SO that's the question. I have a few old machines: 266, 64ms RAM, 166, 32ms RAM, and they don't seem to work with even older distro's that were in their generation like Vector Linux 2.0 or even Red Hat 7.1. It seems to me after testing these machines on RH 7.1 and VL 2.0, along with windows 95, that Windows GUI was better on an older machine than Linux.

What do you all think?

Josh

Like it or not it is a well known fact that the windows gui will run faster than the equivalent kde/gnome. In windows your gui is the operating system, in linux it is an addon. If your looking for a "fancy" looking desktop that will run relatively fast on your 266 just put 95 or 98 on.

I run Slackware 9.1 on several 266mhz machines without any problems. Just use lighter desktop or window managers like fluxbox and the like. Stay away from Gnome or KDE, and other heavy apps like Mozilla or Netscape for browsing, etc.

I agree with lynchmob09!

Even when fixing problems with gui in Linux, as for example, using light weight gui's, you will still face a lot of trouble finding good applications to use under gui. I've a very old compaq 166 MHZ with 32 of RAM and it runs great with Win98, Office 2000 and Borland C++. I even had Visual Basic on it and it was good enough. Running Linux on that machine, means you'd be stuck with lighter applications as Dillo Webbrowser. Dillo is performs terribly in pages full of cookies or when you need to download stuff or tabled pages. Lynks does a way better job, considering it is only a text-based browser.

That old compaq is also very capable of playing mp3 files with winamp or media player. I've tried to play in text-mode only with Linux and mpg321/123 and it lags terribly. That was Slackare 9.0 by the way...

You can get win95 running relatively well in a 386 machine too. With gui's, browser and everything.

Indeed, Linux is a hell lot more stable then those old Dos-based operating system, but saying that Linux supports better old hardware is well, more like a matter of marketing...

Now, about witeshark saying win 3.1 is better then 95 and 98 is hilarious. Win 3.1 had no network support. Goddess, it was not even a real OS, to do not compare it with the amount of programs that you can run with Win95 (up to DirectX 8.0 based games) and Win3.1...

Don't forget that Windows 98 will very soon (in a few months) no longer be supported by Microsoft. In reality this means that if new security holes are discovered that affect Windows in all version, they will not be producing a patch for Windows 98, so your computer will be left wide open to attacks based on reverse-engineering a patch. Versions earlier than '98 are already not supported.

Do U want uR comp 2b 0wn3d?

If you are behind a firewall, that is not such of big deal. Windows have always had a lot of holes for any kid with a netbus to invade you and do funny things as to open your CD-rom device . Linux is not totally safe either, and will never be... No system connected to the net is safe actually

My first Linux machine was about 200Mhz, and Mandrake worked just fine on it. I had a 20 gig hard drive in it, but the BIOS and Windows could only detect 8 gigs. Linux saw the whole thing, however. Anyway, I agree with trickykid, try Slackware and use lightweight window managers, and maybe compile a custom kernel to speed things up a bit.

I concur...

Vector linux got me started on my old Celeron 300 with 64 megs ram
That was 3.2 I believe and I liked it very much.

Can't imagine a P266 with similar specs would operate much differently.
I've got a compaq 166 that I use as an mp3 /net server. It plays mp3s fine and even runs fluxbox without problems...

--Shade

use links' graphics mode for a light-weight graphical browser. Use the command "links -g"

I've played mp3s successfully on a 486 50mHz using mplayer. It takes almost all the CPU, but still...