[arch-general] We have lost the desktop war. The reason? Windows 7.

[Ray Kohler]

On Mon, Oct 26, 2009 at 6:57 AM, RedShift <redshift at pandora.be> wrote:
> This thread will probably erupt in a massive flamewar, yet I decided to post
> my
> story anyway. I am talking about the desktop experience in general, not the
> technical details behind it. Keep that in mind.
>
>
> I've been working these past few months with KDE 4.3 and it feels very
> sluggish
> and incomplete. I can't enable the desktop effects because that makes things
> even slower. I'm doing this on a fairly decent setup, an AMD Sempron 2 Ghz
> with
> an nVidia FX5500. My laptop suffers from this sluggishness as well. On top
> of
> that, lots of things annoy me in KDE 4.3, see the end of this post for my
> top
> annoyances. Yesterday I had to reboot to my Windows XP installation on this
> computer and I was shocked when I arrived in XP's userland. Everything was
> ridiculously fast. When returning to my linux desktop everything felt even
> more
> sluggish. That's when I decided to go back to KDE 3.5. I restored my old KDE
> 3.5
> profile, installed the necessary packages and logged back in. WOOOOOF,
> everything is fast again. Opening new windows is instantaneous, hell even
> bringing up context menus is faster. If Linux is that much better, why does
> the
> current Linux desktop (KDE 4.3) still suck compared to an operating system
> that's 8 years old?

The way that last sentence is phrased reveals a lot. If you think
"Linux Desktop" == "KDE" then you're already deep into a method of
thinking that makes MS automatically win. If I used one of the big DEs
I'd hate the Linux Desktop too. Not to mention, if you evaluate any
"X" by comparing it to "Y" then "X" will look bad by any difference it
has from "Y".

Sure, performance problems are lame. But rather than complain about
KDE, just go run something else that isn't a huge hog. I use awesome
with a bunch of hand-picked apps and I'm very happy with my "Linux
Desktop".