Sung N. Cho wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> Many of you probably read the article on BSDtoday claiming OpenBSD 3.0 is 
> significantly faster than Linux; and some of the OpenBSD users posted 
> comments claiming 3.0 is even faster than FreeBSD!  


depends on how you define fast, I guess. Windows is fast, I 
suppose: it loads apps fast (especially MSFT-branded ones). But is 
it stable and extensible?

I evaluate performance more holistically: rather than time how 
fast windows open and close, I examine how well the system as a 
whole works with me. Does it help or hinder me? If I need to 
change things, how hard is it and how likely is it I'm going to 
hose things up?

Speed or any measure of performance is meaningless with a workload 
to test with. What's the measurement in this case? It sounds like 
subjective comfort: nothing wrong with that,  but it's hard to 
quantify and tune for.

For me NetBSD works quite well: lots of applications, a stable 
well-run distribution, and outstanding, helpful mailing lists.

> my 
> KDE2.2.2 opens things significantly faster.  Even the KDE media player seem 
> to play tunes much smoother.  


Running KDE and complaining about speed doesn't make a lot of 
sense: there's a huge performance to comfort tradeoff when you use 
an all-singing, all-dancing desktop like KDE or GNOME vs icewm or 
blackbox, for example. I have noticed that the most recent pkgsrc 
KDE stuff works better in some hard-to-quantify ways; since I 
haven't installed a new kernel or made any other changes, I have 
to assume Nick Hudson has made some magic happen somewhere.

But to say NetBSD is slow with KDE in the mix is unfair: I came to 
similar realizations when I ran BeOS, linuxPPC, and NetBSD on 
Apple hardware. The hardware is fine, but the OS that came with it 
wastes a lot of the performance. So it is with fancy desktops in 
this world as well.