I'm a performance nut without a lot of cash. My best computer is a mid-range laptop, and the rest are all various types of old, so the less background stuff there is running, the faster my stuff tends to work. I find it's worth it to just start whatever I need up manually; in Windows, for instance, I have a batch file that starts all the printer-related services if I need to print. It's especially important in Windows because I do my gaming there; I like to have a high (and consistent) framerate, especially if I'm playing a multiplayer game. With all the services that I've disabled and the various tweaks I've made, I find I can play most modern games at a pretty consistent 60 frames per second on the laptop, provided I turn the graphics down a bit.
Why, thank you! I just love personal insults as a response to normal discussion! For maximum effect, read all my text in the voice of Oscar the Grouch.
I never said you did. I was just pointing out that you could do a lot of the stuff you mentioned on other operating systems.
More or less, yes. But there are plenty of people right here in this forum that don't use Linux and don't know that, and may have gotten the false assumption that you could only do those things on Ubuntu. I was just explaining this.
You should try MOSIX.
You didn't explain that at all. Also, like I said, a lot of what you mentioned can be done on Windows or OS X.
Windows is really the only choice if you're going to be gaming. You can try to WINE games on Linux, but you'll likely lose a good deal of performance if you can even get the game working; WINE is more useful, for instance, if you have some useful little program someone wrote and didn't port to Linux. And while more games these days are getting Mac versions, there are still plenty of good ones that simply can't be played on OS X (again, you could try WINE, but it really isn't meant for gaming).
I didn't understand the first part of that. However, as far as I read into your original message, the implication was that Windows couldn't do those things. All you said about Windows was that it was built to be pretty, which is simply untrue.
I never said any one was all-around better; in fact, I implied that was untrue. Each distribution offers something different; Gentoo is a lot more focused on hardware optimizations at compile-time, for instance.
I know that. Not everyone does, though, so I explained it. Well... except... Yum can't remove Debian packages.
I will not agree with you on this point. Let's start a little hypothetical here. Assume there are only two distributions in existence, and that the Linux kernel was encumbered in such a way that only these two could exist (and that nobody's going to develop a new kernel at this point that doesn't have such insane restrictions). And let us also assume that code can't be forked from these projects. They're the only two Linux distributions in the world that will ever exist. One is primarily designed for servers; any code contributed that doesn't make the distribution more useful for servers is discarded. The other is specifically designed to run on older computer; for instance, mid-1990s stuff. It's too crippled to be useful to anything except something from the mid 90s. There is no distribution for general use; people who want to use their OS for something other than these two things are considered a niche group and not worth spending time on. Also, the server project has a stupid admin; people have submit code for five years to fix a gaping exploit in the distribution, but the project admin doesn't think any of the code submitted fixes the exploit gracefully enough, and denies it all. Someone tried to offer a version of the distribution with a fix, along with a few other changes to make it more available to desktop users, but the people in charge sued for copyright infringement.
These are the sorts of problems that arise when you take choice out of the equation. You're stuck with stuff that may not be useful to you, and nothing ever really gets developed.
If you know what you want in a distribution, you're not choosing from millions, you're choosing from maybe twenty at most. Spending a bit of time investigating those options ends up being a very useful investment.
Investigate a bit and you can usually narrow your options down to maybe two or three. My ISP caps my bandwidth pretty low, but I didn't really have any problems.
There were too many changes in Vista to count. All but one of them weren't Aero, which is the eye candy.
I have 39 Vista services disabled (some of them related to programs I rarely use), most of which (surprisingly) don't seem to interfere with any of my day-to-day operations. The task scheduler has most of its tasks deleted, and I used Autoruns to get rid of a lot of the stuff that tries to start on logon. There are a few other tweaks, but most of them are for customization purposes, not performance ones. One thing I do is make batch files to start services I may need to start for some reason.
I may have been speaking out my bum on this one, but to be honest, there's no reason why it's technically not possible to do something like that with Windows. I imagine you could probably recompile the necessary software with Cygwin and a few changes and get it working on Windows just fine.
Both are useful in their own ways. That's why I multi-boot all my computers.