Speed is Key
The rest of my family happily plod on running Windows XP. It takes my brother a long time for his computer to be ready to be used after turning it on. It isn’t old hardware, so why? (This is after removing the useless applications that automatically start on boot.)
Why did I switch to Ubuntu in the first place? Simply because Windows was sluggish on a old(ish) Pentium 4, 512MB RAM machine (especially due to automatic update taking up 100% cpu). Ubuntu had no issues, running like it was on a top of the range machine. Speed is important to people.
Microsoft is realising this and Windows 7 will likely boot faster than we can at the moment. Not that open source isn’t improving, this is the kind of thing I find incredibly exciting about open source. Not to mention the five second startup recently achieved. A meanwhile environments like LXDE are perfect for older machines.
Faster linux, forced Microsoft to make Windows faster, which in turn is forcing open source to make everything even swifter. Don’t you just love competition!
