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Ximian GNOME and "Low-End" Systems
Gremeth writes: "This article over at LinuxandMain points out the increase in hardware requirements for many Linux applications, and gives us a good look at GNOME for low-end boxes. Powell details his journey throug the Ximian GNOME experience, starting with the download and ending in some configuration issues. A good read for those of us who have older systems."
...let them take over! Run something sane, fast and highly customisable like WindowMaker and create shortcuts or menus for your favourite g- and k-based apps.
If you really have to use KDE and want some serious speed increases, then compile both KDE and Qt from source with the switch --no-g++-exceptions. This is a hint from Linux from Scratch which works very well.
--- Hot Shot City is particularly good.
Why not? I run netBSD on a 20 mhz machine from time to time. (a sun3/60). My only linux machine is a 386-25, but the monitor failed years ago so now it sits on a shelf and handles my mail. Works just fine.
Now I admit those machines are a bit slow, but they work, and they are more than 10 times faster than the atari I started out with (1.6 mhz, and 8 bits).
My main machine runs at 200 mhz, but it has two processors. I see no reason to replace it, it is afterall rock solid, and I don't like 3-d graphical games. I don't need more power, I need the power I have used wisely.
Of course, a large part of the problem lies with Nautilus, which is (if this is in fact possible) slightly slower than Mozilla on my system. Seeing as Mozilla is constantly getting faster and Nautilus is no longer actively maintained, I see this as a potential problem.
This is just untrue. Nautilus is very actively maintained. Darin Adler, former Eazel-employee are maintainer on his spare time, now together with Alex Larsson.
Lots of the slowness in Nautilus 1.0.x seems to come from general slowness in the immature Gnome-libraries that only Nautilus exposed fully in Gnome 1.x. Nautilus for Gnome 2 got a lot faster for "free", when shifting to the Gnome 2 platform. In addition, lots of other speed improvements have been made.
I can happily say that Nautilus 1.1.x (The Gnome 2 development platform) is very fast. Opening a new window is about twice as fast. Changing directories is almost instantanious. Even large image-dirs with thumbnailing turned on is acceptably fast. This is on a Pentium III 550 with 256MB of ram.
I'm going to try this out on a lower end machine, but the huge speed increases is reported to have a nice effect here as well. Nautilus should be usable on reasonably low end machines now, if you turn off the latest bells and whistles.
For me, it is also nice that the SVG-rendering in Nautilus 2 is a lot faster. I'm unable to "feel" a speed difference between a regular theme and a vector-icon (SVG) theme.
I know there will be lots of people posting about window manager XYZ or the like, but I have finally settled on a very usable and very fast configuration that I think should not be overlooked.
I run the following:
DE/WM: XFce
File Manager/Desktop icons: Rox filer/XFtree
Web Browser: Galeon, Opera or Dillo
Mail Client: Sylpheed or Evolution
Word Processor: AbiWord, Applix or WP8
Other Desktop apps: Gnumeric, JPilot
I have two machines: An Athlon 900 with 768MB of RAM and an old Laptop. A P233 with 64MB RAM. I find that the above works perfectly on either. Initially I set XFce/Rox/Sylpheed/Dillo up just for the laptop. At the time I was using KDE on the big machine. Then I realized how much all of the fancy integration costs. KDE was unusable on the laptop, Gnome without Nautilus or GMC was okay, but XFce etc. put them all to shame.
Rox is a great file manager. It's blindingly fast, has lots of features normally only associated with Natilus or Knoqueror, and is very tiny. Same goes for XFce.
Also, XFce has very good keyboard bindings that just make sense.
If I was going to create a distribution tomorrow I would use the above setup as the default rather than KDE or Gnome. The apps are great, but the overall weight of the system is just too much. I find XFce on my Debian Potato laptop is finally about as fast as Win95 was on the same machine. Oh, and PCMCIA actually works better on that machine in Linux than it did in Windows.
Honestly, XFce and Rox are such nice programs, I'm really shocked that more people don't use them. They're fast, the developers are responsive, and the programs are small and stable. I used to cringe when people would tell me that they were installing Linux onto a machine with lower specs than my laptop. It doesn't have to be that way.
As for the apps, most Gtk apps that I use seem to be as fast as you could expect. Xmms, Gnumeric, abiword, jpilot, even gimp are all quite fast considering what they do. Personally, I'm impressed that the author got StarOffice to work as well as he did. I tried OpenOffice on my laptop. I started it up, a few minutes later the HD was still thrashing. I gave up and logged out. Works great on the Athlon, though, and build 642 seems a bit faster. Applix and WordPerfect 8 are _much_ faster. In fact, I'd argue that recent builds of AbiWord aren't actually much speedier than WordPerfect 8 for Linux.
Anyway, there's my 2 cents.