Windows 8 vs. Windows 7 Performance

[longship]

71. That's fucking hilarious.

My new laptop came with Ubuntu pre-installed, ready to go.

Just because monopolistic Microsoft shuts down commerce channels with major retailers doesn't mean they get to shut them all down.

I have been doing computers since my college days in the mid-sixties. I have worked with all sorts of OS's from IBM mainframes, Burroughs mainframes, DEC (including the System-10 which had real core memory), Harris super minis (try Vulcan OS sometime). I started microcomputers with Apple II and eventually migrated to PC because of the open technology which enabled me to build my own from off-the-shelf components.

I saw MS-DOS as a weak OS, very limited given the capability of the hardware. CPM, which predated it, was arguably better, and certainly more powerful. Even Apple's ProDOS, which I beta tested, was much more powerful. ProDOS died with the poor Apple III, regretably. When Windows 1 came out, I tried it out. It was ponderously slow. But, as I knew, it was merely a copy of Apple's Lisa, which was a copy of Xerox's desktop.

As a derivative work, Windows is an abomination. They actually glued a so-called 32-bit windowing environment onto the inane 16-bit MS-DOS shell and marketted it as 32-bit (Win95/Win98). I know, because I had official beta test versions of both.

The last Windows I used was Win NT 4.0, which I also beta tested. I had already been using Linux in parallel with NT 3.x. But even this early Linux put NT, the best M$ had to offer, to shame. The resource requirements were small. Plus, the best thing -- and Microsoft's HUGE design mistake -- is the separation between System and User. In Linux and all Unixen, the two are separated by steel walls. The user interface operates in user space; the OS operates in system space.

Only Microsoft Windows puts the user interface in system space. That makes it inherently insecure, as Windows' malware experience attests.

What convinced me was that I could learn everything about Linux by simply going online and getting the full OS documentation. You want to run the most popular Web server in the universe? All the docs are right there. You want the source code? It's on another site. You want to help? Sure, we can do that, too.

The result? I have never run a virus scanner on any of the many Linux boxen I have run. Just do not need them. More processing power for me. I have never had a Linux box crash, except for hardware failure, which kinda makes any OS go down (usually a hard drive).

BTW. My quad core linux laptop kicks some serious butt.