For this article I’m taking the viewpoint of a typical everyday user. Someone who is capable of downloading and installing programs, but doesn’t necessarily know how it all works behind the scenes. Someone who has heard the term “memory” but uses it interchangeably with hard disk space. Perhaps next week I’ll post a more technical comparison between Windows and Linux… nah scratch that, it would be a blood bath.
So here we go, Fedora 13 versus Windows 7, from install to basic use. Ensure your tray tables are in the upright and locked position..
Let’s start from square one: installation.
Acquiring the media
Windows – I chose Windows 7 Professional for this comparison, as the lesser versions would immediately grant an unfair advantage to Fedora in terms of available features. See, I can be fair when it comes to this discussion topic! Now, get your pocketbook out. If for whatever reason you do not qualify for an Upgrade version you get the joy and pleasure of shelling out $268.99 (Newegg.com) for a full retail version of W7 Pro or $175.99 (Newegg.com) for the Upgrade.
Fedora – Have a blank CD-R sitting around? Chances are you do, but if not just run out to your nearest Hy-Vee, Wal-Mart, (hell even some gas stations sell 10-pack blank CD-R spindles) and cough up $10. Run back home and point your browser to http://fedoraproject.org/en/get-fedora-options#architecture. Select your version (32/64 bit) and download the Desktop Edition. Burn that .iso file to a blank CD-R, and there you have it. If that sounds like too much work, just request a free DVD through the Fedora Free Media project (http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Distribution/FreeMedia). Yeah, they’ll send you a DVD of the install files for free. FREE I say.
Installation tasks
Comparing W7 and F13’s installation tasks is somewhat of a moot point. If you are starting from scratch they will have a similar number of steps with comparable degrees of complexity, which really is next to nothing. If you can read you can navigate both install processes. The only major difference being time; Windows 7 is moving/unpacking nearly x3 as much data so the install will seem slower.
I have not personally upgraded from a previous version of Windows to W7 so I do not have any data to share on that, but the F12 -> F13 upgrade was ridiculously simple. I entered one command, “preupgrade”, and went to bed. This process downloads all of the new files (about 3gb for my 64bit version), installs them, applies my current configuration to the new packages, removes the old packages, reboots, and without any interaction necessary from the user. After it was all said and done I had an additional 75mb to my installed packages, that was it.
Back to the “from scratch” install. Once W7 is installed and updated your hard drive will be 20-25gb heavier (depending on your architecture). You add another 15gb to that total if you selected the Windows XP Mode option during your install. An updated Fedora 13 install weighs in just over 3gb. Wow, hope you weren’t planning on installing W7 on that shiny new Netbook with a solid state drive.
The hard drive space situation only gets worse over time for W7 systems. Each update applied is downloaded, installed, and retained in full. Eventually you find yourself with a huge collection of old update files which you cannot remove. They simply get to stay there and eat up space. Fedora 12 introduced the concept of delta-rpms, where the package manager (yum) determines the differences between your currently installed packages and the updated, downloads only the differences, and performs any clean-up steps available. I update my systems religiously and in nearly two years my base installed package space has grown only 241mb.
Now on to step 2: Performance
Hardware Requirements
Let’s start with the listed hardware requirements for each:
Windows –
CPU: 1 Ghz
Memory: 2 GB
Hard Drive: specs say 20GB, realistically 40GB
Fedora –
CPU: Pentium Pro 400mhz
Memory: 512mb
Hard Drive: specs say a full DVD install requires 9GB, realistically the Live iso needs only 4GB.
Sitting idle
For the baseline on these stats I’m using a new system fresh off the install process for both operating systems. This way no 3rd party programs are starting up or consuming any resources, so only the programs/processes necessary for basic O/S functionality are running.
Windows – Based on blogs, tech notes, and other resources on the web I’m seeing most users reporting anywhere from 750mb to 1.3gb memory in use when W7 is sitting idle. Let’s call it 1GB on average.
Fedora – An idle F13 desktop hums along at ~200mb memory used, 0% swap space used (swap is the Linux equivalent of Virtual Memory). Lean, mean, and clean my friends. Just to up the ante I installed some web server related services and set them to start up on my next boot (Apache, MySQL, vsftp, sshd). After rebooting the memory footprint was 225mb. So a fully functional desktop turned web server was still consuming 1/4th the amount of resources compared to W7.
What does this mean to an average user? The less resources consumed by the base operating system, the more resources for your applications to use and use efficiently. An efficient application is faster, more responsive, and leads to a better user experience and ultimately allows you to multitask with far more applications.
Step 3: Let’s fire up some apps
A common misconception from the Windows camp is that Linux can’t run your applications. While that sentence taken literally is somewhat true, there are typically Linux-equivalents available. When an alternative is not available you can always give Wine a shot, which allows native Windows applications to run within Linux. Wine usage and configuration is out of scope here however.
Image Manipulation
Everyone knows about Photoshop. It is the premier graphic manipulation program created by Adobe and has been a staple application for anyone that owns a digital camera. We know it runs in W7 but what about Fedora? Enter: the Gimp. The GNU Image Manipulation Program offers many if not all functionality found within Photoshop. Everything I’ve ever wanted to do in Photoshop I’ve been able to do in Gimp. While I’m certainly not a Photoshop guru, my wife is. Her biggest complaint against Gimp is the menu layout, having become so accustomed to how Photoshop is laid out. Functionality wise though we have yet to say, “looks like you can’t do that in Gimp”.
Cost:
Photoshop CS5 – $699.00 (Adobe.com)
Gimp 2.6 – $0 (http://www.gimp.org/)
Yup, Gimp is 100% free to use. They even have a Windows client available.
Office Productivity
Word, Excel, and Power Point; where would the corporate and collegiate worlds be without these. Most everyone who has operated a computer has used one of these three Office products at some point. There’s simply no avoiding it. But how many of you know there is a free, open source alternative?
OpenOffice.org provides all of the functionality found within the Office bundle. Much like the Photoshop -> Gimp comparison, the most frequent complaint is the different menu locations. Remember folks, just because some button is in a slightly different location than what you are use to, doesn’t mean the product is flawed! OOo can save your documents, spreadsheets, etc in a vast array of formats ensuring your document can be opened by almost any other office product. It can even save them in Microsoft’s own propriety format so you can open them with Word, Excel, etc.
Cost:
Office Professional Full Version – $449.95 (Newegg.com)
OpenOffice.org – you guessed it, $0 (http://www.openoffice.org/)
Again, there is even a Windows client for OOo available.
From start to finish, what’s the damage here
Before I get my fangs out and sink into some more technical differences between W7 and Fedora (an article soon to come), let’s stop and review the total cost between the two systems.
For someone who wants their system to do digital photo touch-ups and dabble in document, spreadsheet, or presentation creation:
Windows – Windows 7 Pro ($268.99)
+ Photoshop CS5 ($699.00)
+ Office Pro ($449.95)
= $1,417.94 not including tax if you buy them locally
Fedora – Fedora 13 ($10 if you had to buy new CD-R’s..)
+ Gimp ($0)
+ OpenOffice.org ($0)
= $10.00 max
Do I have your attention yet?
Let’s get to the goodies. This first screen shot is of my current open windows. At first you may not notice much difference, but check out the top toolbar. Activities hmm? We’ll get into that in a minute, but that’s where all the magic happens. The clock/calendar has been moved to the middle of the tool bar while the Notification and User Switch Applets remain in the upper right corner. Somewhat unexciting so far but hold on to your Spongebob undies.
Now let’s move the mouse to the upper-left corner (or simply hit ALT-F1 for those keyboard only chaps out there), and blam we get a Compiz-like effect. All enabled Workspaces, and I’ll explain what “enabled Workspaces” mean later, are shown along with the applications currently managed by said Workspace. From here your next action can be one of very many
They’re your Favorites, so its only natural that you can customize the apps shown in your list! Each application on your system is available in this quick and easy menu, just right click on your chosen app and “Add to Favorites”
You can expand the Recent Items list for a zoomed-view of the documents so you can get a better preview, should you so choose. Or if you’re blind. Or you just like more eye candy. I’m the latter. 
There is an option to enable this.. sidebar thingy on the left side of the screen, but I can’t say I’m really impressed by it much. Once you enable it, any icons on your desktop are moved over permanently. When you mouse over the sidebar the icons actually move with the expanding bar. I can’t decide if I like this or not though. It feels like the ghetto version, maybe the quick-n-easy version of the real Gnome Shell menu? Perhaps this will never see the light of day once the stable release becomes available, which wouldn’t sadden me in the least. 
