Before getting my iBook, I used to work with a pretty old laptop, a DELL Inspiron with a 266Mhz Pentium, 200Mo of RAM and 4Go of storage. I was using a Debian GNU/Linux distro on it with KDE. And hosnestly, it was damn slow and I never managed to get the sound to work. Ubuntu didn’t do much better.

I hear you saying that’s quite normal for an old PC but look, late nite, I decided to give a try to Windows XP and installed it. And I’ve been impressed. The install took a lot of time but the OS installed perfectly. The system now boots up in 30 seconds and works quite good, with sound and everything.

I’ve to admit that I’m sometime disapointed about what GNU/Linux just became. It got the same problems Microsoft had years ago, a big incontrolable thing. GNU/Linux is great core OS but the application stack on top of it sucks. Its design shows its limits and it lacks a clean software architecture. The system is generally too low-level and doesn’t provide enough services for the application developer. That leads to a big OS where nothing work together. In my opinion, one of the issue is the number of different distro and configuration available. Each software have to adapt itself to the environement because it can’t take it for granted. Small apps–like the Gnome Terminal–tend to waste too many memory and that not normal. And actually, that’s not better than most Microsoft software.

I hope groups like the Debian Alliance would help solve these differences and would provide a clean base for GNU/Linux that would help developers to make better applications.

But in the meantime, here is a fact: Windows XP just reborn my old laptop.