10 days ago the Linux Loop blog had a post titled “Linux Eee PC Far Faster Than Windows Version”. I’m sure many Linux users nodded and had assumed as much. The author compared the times of three tasks: boot up, loading Firefox, and shutting down. That’s hardly a comprehensive set of tests. Some people commented to dismiss these metrics as “meaningless”. They aren’t meaningless but they certainly aren’t the whole story.

I’m going to try and sift through the morass and say what I think the numbers really mean and what they don’t mean. Those with an agenda, either agenda, will, I’m sure, attack what I have to say. I think anyone who really tries to look at things objectively probably won’t. I’m just not sure that very many people are truly objective.

There is no denying that on identical hardware running an identical application (Firefox) that Xandros is significantly faster than XP. Any comparison of dissimilar apps (IE vs FIrefox or Works vs. OpenOffice) is an apples and oranges comparison. It tells us nothing about the speed of the underlying OS. What if I compared AbiWord and Gnumeric instead of OO? Might Linux seem faster again? It’s not a fair comparison, is it?

What does this all prove?