[kingu]

I have a laptop I was thinking about switching to Linux (well, it already has it installed, actually) for folding.. Does Linux show any performance improvement?

[hiredhand]

It "could" give a performance boost, depending on CPU, memory, and video hardware. I've found that all in all, the most bang for the buck on the perform-o-meter (so to speak!) is realized with FreeBSD. But FreeBSD isn't quite "prime time" for desktop usage yet.

We use RedHat Linux ES-4 at work, but I run Debian Sarge (stable) on a laptop and a buddy of mine there runs RedHat Fedora Core 4. I think both are probably a good choice, although I really, REALLY like the "apt" applications for aptitude (for installtion, and updates).

So far I've installed Debian on half a dozen or so machines and with well over half of them, it auto discovered the video hardware and I didn't even have to build a custom XF86Config file! I've been impressed so far.

You'll most likely realize a performance increase with Linux on slightly older PC hardware, but even if it's no better "speedwise", it will be extremely stable!

Your question makes me wonder though if the MS-Win folding client runs any better than the Linux client. I don't have a Windows box to compare it to so I don't know. If you can find somebody running Windows on an AMD Athlon 2200+ with 1G of RAM, I'd be happy to turn over my stats so you can compare. :-)