Date: Tue, 18 Jul 2000 16:39:23 -0500 From: "Jason" <jsmethers@pdq.net> To: <chat@freebsd.org> Subject: Re: The joys of Windows Message-ID: <008201bff100$a3ad4980$9ccf1f40@pdq.net> References: <Pine.BSF.4.21.0007181522270.25933-100000@turtle.looksharp.net>
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From: "Adam" <bsdx@looksharp.net> > I have workstations as well as servers. I run FreeBSD on them all. > I just booted up FreeBSD on one, started XFree86, and am in icewm with an > xterm open and top running. Mem: ~7.6M active, ~7.6M Inactive, 12M Wired, > 32K Cache, 8112K Buf, 97M Free out of 128M total. The 7.6M and 32K cache > and 8112K cache can be considered free also if you realize they can be > paged out or shrunk if more mem is needed. 31 < 64. Again there are many variables to this whole discussion and it all comes down to some personal intrest. I can't give specifiec numbers since I always revert my main machine back to windows after having a period of having used FreeBSD and X. Last time I worked with the two using KDE, X's size started at about 40M and by the time I had done some work or played around it would be up to 50M - 55M. Take into account instance of netscape, xtrem, etc., my memory usage usualy was in the 128 - 196 MB range. The same things that would hardly scratch a limit of 64M in windows 98. I didn't see more then about 512K swapped of course becuase I have 256M in my machine, but switching between windows, especialy xterms would cause close to the same slow repaint as an Internet Explorer window that has been left idle long enough to be paged out. I agree that windows memory management is nill to non existant, but the way it handles things can be intrinsicly better in such a way as it doesn't matter for the applications of many people. FreeBSD has it problems in this area also which are being worked on to some degree. Directory caching is harible coupled with a default filesystem that was designed more or less to support server applications with multiple users, one of the things I do at least every day, filesystem browsing, takes a major blow in speed akin to going back a generation in hard disk speed - ATA-66 disks to PIO3 disks. > > > >Have you ever tried doing something graphics intensive on FreeBSD with > >XFree86 2D or 3D? You can't. Simply put, the video drivers still suck, even > > Yes I have and its blazing fast (to me) with the GLX extensions for my > video card. Can you have Hardware 3D animation in your windows > backround? I don't think so. I've recently tried both TNT2 and GForce chipsets, and when compared to the windows it is nothing short of pathetic, both 2D and 3D. No I can't have it in the background persay that I know of, but I can have it in a window. I can see it being fast to you, but you are going from one version of XFree86 to another. Going from the speed of a comercial windows driver to an open source one is more akin to going back two or there generations of hardware. > Please tell me, how does 3D sound hardware play my mp3's in 3D? How does > it play Audio cd's in 3D? Are you trying to be an ass? mp3 is interpreted to PCM. CD audio has almost nothing to do with it. The hardware can interpret normal PCM data to a synthasized 3D or there can be specified information about how a sound is played in 3D. Both may require hardware setup by the driver. This comes down to the driver supporting the 3D functions of the card and interfacing to a genric 3D audio API. Some sound guru may prove me wrong in some way, but that is my take on it from my research. Here the point is more or less on gaming of course, though some meager home theater and studio applications are also prestented. > That 63 days one was not a server, it is a computer I use daily for > various (small) tasks. But I do run X on it the whole time and ssh around > and read my email and run various other frivolous applications. The last > time I rebooted was because I was screwing around with the external scsi > bus in ways I probably shouldnt have been. I have my scanner attached and > scan in images with gimp happily. When I'm done, top looks on average > like this: > Memory: 40M Act, 676K Inact, 412K Wired, 4008K Free, 508K Swap, > 79M Swap free > > This computer has a 40mhz cpu. When I scan on my parents NT4 computer > with 64 megs (more than this one) and a *400* mhz cpu it crawls from > swapping. > > I'll continue to provide specific examples disproving assumptions about > how I(we) (may) use our computers as long as I'm included in the grouping. This is a specific area in which windows takes a dump. From my expiance, I do not beliave that this has to do with running out of memory. It seems more like bad app design. My perception is that the application will allocate lots of memory instead of using something simpler such as a temporay file. Neither of which will help in speed becuase windows file caching is also garbage. Windows does a terrible job of handling any sort of remotly large data set. In fact, anything from Microsoft does a horrible job of managing large data sets. This is clearly a place that FreeBSD wins. Its already been shown that FreeBSD does an awsome job in managing memory, especialy in tight situations. It is also demonstrated that this is not of upmost importance nor is it as important considering the applications that are available are not of the upmost efficency in resonable memory allocations or the cooperation between instance of the same application in X. Now it loses when you want to display that image, compared to windows, becase the video drivers in comparision are not near the optimization. Same for playing video. The freely available video decoders suffer both from a lack of rendering quality and decoder speed coupled with inadiquit display drivers. I think that FreeBSD itself at its core is hands down going to kick windows butt, but when it comes to things such as supporting applications such as XFree86 and its applications, and other subsystems such as sound, it loses the usefulness that the core provides. Of course, it does not fit in with the main stream PC usage without these - gaming. There are three reasons I do not use FreeBSD and X instead of windows. The one that always really gets to me every time is that the sound cards I buy are not supported in FreeBSD and of course, I explore writing one for my current card every time but other things in addition to lack of documentation and that I have never written more then the PCI handling functions for a device driver, looking at the source to Linux drivers for the same card that will say in themselves that they are not correctly written and that the manufacture didn't give a flip about them have stopped me from doing so. Its just my personal opinion, but I don't think that I should be forced to buy what I believe to be a second rate sound card, or any other hardware, just to have it supported by a particular OS, nor do I believe that I should be placed in a position to have to buy a driver from a third party for that OS. Then of course, there is the large drop in video speed going from windows to X. Finally, there is not so much the lack of applications but the lack of coherent GUI interfaces to some applications and the mismanagement of screen real-estate because of this and other base design philosophies used in the X world. For one example of a bad design philosophy, look at the KDE developer site where they bash windows. Why would anyone want to cut or paste into a dialog box anyway? After all, that's only useful for manipulating entire paragraphs, right? There is of course a lot of NIH in X applications where you see lots of implementations of base functionalities that never get much further and a lot of restarts in projects. Lack of quality rendering in things such as video, .pdf, etc., other things such as that lack of communication between GUI apps, and so on are major draw backs to me. The only win I see is .ps file support of course. When the sound and video are equal to windows, I will switch. The applications aren't as important to me because I can write my own or modify others. - Jason To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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