Comparing because I can
A quiet afternoon and two identical laptop computers. What to do? In the geek world, the answer is simple; compare and contrast your two “favourite” operating systems. After all, subjectivity isn’t scientific, so a dual-boot machine leaves you convinced that A is better than B, but the doubt persists. What if I’m suffering from a discontinuity in my benchmarking memory?
I’m currently restoring some machines that have been to the schools and come back. A laptop is like a dirt magnet, although I can ignore grime on the keyboard if I have to. The difficult part comes from watching a machine take minutes to boot, due to the accumulation of badly written or configured software. In the name of science, I decided to disrupt the workflow with an impromptu installation of the most recent version of Linux Mint on the left hand machine, and put our usual prepped version of Windows XP SP3 on the other. Given identical processors, memory count and hard disk size, it’s a fair matchup.
Time for installation under Linux is a matter of a quick lunch break, and that includes the updates available from the repositories after the fact. On the other side of the table, my XP install and upgrade blitz equalled a long, leisurely afternoon. Oddly, the ATI drivers were not an automatic install with the dominant OS. Winner of the first round: Linux.
The ease of use isn’t really open to comparison; I maintain Windows for my employer and I dabble in Linux for personal pleasure. I have years of exposure to the commercial product, whereas the “where is that, anyway?” question is an integral part of my Gnome experience. For simple things like surfing the web, either will do, as long as you get a copy of Firefox for the XP platform.
The screensavers in Linux are WAY better, but that’s a personal reaction. Maybe tomorrow, if things remain quiet, I’ll be able to do something more professionally relevant, but for now, the test session is on pause.
