Performance shock

[Suparious]

I have been using linux exclusively for 5 years now, but I am neither an
expert nor consider myself a programmer. I just like to 'hack' around
and improve/customize my destop to make it faster and more productive.



I have WinXP installed on my wife's computer, as she has no intrest to
lean linux, however, I have made many comparisons and found that since
I use the 4GB 2.6 kernel optimized for my Athlon (K7), with 1024MB of
ram my Ubuntu blows windows out of the water. I know that 1024MB of ram
is not the common standard at this point in time, but it will be soon.
Once people realize how much ram makes a difference to linux, and
keeping in mind that windows precompiles all their libraries into
bloated exe's, they will no longer have performance issues against
linux.



I have to applaud Ubuntu as being the fastest 'out-of-the-box' linux
distribution around. I have been watching distrowatch.com for a long
time, using a test station to try out the new distros that appeal to
me. Although I can make any linux perform the way that I wan't
(eventually), Ubuntu's defaults have saved me so much time.



The biggest frustration, and what has made the biggest performance
increase was enabling harware 3d accelleration on my linux. No linux
distro that I have installed has provided me with the proprietary 3d
support for required for my ATI card (obviously no distro wants
copyright lawsuits). Ubuntu's restricted repository has a good fglrx
driver for xorg, and I have used it following the ubuntu wikki, but I
still ended up compiling my own kernel module and using ATI's drivers
(I'm thirsty for fps!)



I hope this insight of my experiences helps!

All IMHO



Shaun


-- 
Suparious