I think it's a bit of a false comparison - give that they're running in VMs. After all, F8 on the real hardware is only about 4 times slower. To throw in my own experience, I have a self-built, pretty nice P4 running Win XP and a cheap, $300, few years old Emachine running Fedora 8. If I start them up at the same time, even counting the time it takes me to type in my username/password on Linux (in Windows it just boots straight to the desktop), I can use the Linux/Gnome computer up to a minute or more sooner than I can Windows. Why? Because Norton Internet Security takes forever and a day to start up and until it does, I can't do ANYTHING on my computer. Even clicking the start button is a 20+ second wait. Norton is essential to keep my computer running, so it would be unfair to compare it to Windows without Norton. (BTW - I'm running Norton 2008 which runs a heckuva lot faster than 2007) And my Ubuntu machine (using upstart?) which is an under-powered laptop starts up even faster than Fedora. So yeah, Fedora needs to work on startup time, but I can be browing the internet/doing w/e I want a LOT faster in Fedora than in Windows. <div class="gmail_quote">On Fri, Mar 28, 2008 at 9:49 AM, Dimi Paun <<a href="mailto:dimi@lattica.com">dimi@lattica.com</a>> wrote: <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"> <div class="Ih2E3d"> On Fri, 2008-03-28 at 13:48 +0100, Lubomir Kundrak wrote: > > Not to devaluate your tests -- please bear in mind that we offer more > features and are much more secure than XP. I am wondering what the > results would be if you kickstarted fedora just with icewm and firefox > and compared that one. </div>They will be better, but I don't think by much -- it takes almost 1.5min just to get to the point were we start GNOME, IceWM can't go back in time. :) And what features can we offer that we are willing to pay by an order of magnitude in performance? (Firefox after boot in XP starts in 2-3s, whereas in Fedora it takes 25-28s!). The danger here is that we make ourselves feel better and ignore the problem by saying we offer more features. 600% slower to start! I remember the days back in 99 or around there, when Windows came on top in performance. For months we tried to blame it on biased tests, etc. Then the kernel folks got their act together and fixed the problem. The same must happen here, and the first step is to acknowledge it. This is a much more difficult problem I think then the other one, and I'm afraid that RedHat is the only one capable to solve it (because they employ enough key people in all the right places: kernel/glibc/toolchain/GNOME). This is similar in the way to good thread support that required tricky changes in kernel/glibc/toolchain. Hey, come to think of it, we need Ingo to look at it! :) I'm not even sure where the problem lies. Is PE inherently faster than ELF? Is it the on-demand paging of apps that is done in the kernel under Windows responsible for that much faster startup times? Do they have that much better compilers/linkers? Or maybe better preloading from disk? I personally think a key piece in the puzzle is why is Firefox so darn slow to load under Linux when compared to Windows? <div class="Ih2E3d"> -- Dimi Paun <<a href="mailto:dimi@lattica.com">dimi@lattica.com</a>> Lattica, Inc. -- </div><div><div></div><div class="Wj3C7c">fedora-devel-list mailing list <a href="mailto:fedora-devel-list@redhat.com">fedora-devel-list@redhat.com</a> <a href="https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list" target="_blank">https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list</a> </div></div></blockquote></div> -- Eric Mesa <a href="http://www.ericsbinaryworld.com">http://www.ericsbinaryworld.com</a> <a href="http://server.ericsbinaryworld.com">http://server.ericsbinaryworld.com</a> "Do not worry about those things that are outside of your circle of influence. For since they are outside of your power to control them it is simply a waste of time and energy to dwell on them. Instead, turn your attention to those things that you can control and grow your influence in those areas and you will see the effects begin to trickle out to those items that were previously out of your power to influence." – Eric Mesa inspired by Covey's 7 Habits of Highly Effective People