[webmobdev]

Your point about Linux GUIs is quite true. I've found DEs like Gnome and KDE to be more resource intensive and klunky. Some 8 years back, there was only one distro (I forget the name) that used FluxBox that was blazingly responsive but lacked intuitiveness. (I've heard i3 is also very fast, but I have never used it as I don't like tiling WM).

Before corporates entered the Linux market (e.g., Red Hat and Canonical), Linux actually used to be faster than Windows. Today, I find Ubuntu (and most Ubuntu based distros) to be equal or sometimes worse than Windows on the same hardware. It just feels as "weighed down" as Windows.

And yeah, you are absolutely right about BeOS - it felt revolutionary to run two sessions of a movie player on a 200Mhz powered system with 16 MB ram!

[karatestomp]

I'd love to know what BeOS did to achieve those magical-feeling results, and why it hasn't been copied by everyone else. I reckon it's gotta have a lot to do with process scheduling and how UI events are dispatched, but if it's mostly those couple things, why isn't every modern OS doing what BeOS did? There must have been trade-offs I guess but from the user's perspective it seemed to be 100% an improvement over everything else—it's not like multimedia took a backseat to user interaction, or parts of the UI lagged so others could feel fast, everything felt smoother, quicker, and more responsive. On single core machines with 1/16 the memory it takes to start Slack, too!