[LargoLasskhyfv]

I have to disagree. The comparison you make is unfair. I experienced QNX and Beos too. But what could you really do with it out of the box, compared to a full blown Linux-distro? The 'feeling' of snappiness is a matter of carefully choosen defaults IMO. Almost nobody does that anymore. So have this lowest common denominator, and mostly crappy tools to change them from within the GUI, or have to dive down in the cesspool of myriads of different config files in different formats and places, and in addition an explosion of complexity of subtle interactions of several subsystems.

Regarding the shitty hardware...

The f-ing fastest desktop experience i ever had was somewhere in the late days of KDE 3, across NetBSD, ArchLinux and Gentoo, on Pentium3@933Mhz with 512MB RAM, onboard I815 Intel graphics(edit: with the 'superspecial' 4MB VRAM Dimm-thingy), and some IBM Deathstars. With the same toned down look across all three systems, and toolkits, instead of the usual teletubbyfication.

What can i say? When your KDE 3 crashed you were holding it wrong, or it was somehow miscompiled, be it the optimization , or some libraries.

For me it was rock solid and lightingly fast, at least in my configurations.

The same can be seen nowadays with systemd and pulseaudio. They can be used if configured right. The question is if one wants to be hassled with that, if it isn't.

/endrant

[karatestomp]

shrug I've had Linux desktops across Debian, Mandrake, Gentoo, Ubuntu, and maybe some others. Oh I think Fedora in there somewhere. Gentoo and the first few years of Ubuntu (pre-Pulseaudio, basically, though it's not the only reason it suddenly got worse right around that time) were the only ones that felt like they weren't built on some kind of horrid Jenga tower always on the verge of toppling over, but in Gentoo's case that's only because I placed all the pieces myself. And it's never felt any "faster" or more responsive than Windows unless stripped down to bare bones on the UI side. And God did X used to crash a lot. At least Xorg's mostly better on that front, but then Windows doesn't BSOD a couple times a day anymore either.

[EDIT] oh as for BeOS, it ran a lot of the same junk I ran on Linux just fine. Better, really. It wasn't suitable for a server, but that didn't and doesn't really matter for one's desktop OS experience. Especially these days—can it run a VM (as one supposes any modern BeOS-alike could, because why not)? Cool, then I can run most any deployment target I like on it.

[LargoLasskhyfv]

That reminds me of something wrt configuration files. What always rubbed me the wrong way, for instance in Debian were the commented out examples in config files inapplicable for the configuration of the running system. I remember this for the bootmanager, framebuffer and X when setting up a flicker free boot with the SAME video mode as early as possible, networking, and file systems.

Only Mandrake and PCLinuxOS got this right, they had nothing in /etc which wasn't applicable, because somehow generated programmatically by their installer, according to the choosen configuration.

That was CLEAN, there were no useless ##commented out things for stuff the system didn't even had installed.

Unfortunately their package repos at the time were 'clean' (meaning lacking the stuff i needed/wanted) too.

SUSE also tried this with YAST, but got it wrong often, and felt sluggish and bloated.

I can't really remember XFree86 and later Xorg crashing on me, except when pushing its boundaries wrt multi monitor and hotplugging, i guess that depends on the used hardware and the quality of their drivers?