[CS-FSLUG] The Fast-Food Syndrome: The Linux Platform is Getting Fat

[N. Thompson]

Consider these memory requirements for Fedora Core 2, as specified by 
Red Hat: /Minimum for graphical: 192MB/ and /Recommended for graphical: 
256MB/ Does that sound any alarm bells with you? 192MB minimum? I've 
been running Linux for five years (and am a huge supporter), and have 
plenty of experience with Windows, Mac OS X and others. And those 
numbers are shocking -- severely so. No other general-purpose OS in 
existence has such high requirements. Linux is /getting very fat/.

http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=7324&page=1



I don't usually like OSNews but this article has a very good point that 
cannot be ignored, I've seen what its like to try and install and run 
Linux on older computers myself and it is a very serious problem. On my 
old Celeron 466 back when I had it, it got to the point where Windows 
was in fact faster then Linux in some places and that was quite a while 
ago, now I've got a Pentium 4 with smp and Windows would still be (much) 
faster were it not for the requirement of Anti-virus, firewall, 
anti-spyware, anti-adware (the list goes on) software. Linux has a very 
devoted <cough>zealous<cough> user base that unfortunately lets that 
blind them, when the problem gets too bad I think the worse of us are 
just going to say "switch to Gentoo/CRUX/LFS or stop complaining" while 
the rest are going to switch to FreeBSD, Syllable, SkyOS or back to Windows.