Every time I look at XP or Windows 7 I think ahhh shiny. But I just can't help but think of Windows as anything more than a kids toy. It does have power, and can do many tasks but I still can't get past the toy part.
To give an example. When doing the intro video for Derek's Wedding and later the into video for a Michelle's DVD I needed to setup a rendering farm. Rendering a 20 minute video can take days depending on the complexity. Setting it up with a gui in windows just seemed like a waist. How much memory does windows take up? 100M? 512M? Isn't that memory I could use to dedicate to the rendering farm? With Linux I can shut down pretty much everything, the graphics, the printing interface, everything. I managed to get a foot print down to under 50M for the rendering farm, and even better could load the thing off a CD as not to interfer with what was on the system already. That way I could slave several computers together to dedicate the entire system to the rendering process.
So I'm not saying Linux is better here. In fact, I'm a true believer that they both have their strengths and weaknesses that make them equal. But, the more shinny added to Windows the more I'm still going to see it as a toy. But that's me, I'm all about function rather than form.
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Any time you don't want the GUI, you have the option to boot to a DOS prompt; and along with powershell, that DOS prompt is extremely powerful. However, in an age where you can get 8GB of memory for $200 or so, I've stopped worrying about how much memory the GUI takes on either platform.
ReplyDeleteVery true... But then again for my example I was digging up every computer in the house, so some of those computers couldn't support 8G of ram (most under 512M) nor did I want to start buying new computers/memory for the task.
ReplyDeleteAlso I tried starting up powershell/command prompt in XP and it still starts it up with the graphics server running.
With my past experiences I can pump more raw power out of Linux than I can with Windows. When I was processing GPX files into an Oracle DB I found that seconds count. I could tweak everything to get that power in Linux but at the time I couldn't get Windows up to the task. (But that was a while ago now, Win7 could change things..)
But regardless, my rant was about perception, as I didn't say that Linux was better. The example I gave to my wife was you have two life support machines. One is just a grey box with a few lights. The other is pink with bunny ears. Which would you trust your live to? Both do the job.