it's a pretty much always going to be in memory and is a tight little binary database, with Linux starting applications have to go and check the possible locations of dozens of little text files as they start up.. This is a huge penalty against Linux performance-wise as seek times on harddrives are dreadfull and is a chronic problem for slow starting applications (pay attention to disk I/O vs memory usage vs cpu usage when you start up a big application after a fresh reboot).

However when times go buy and you gradually upgrade your applications and desktops and the OS your using follows one version after another... the registry begins to crap out in Windows.. It gets bigger, and there is no rules about what application can stick what data were. No internal boundries or anything like that. It gets crusty and there is no real way to fix it. Nobody, and I mean _nobody_ can realy go into it and with certainty start editing away at it and fixing problems that have been compounded by time and numerious different installers and upgrades for all your applications.

With Linux...
1. backup your email, bookmarks and whatever else.
2. log out of the GUI and log into the console.
3. make sure your previous session is shutdown completely with all your programs and background services are finished. If that is a problem...
> kill $(ps --no-header --user $USER -o pid)
will take care of it. (Of course that is that nasty GNU syntax, not the perfect BSD or SysV stuff that shouldn't be touched, changed, or challenged.) :)

4. make a backup directory and move preferences to that...
> mkdir ~/backup
> mv ~/.??* ~/backup

5. Fire up midnight commander and begin copying back over any preferences you don't want to loose. Mc makes it actually a fast proccess.

After your finished you can log back in and it'll be just like you had a fresh install. However no loss of data and no re-installation of programs or anything like that is required. If you made a mistake and forgot some preferences or forgot to backup your bookmarks then all that stuff is still there in the ~/backup directory for you to use.

I know it's not simple or easy enough for the average person. But at least it's possible. That's just one example. I can give a dozen others that make Linux easier to use and administrate in the long run.

I know that all software sucks; Linux isn't a exception.. and I don't realy know much of the difference between XP vs Linux on a desktop in terms of performance or fit and finish. I just haven't use XP much personally (although I have spent a great deal of time _fixing_ Windows I try to avoid it in my personal life if I can.) so I don't know. I've had situations were I've installed Linux and have been dissapointed, but other times it's been very fast and very responsive.

My general impression is that if done correctly Linux is a much faster and much more efficient (as in user to machine interaction) then Windows is. It's much easier to tailor to specific requirements and make more efficient use of the hardware resources. Out of the box Linux isn't so great. Either Gnome or KDE or XFCE it doesn't matter; all of them suck until I get it setup the way I want it. This easy customization is another reason that makes Linux a much better OS, IMO.

Vista Aiding Linux Desktop, Strategist Says (eWeek)

Posted Aug 10, 2007 9:55 UTC (Fri) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

One big example is how Linux uses ~/.filename and ~/.directorynames to store user preferences vs. Windows with it's registry. The Windows registry is fast as it's a pretty much always going to be in memory and is a tight little binary database, with Linux starting applications have to go and check the possible locations of dozens of little text files as they start up.. This is a huge penalty against Linux performance-wise as seek times on harddrives are dreadfull and is a chronic problem for slow starting applications (pay attention to disk I/O vs memory usage vs cpu usage when you start up a big application after a fresh reboot).

Sort of. This is never going to be true for big applications (the time taken to page in the app is going to swamp everything else, especially if you haven't prelinked so everything must be relocated too); and small apps generally pull in few enough config files that it doesn't take long and on subsequent runs they'll all be in the cache.

But there are some small apps which look for a huge number of config files in numerous places, many of which don't exist, so you end up with the short negative dentry caching slowing you down again. The thing to do for these apps is what KDE does: read in all plausible config files and write out a cache optimized for rapid reading speed (so one file, or a very few), then keep an inotify watch on the config file directories for as long as the cache exists so that if the config files are changed you can wipe and recreate the cache: then the apps' config-file readers read that cache instead.

(This is pretty much what the `ksycoca' component of KDE does. Unlike the registry, because the cache is transient and its sources are inotify-watched, you can pretty much always ignore the existence of the cache: it's not a fragile all-your-data-belong-to-us binary horror like the Windows registry. Plus we don't have to reinvent all the filesystem permissions and security stuff inside the registry like Windows does.)

Another approach (roughly that used by GNOME) is to read in the config files into a process which then tells interested apps what the value of configuration keys (or whatever) are. This eliminates the need for cache invalidation but adds the need for an IPC protocol and a nastier failure mode (if the inotify-watcher dies, nothing goes immediately wrong and the worst that happens is that configuration updates aren't detected until the cache is manually removed: if the configuration-state-storer dies, nobody can get at *any* configuration, changed or not, until it's restarted).

Of course it is *possible* to smash your Unix desktop in ways that require massive wizardry to recover: but you need to work at it (everyone has horror stories: my personal trial by fire was the time when a remove-obsolete-links script of mine didn't notice that * is left unchanged when it matches nothing, and, well, it ended up removing the contents of a client's /usr/bin/). On a Windows box you don't need to do anything special :(

(Regarding the 'easy customization' stuff: I agree so strongly that I use Emacs. :) I switched from GNOME to KDE when GNOME 2 came out entirely because GNOME's configurability plunged and I was no longer able to make it work the way I wanted to...)

Vista Aiding Linux Desktop, Strategist Says (eWeek)

Posted Aug 10, 2007 15:06 UTC (Fri) by johnkarp (subscriber, #39285) [Link]

No internal boundries or anything like that.

The Windows registry doesn't have fine-grained permissions, but it is composed of several discrete 'hives'. Each user only has access to their own hive, plus system hives that they may or may not have write-access to depending on their priviledges.

Vista Aiding Linux Desktop, Strategist Says (eWeek)

Posted Aug 10, 2007 16:42 UTC (Fri) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]

Well ya I know about the 'hives' and such. Been that way since W2k. And you still can't just go in and edit them with any sort of reliability.

It's still a mess and it's not all Microsoft's fault. When you configure a application were do the changes get saved? Why do lots of Window's program's require administrative rights? The answer, is of course, it depends on the application and what the application developer felt like doing at the time.

This is something they worked on fixing for Vista, but they can't really fix it in a strong way or they break that all important backward compatibility.

Of course this is the sort of bullshit people will start seeing in Linux, with applications being set setuid for the sole reason so they can save configuration stuff to some bizzare location like /usr/var/etc/config once those same proprietary application developers (aka ISVs) start making their applications available on Linux... But I am hoping that people are smart enough and have enough backbone to reject that sort of behavior.

Vista Aiding Linux Desktop, Strategist Says (eWeek)

Posted Aug 13, 2007 4:56 UTC (Mon) by jamesh (guest, #1159) [Link]

My memory of the registry on NT derived versions of Windows was that each registry key could have an ACL attached to it, the same as for files.

Of course, the ACLs on registry keys only apply for access via the registry APIs. When accessing the hive on disk, it is only as secure as the file permissions.

Vista Aiding Linux Desktop, Strategist Says (eWeek)

Posted Aug 10, 2007 1:55 UTC (Fri) by bk (guest, #25617) [Link]

I don't doubt the truth of your experience, and I've heard similar reports elsewhere, but I haven't used a Linux desktop in years on modern hardware that showed any of these symptoms (stuttering/glitching, regularly crashing applications, etc). I tend to think the problem is Fedora Core, as my experience with Ubuntu, Gentoo and Slackware has been overwhelmingly positive.

Vista Aiding Linux Desktop, Strategist Says (eWeek)

Posted Aug 10, 2007 14:16 UTC (Fri) by vonbrand (subscriber, #4458) [Link]

I'm a long time Fedora user, and have never seen such erratic behavior (except when Fedora on x86_64 was very green; and on a machine with a broken fan, which lead to overheating funnies).

Vista Aiding Linux Desktop, Strategist Says (eWeek)

Posted Aug 10, 2007 4:54 UTC (Fri) by bojan (subscriber, #14302) [Link]

Yeah, YMMV, as they say. I run F7 on two of my cheap Dell notebooks and that has been a pleasant experience for the most part. No major problems and the performance is OK.

As a different example, a co-worker upgraded his fancy and recent (i.e. Vista certified) Toshiba notebook to Vista a few months back. He's still wondering why the machine goes into a period of disk thrashing every so often, making the system completely unusable - something that never used to happen under XP. So, I guess it all depends on a particular hardware/software combo one runs...

BTW, I think the original quote: "To mess up a Linux box, you need to work at it; to mess up your Windows box, you just have to work on it." is not performance related, but more to do with how the software is managed within the OS. I haven't had direct in-depth experience with Windows for a long time now, but I see people at work lodging trouble tickets to the effect of "my system has become slow" regularly. The fix is normally a complete reinstall of the standard operating environment (i.e Windows + apps) on the box. I don't think many running Linux on their desktop do that kind of stuff (I certainly don't).

All that being said, I don't think Linux on the desktop is something that's going to be massively deployed around the place any time soon. There just isn't enough comparable Linux software for many corporate users to do what they've been doing with their Windows machines. There is always an app or two that will need Windows (some even developed in-house), so only the most dedicated (or perhaps the ones thinking long term TCO) will go the Linux route (for now).

Vista Aiding Linux Desktop, Strategist Says (eWeek)

Posted Aug 10, 2007 6:55 UTC (Fri) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]

That's why virtualization, wine, samba, Mono, and things like remote desktop are so important.

Out of any OS you have Linux has the highest compatibility with software. If you want something to run on Linux you can get it to work.

For example if I have some financial doo-dad that I need, but it's only aviable on windows, depending on the size of the company, there are a few things I could do. If I am major customer I could tell the ISVs that I want them to provide Linux binaries.. they can use Mono if it's a .NET application to accomplish this and often with only minor modifications a Windows application can compile to run on Linux quite well with the assistance of libwine.

If I can't do that then I can run remote desktop and get windows applications to appear on my user's Linux desktops in a rather seamless way. (that is they appear as windows on my desktop with files being equally accessable in either OS)

Sure it's not perfect, but as long as the majority of work that needs to be done can be done on Linux that last few applications that some workers require shouldn't be much of a burden one way or another.

Like everything it 'just depends' on what sort of environment your dealing with.

And especially if your setting up a new environment.. like a new office or growing a business, then going from nothing to Linux is going to be as easy or easier (and much cheaper) then going from nothing to Windows.

This is easier in places like Europe, Eastern Europe I suppose mostly, China, and lots of other places were they are just now starting to get into the whole 'information tech' level of sophistication. But it's still possible in U.S.

I've always figured that once Linux reaches 15-20% of market share of business desktops it will hit a critical mass were even very proprietary companies are not going to be able to avoid Linux compatibility. It will start to be more and more a hard requirement for ISVs to sell software/support to their corporate customers.

Remember that Microsoft didn't get were it is today by making superior software. Everything they made had superior competitors since the beginning. They are just better businessmen.

Vista Aiding Linux Desktop, Strategist Says (eWeek)

Posted Aug 23, 2007 4:49 UTC (Thu) by roelofs (guest, #2599) [Link]

The fix is normally a complete reinstall of the standard operating environment (i.e Windows + apps) on the box. I don't think many running Linux on their desktop do that kind of stuff (I certainly don't).

Indeed not. On Linux you simply restart Firefox and maybe the odd GNOME app every month or two, and you're flying again. (Even Linux can't withstand 300 MB memory leaks without swapping...)

I have never understood why Windows users put up with that reboot/reinstall crap.

Greg

Vista Aiding Linux Desktop, Strategist Says (eWeek)

Posted Aug 10, 2007 8:43 UTC (Fri) by mbottrell (guest, #43008) [Link]

I don't think as a newbie Linux user you've got the experience to really quote that.

I wouldn't also rely on FC6 for a good test bed as a desktop.
Try a distro that's tuned for Desktop -- such as Ubuntu or the like.

You'll also find tuning OpenOffice and Firefox you'll get a lot better performance. (Also the mount option is also another great one).

In addition - remove any unnecessary crud your FC6 machine has got.
Linux desktops can be tuned well to use a small fraction of the memory WindowsXP/Vista uses and perform much faster. :)

Spend more time on it... then come back in a year and report your results. Out of the box.. I do agree particularly with FC6.

Vista Aiding Linux Desktop, Strategist Says (eWeek)

Posted Aug 10, 2007 14:37 UTC (Fri) by zooko (subscriber, #2589) [Link]

It's true -- Windows really is stabler and more responsive than Linux. I use Windows XP, Linux, and Mac OS X all the time.

For example, suppose you overload your RAM and get into swap thrash. On Linux, you can do nothing but sit and fume and drum your fingers for minutes or tens of minutes until either (a) your attempt to get a shell and run "kill" or "top" finally succeeds, or (b) random processes get killed by the kernel. On Windows XP, you hit Ctrl-Alt-Del and a nice GUI window pops up (the Task Manager) that lets you choose processes (or apps) to kill. This GUI window is frequently updated and responsive. When you use it to kill a process or app, then that process or app quickly goes away and the rest of your apps regain responsiveness.

I think there might be something to Con Kolivas's thesis that the current Linux development process serves the needs of corporations who want to get a percent improvement in some batch processing benchmark at the expense of users who want to interact with their computer:

http://apcmag.com/6735/interview_con_kolivas

Anyway, Linux hackers really ought to investigate how Windows XP does that cool trick of making the Task Manager responsive even when the system is overloaded.

Vista Aiding Linux Desktop, Strategist Says (eWeek)

Posted Aug 10, 2007 15:45 UTC (Fri) by pyellman (guest, #4997) [Link]

That "cool trick" occasionally fails to work for me (yesterday, for example), on a well-behaving, clear-of-cruft install, and routinely when troubleshooting friends'/families' gummed up XP installs.

Ever had this happen? You go to shut down your XP machine, selecting "Shutdown". Some process is hanging. You stare at the screen (or is it drum your fingers, for oh, 5 or 10 minutes); you try to run task manager to get a clue to the problem, but to no avail; you're not sure if the machine is going to successfully shut down or not, but you've got to leave, so you're facing a choice of powering the machine off.

This is not uncommon, even on a well performing, clear-of-cruft XP machine. Those Windows hackers really need to investigate how Linux manages to cleanly and quickly terminate misbehaving process and shut down the machine quickly enough to get you to your next appointment on time.

Peter Yellman

Vista Aiding Linux Desktop, Strategist Says (eWeek)

Posted Aug 10, 2007 16:13 UTC (Fri) by zooko (subscriber, #2589) [Link]

Yes, I've had that happen plenty, although I'm not sure if that was on Windows XP or on older versions of Windows.

I think it is a different issue from the responsiveness of the Task Manager under load. I think (I'm not sure) that the reason the Task Manager works so well to recover from an overloaded system is that the Windows XP kernel is careful to preserve responsiveness for basic UI even under extreme load situations and that it has effective prioritization such that the Task Manager gets top priority and is a useful interactive tool even when the whole rest of the system is locked into swap thrash.

Vista Aiding Linux Desktop, Strategist Says (eWeek)

Posted Aug 10, 2007 16:36 UTC (Fri) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

Just yesterday I tried to create bspatch fropm one 300Mb file to another 300Mb file. Both Windows and Linux went to heavy swap. On Linux I switched to text console and easily killed process, on Windows I spent ~10minutes to kill the task: it needed more then minute to just show task manager window!

So as usual with Linux you have simple solution while Windows is trying (and failing) to do everything in "user-friendly way"...

In the end I've just used xdelta :-)

Vista Aiding Linux Desktop, Strategist Says (eWeek)

Posted Aug 10, 2007 16:44 UTC (Fri) by zooko (subscriber, #2589) [Link]

That's interesting since it is the opposite of my experience. The fact that your Linux system was responsive when mine aren't suggests that you were using a different kernel version/patchset/configuration than I use. (In particular, when my system is in that state, it takes a few minutes at least to "switch to a text console", which you apparently were able to do with ease.)

The fact that Windows didn't work as easily for you as it does for me is a bit of mystery. What version of Windows was it? Did you use Ctrl-Alt-Del or a different command?

Thanks!

Vista Aiding Linux Desktop, Strategist Says (eWeek)

Posted Aug 10, 2007 17:32 UTC (Fri) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

It was Gentoo system vs Windows XP SP2. Both systems were in use for ~2 years. I've used Ctrl-Alt-Del to call the Task Manager, of course (how else I was supposed to do this when I've clicked on taskbar, got nothing in response and five "clock" windows by the time Task Manager finally opened after pressing Alt-Ctrl-Del?).

Switch to text console was not fast at all (minute or two), but at least after that everything went smoth. Of course the big plus was that I had shell prompt on text console readily available.

P.S. The really strange case is that usually I can easily switch to FAR window to kill offending process (kind of switch to text console in Linux LOL) - and I was able to do it this time as well, but then FAR was unable to show the list of processes for ~10 minutes (by this time I've clicked by process name in Task Manager and decided to just go further in Task Manager). Not know why - usually when Windows gods are angry at me and Firefox/OOo/whatever are frozen FAR is ready to help, but not this time.

P.P.S. The biggest difference I know in responsiveness of system comes from device drivers. If you don't have support for your IDE chipset, for example, your Linux system will work (by using generic driver), but even Windows 3.1 will be faster in this case. Binary NVidia/ATI drivers often hurt (but not always - they just don't play nice with some other drivers), NDISwrapper can be problematic, etc. ACPI is especially bad: on some systems it's a must, but some older system will be crippled if ACPI is enabled... Too bad there are no easy way to catch the offending driver...

Vista Aiding Linux Desktop, Strategist Says (eWeek)

Posted Aug 12, 2007 3:36 UTC (Sun) by gdt (subscriber, #6284) [Link]

Sadly the same thing happens to me when running Evolution under GNOME with Ubuntu:-(

Vista Aiding Linux Desktop, Strategist Says (eWeek)

Posted Aug 11, 2007 0:44 UTC (Sat) by moxfyre (subscriber, #13847) [Link]

Anyway, Linux hackers really ought to investigate how Windows XP does that cool trick of making the Task Manager responsive even when the system is overloaded.

Linux has a similar feature, more robust and powerful than Task Manager... though without the pretty GUI.

It's called the "Magic SysRq" trick: http://www.linuxhowtos.org/Tips%20and%20Tricks/sysrq.htm

Vista Aiding Linux Desktop, Strategist Says (eWeek)

Posted Aug 11, 2007 22:12 UTC (Sat) by tyhik (guest, #14747) [Link]

Getting rid of swap may help you. RAM is cheap and apps running amok are rapidly cought by OOM killer. I have run my own desktops both at work and at home swapless for a few years now. As I build my kernels myself, I have an added bonus of simpler and possibly faster VM subsystem in the kernel (though I haven't benchmarked the difference).

I have asked a number of friends and colleagues of why they have configured swap for their linux desktops/laptops and for most of them it really boils down to: they have always done that.

Vista Aiding Linux Desktop, Strategist Says (eWeek)

Posted Aug 11, 2007 22:23 UTC (Sat) by tyhik (guest, #14747) [Link]

"For example, suppose you overload your RAM and get into swap thrash. On Linux, you can do nothing but sit and fume and drum your fingers f ..."

If you have another box at hand then try ssh into the hogged box; that has given me a responsive shell I think.

Vista Aiding Linux Desktop, Strategist Says (eWeek)

Posted Aug 16, 2007 11:48 UTC (Thu) by lysse (guest, #3190) [Link]

> For example, suppose you overload your RAM and get into swap thrash. On Linux, you can do nothing but sit and fume and drum your fingers for minutes or tens of minutes until either (a) your attempt to get a shell and run "kill" or "top" finally succeeds, or (b) random processes get killed by the kernel.

The only time I have any experience comparable to this is when I've forgotten to enable swap space, and some stray process has malloc()d and touched so much memory all at once that the kernel can't even page in executables to run them (because without swap, it can't page *out* unused data pages).

When I enable swap, all such symptoms go away.

> On Windows XP, you hit Ctrl-Alt-Del and a nice GUI window pops up (the Task Manager) that lets you choose processes (or apps) to kill.

In contrast, I've been left with a thoroughly unresponsive XP box before now. The Task Manager may come up quickly enough and let you choose processes to kill, but when the selected processes refuse to die...

Vista Aiding Linux Desktop, Strategist Says (eWeek)

Posted Aug 23, 2007 22:30 UTC (Thu) by Cato (subscriber, #7643) [Link]

This is just not my experience at all - I use Windows at work and home, and Linux at home. My Ubuntu Linux PC at home has never crashed, and only once locked up (due to Picasa) - it was recoverable without rebooting. I recently installed a new monitor and then a new video card, and in both cases it was really quite trivial to get them working - virtually plug and play.

My work laptop using Windows has frequently locked up when docking or undocking, or decided to not wake up fully from sleep, and occasionally crashes.

The home Windows PC takes far more time to administer and keep secure than the much older Linux box, even though it only uses Firefox as the browser, and has frequently caused nightmarish problems such as very high CPU usage (due to Windows Update). This required significant registry hacking and update de-installation to fix.

Generally, Linux takes quite a lot of setup (I'm on an older Ubuntu at present, newer versions should be better) but works incredibly reliably. Windows just never stops consuming time.

For friends who are non-technical and can afford Macs, that's what I recommend (they can run Windows apps via Crossover or Parallels virtual machines if needed) to reduce the security/admin nightmares.

For technical friends, I recommend Ubuntu, but it's not quite as plug and play as a Mac (yet).

I've been using Windows and Linux a long time, and am considered somewhat of a Windows power user at work, but I really want to get away from it as far as possible...

One tip for Windows users - install Microsoft's Process Explorer instead of Task Manager, it lets you suspend processes that are killing your system responsiveness (often installed by IT departments to try to make your system secure) so you can get some work done. I've never needed a similar tool on Linux, using top or the KDE equivalent is enough.

Vista Aiding Linux Desktop, Strategist Says (eWeek)

Posted Aug 10, 2007 17:16 UTC (Fri) by leoc (subscriber, #39773) [Link]

That's interesting, I have two non-identical machines, one is a laptop with a PentiumM running XP, and the other is a much older P4 based desktop system running Fedora Core 6. I also do similar things like cross platform application development, document editing and the usual kind of web surfing and email writing and for all of those things Linux is not only faster, it is also far more reliable. For example, if I copy a big file from one place to another on my laptop, the entire gui becomes unresponsive. If I need to do more advanced things like switch between networks (I have multiple different subnets that I do different kinds of work on) the Linux box is far far easier to switch and doesn't do bizarre things when I do so. The XP box generally requires more reboots and recoveries. The Linux box just works. I only reboot it when I update my system and it installs a new kernel. The only thing the XP box does better is handle multimedia. I think it is because the CPU is a lot faster, because my dual core box at home does that kind of thing fine.

As a side note, have you tried synergy2? It's a fantastic app for people with multiple machines on their desk.