Desktop Linux versus Windows XP shootout writer needs help -any volunteers?

You have to wonder about a journalist who writes:

I still need to load Windows and Office on this system to get some exact performance numbers with Microsoft software. I know it will probably run just fine because my friend has a nearly identical system running Windows XP and Office 2003. I'm also curious if there are less bloated full featured desktop Linux distributions out there that will perform better some I'm open to suggestions for testing. I will probably test Red Hat or SUSE Desktop Linux configurations.

George, the first rule of journalism states, don't write if you don't know the answer. You didn't have a performance testing plan so you just simply compared some very irrelevant data. Let's take a look.

You created a matrix with Windows, Windows with Office, Linspire and SUSE as the operating systems. Your first test measured POST which stands for power-on self test. Did you know that was a hardware specific test and has nothing to do with operating systems? What conclusion did you make from that? Linux is slower?

You also tested the system on $100 computer with 128 MB of RAM. Earth to George: No modern operating systems will run correctly on that kind of RAM. You must have known that because you decided to run a second test and added a 256 MB DDR-333 stick of RAM to do your second tests.

Unfortunately, you still didn't get an appropriate test platform because Windows XP recommends that you use 512 MB of RAM and if you want to get decent performance from Linux, you should use a similar amount of RAM.

So, what did you test? Loadtimes. Now that's the kind of test on which a moron would base performance. You even said as much when you wrote:

While I admit that load times aren't the only factor for judging performance, it is a significant one. Any software developer will tell you that load times don't just magically shrink; it takes careful design and plenty of hard work to optimize code to be responsive.

In this conclusion you 've exposed your ignorance further. First, when you say "any software developer", you just make a generalization. That's like saying "all software developers". How do you know what any or all software developers will say? You don't.

Next, you say that load times don't magically shrink. Maybe not magically, but they do go down on Linux and they do slow down on Windows. Any computer analyst knows that! Unfortunately, you didn't make any adjustments to Linux to enhance performance because you didn't know any better. One adjustment alone would have massively increased performance: Swappiness. But then, you didn't know that. It's something we do when we run Linux as a desktop, But then, you didn't know that Linux can run as a Desktop, Workstation and/or a Server out of the box.

Geroge, I hope ZDNet takes your press pass away. You're a lousy writer and a terrible journalist. In a nutshell, you stink. That means you should write articles about Microsoft XP.