"Mayayana" writes:

|I use puppy linux. Way faster and more stable than windows.:-)

"Way faster"? Is there something you find unusably
slow on Windows? I ask because I think speed is
vastly overrated, due to a long history of marketing.

Nope.
Try using your system all day, like I do for computer programming.
A fast system allows you to work un-interrupted.

People even talk about browser speed, and the browser
companies encourage it by running tests and trying to
beat each other out with page load times. But a slow
webpage load is usually due to a slow server, a slow
Internet, or a bloated and badly designed webpage.
Choice of browser has little to do with it.

Although the network is the bottleneck,
some browsers do a better job of getting key parts of the web page in
parallel and displaying the page without all the parts present.

Speed hasn't really been an issue since the late 90s
when CPUs got up to about 500 MHz, unless you're
someone who edits video or giant photos. Then speed
is about getting more RAM.

Can't agree.

While a Windows
PC with a lot of junk installed can be very slow (I've
seen XP systems that move like molasses), in
general there's no problem with Windows. I'm running
XP right now, on a home made box that's nothing
fancy. I bought one of the cheapest CPUs about 2
years ago. Yet virtually everything I do is instant, at
least as far as my human perception can tell. I don't
think that even the super-duperest Linux can beat
instant.

XP does some things instantly, other things much slower.
Human reaction time is around 1/10 of a second. As a
guideline, I think humans perceive slowdowns of around
1/10 of a second or more.

Which is not to say I'm against Linux. I just hate to
see people spend money needlessly. And Linux is not
"free" if it takes new hardware and/or lots of time to
set it up.

Nope. Do a dual boot install. No extra hardware required.
Getting on the MSFT upgrade cycle WILL cost you money.
I don't think Linux takes any more time to set up than
a Windows system. It's the other way around.

There's also a serious lack of software, despite
what some Linux fans will say. (GIMP is still not a very
good image editor, after 15+ years in development. WINE
is still not a solution, after 15+ years in development
and a ridiculous 10-day update cycle.)

Wine does some things fine. Personally I don't use or need
Wine.

I can get by in GIMP.
There's a load of other Linux software which works as well
or better than the common Windows equivalents.

I've seen an awfully
lot of people throw away perfectly good computers because
they started to run a bit slow and the people were told
by others that their PC had "got old", or that the OS was
somehow "outdated". I have some of those PCs now.
I clean them up and save them for people who might
need one.

Doesn't happen with Linux systems.
They don't slow down with age and new OS versions
run fine on older hardware.

--
Dan Espen