I used to work for a web hosting company that offered hosting on NT and Linux. We could host over 500 sites on an optimized P3 600/256MB Linux box while at 275 an NT box running IIS on the exact same hardware will start to choke.
I also worked for a major online sporting site (THE major online sporting site...) and the only PCs in the building running any Microsoft products were the receptionists and secretaries.
Of course the desktop GUI is not as refined as Microsoft yet. There is a very good reason for that. Microsoft''s GUI is bloated and error-ridden. The XFree86/Gnome guys are concentrating on making a STABLE and LEAN running GUI and making sure that they conform to standards set out by the different standards committees instead of making their own standards and forcing everybody to live with them. They are also building it to be easily extendable by in-house developers. Try extending Windows. Go ahead and ask old Billy boy for a copy of his source code
Linux does not waste resources the way Windows does. Sure, you load XFree and it tells you that it is using 120MB of RAM. You run it for 3 weeks doing different things, exit to Linux console, go back in and it will give you the same numbers.
Try doing that in Windows. Run Windows for 3 weeks playing games without rebooting and tell me what your system resources look like.
The performance of a Linux box depends more on the memory available than does Windows compared to processor speeds. Take a normal Win9x/ME box with 256MB of RAM and do some benchmarking on high memory usage applications. Now add another 256MB of RAM and do it again. See a difference? Didn''t think so.
Do the same thing on Linux. Major difference.
NT will improve performance some but it will not be as dramatic as Linux.
I can write a program on Linux that will COOK an Athlon processor ( I have a toasted specimen if you don''t believe me )that has standard cooling while I can only make it really hot on Windows. Linux uses the full power of your processor and memory. That is why you can still run linux applications on some really slow processors.
IBM, Dell, DEC are all jumping on the Linux bandwagon in a major fashion.
Expect some good stuff real soon.
Seeya
Krippy
