****
PM'd. :evil:

I am not Linux expert however when I run Fedora Core 3 I couldn't see any difference in running speed.
This difference is subtle sometimes, but it bites.
I experienced Fedora Core 6 and Win XP on the same machine with 512 Mb RAM.

While you run only browser/office, everything is fine. But when you start to add up (DC++/antivirus/firewall/Lazarus/mail client/file manager/some game/et cetera) and yor program take 600..700 megabytes of memory (while you have, as I said, 512), XP starts to swap. When you start copying or otherwise accessing big files, XP slows down to a crawl, swapping the applications out of memory, and 80% of your time you just wait when it stop swapping and react to your command.

When you boot FC6 and start to use the same set of applications (minus the antivirus, which you don't need and the firewall, which is built-in and lightweight) the difference is glaring. Not just noticeable but glaring. Because Fedora swaps *only* when you switch from one app to another one. While XP swaps all the time, without stopping, at each your action, and it never ends.

The only explanation I can think of is that XP uses terminally ineffective swapping algorithms while Fedora employs just the right ones. Indeed, the M$ developers never saw the swapping in effect, since they work on the top-grade machines, and didn't bother to test how it works.

Add here the fact that XP freezes or BSODs each few days while Fedora works for weeks and months without any problems (and even survives the hardware failures in the IDE interface, just restarting it)... In short, I abandoned Windows for Fedora.

It is all about money.
Exactly. Why should I buy another 512Mb RAM that I don't need?

Yeah, but is there any reason for switching to Vista?
There is not a single one!
So, Vista is useless for most of the people. And that's the same thing that downed 3dfx. The extremely long production cycles.

and I love Delphi's Debugger
(sigh) I loved it too... But $1300 is a very good deterrent, it does wonders to one's adaptivity. Plus, the debugger isn't very useful when you debug a fullscreen OpenGL game.
And now it's totally useless for me, since I use a schema where all my critical code resides in a dll handled by a different program.