[bmacho]

I believe Linux should be even faster, right? Probably it only lacks a lightweight and responsive DE, and a distro with sane defaults, e.g. no gazillions of random processes running at the start. But e.g. the compilation, or anything compute heavy should be faster under linux?

[lproven]

I wouldn't have thought so, no.

Linux is a huge OS by the standards of BeOS and Haiku, with an early-1970s design and layers and layers of legacy cruft between the kernel and the user.

Dr Tanenbaum called it obsolete even 30 years ago: https://www.edn.com/linux-is-obsolete-thread-is-started-janu...

... and he had a point then.

[LeFantome]

The kernel is not huge though. Even a modern Linux kernel runs on really, really resource limited hardware ( eg. embedded ). As said above, it is all the other crap that takes up memory and slows it down ( and makes it useful of course ).

It is not the Linux kernel that makes the Linux Desktop so much heavier than Haiku though.

[lproven]

No, that is true and a fair call.

Saying that, the first machine I tried (and failed) to install Slackware 1 on was I think a 486 with 8MB of RAM, and I am not sure 21st century Linux will fit on that...

[themodelplumber]

I switch between Haiku and Q4OS on the same netbook, and they are both very responsive. The Linux distro does indeed have some performance advantages. However I haven't tried beta4 yet.

[squarefoot]

It is possible that musl based distros such as Alpine, could somehow compete for having a lot smaller code footprint to execute, but "normal" glibc ones would hardly match Haiku's speed. That doesn't necessarily make Linux inferior; it's just the price to pay for decades of development from thousands of developers and being portable to a huge number of platforms. The upside is we (Linux users) have a lot more software and supported hardware than Haiku, as of today.