[openbeos] Re: Windows Vista Performance Kludges (that Haiku does not need)
- From: "Ryan Leavengood" <leavengood@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: openbeos@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Mon, 11 Dec 2006 13:44:44 -0500
Hi Thom, I enjoy reading your posts on OSNews. In fact as I recall it
was one of your posts that inspired me to write this thread :)
To address your comments:
On 12/11/06, Thom Holwerda <slakje@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
The problem with Windows is not so much a technical one; don't think the
programmers at Microsoft are any less capable and talented than Apple, open
source, or Haiku coders. Programmers are a rare breed, and all those
companies and open source projects are fishing in the same pool. The
problems do not lie in Microsoft's technical staff; no, they lie in the many
management layers, clogging the development cycle up with lots of red tape.
I agree wholeheartedly. I have a friend who worked at Microsoft for a
while, a very intelligent guy, but he left because of the bad politics
and management mess that has developed at Microsoft in the last 10
years or so. I think in its earlier years MS was a much better
company.
On to Windows Vista, it is extremely unfair to compare Windows (or OSX for
that matter) to BeOS/Haiku. Yes, Windows is slower than BeOS, but lest we
forget: Windows does about ten million things more than BeOS can. Yes, you
might not notice this in home desktop use, but you surely will when you go
to the corporate setting. I am a long-time BeOS user, so I know the
shortcomings of this wonderful platform.
Well indeed Vista, XP and OS X certainly have more built-in features
than BeOS. I don't think the order of magnitude difference is quite
ten million, but I see your point. I would argue that in a few years
Haiku could add many of these features and still not see the
performance issues that Windows (or for that matter even OS X) sees.
As an example, take searching. Of course BeFS is extremely powerful and cool
and all that, but it is simply not as advanced as the search in Vista or
Spotlight in OSX. BeFS's search capabilities do not, for instance, extend to
file contents. In other words, Windows and OSX have a lot more to index than
BeFS, hence it uses more resources.
Fair enough, but again I would argue that adding file content indexing
within BeOS or Haiku would not cause as much loss in performance as
you see on Windows.
As Axel already pointed out, there is nothing wrong with Windows NT. It is a
highly portable hybrid (I refuse to side with Linus Torvalds that 'hybrid'
is a mere marketing term; it's a term that perfectly well describes kernels
that share similarities with both the muK and monolithic side of the scale)
kernel, which runs on various different architectures. It's inception was
led by Dave Cutler, and I think that's why it is regarded as such a good
piece of software: the project was not led by managers, but by programmers.
I suppose others in this thread were bashing Windows in general, but
my original message was strictly about how the Vista "performance
features" were really kludges, and I have yet to see someone disprove
my assertion.
While I do agree that some of these features have merit (Sleep and
maybe the ReadyDrive), my main concern is that these features are
essentially REQUIRED for Vista to perform decently on even a very
powerful modern computer.
Don't get me wrong, I am still a huge fan of 'my' BeOS, and I always will
be, but saying that Vista's relative slowness (relative because it actually
boots in like 12 seconds) compared to BeOS/Haiku is proof that Vista sucks,
is simply, with all due respect, uninformed.
But come on, let's be honest here: Vista is a big, bloated beast. Does
that mean it has no merit and completely sucks? No, but it is still a
big, bloated beast.
Have you seen the blog of the Microsoft programmer who spent a YEAR
working on the Vista shutdown menu? This was because of stupid
management and also because of the insane circular dependencies of the
Windows code. The resulting code wasn't even that long or complicated
(at least on his side, the kernel guys had more code obviously.) But
that alone shows that it isn't just "more features" that are making
Vista slow.
But here is my main overarching point in this thread (to bring things
somewhat on topic): I'm tired of this trend of "throw more hardware at
the problem." It is one thing to do this for a web server serving
millions of requests, but I feel this is a big mistake on the desktop.
There are millions and millions of old (but in the grand scheme of
things still quite fast) PCs which are destined to be paper weights
because of the design of Windows Vista. Hmmm, but people could install
Haiku on those machines and get some good use out of them, and still
get many of the benefits of a "modern OS" like Windows Vista.
So ironically Microsoft may be helping the future distribution of
Haiku and similar alt-OSes by making Windows so bloated. So, go
Microsoft!
Ryan
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