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."

Comments

I've said this before

[EricKrout.com]

I've said this before and I'll say it again -- FEATURE REQUESTS!

Users are continually requesting new features to be implemented in their favorite software packages. Of course this is going to add overhead, increased memory and disk space requirements, etc.

As someone working on a product, it's your job (and you take pride in) satisfying those who use your program. If they "ask nicely" for new capabilities, you try your darndest to give them to 'em. Sometimes, just "getting it right" is more important than bug testing or tweaking/streamlining your code; you're too busy working on the next task at hand.

m o n o l i n u x :: See For Yourself What Everyone's Talking About

Re:I've said this before

[garett_spencley]

I completely disagree.

First of all, if I'm a free software developer I owe nothing to the users of my software. This is because I'm not being payed for my work. I'm doing it out of love for what I'm doing. If you want something added then do it yourself.

Now if I'm being payed for my work than that's a different story but I still disagree with you. Yes it is my responsibility to meet the demands of the customers because they are the one's that are putting the cash in my pocket when you get down to it. However, it is also my responsibility to ensure that what they get for their money works properly. That means testing, optimising and fixing bugs the "right way" :O) Not just getting it to work and "moving on to the next thing at hand".

--
Garett

Other arches.

[saintlupus]

GNOME for low-end boxes.

From a PPC standpoint, don't even try on anything older than a G3. I've run Ximian GNOME under LinuxPPC on a Motorola Starmax and a 6500/225. Both times were actually _painful_. I don't know if the speed has picked up any since whatever version that was, but I certainly don't want to try again.

Blackbox and E, on the other hand, are both pretty speedy on my 7200/120.

--saint

Does Windows have an edge?

[nakhla]

In this situation, does Windows have an edge? I've noticed that Windows comes up much faster on my Dual 1GHz P3 with 1GB RAM than KDE 3.0 does. MUCH faster. There's so much hype about Linux someday conquering Windows on the desktop. Is this REALLY possible if Windows runs faster than GNOME and KDE, the two leading GUIs for Linux?

Would this problem be solved by using one GUI library? If you think KDE is slow, try running GNOME apps on KDE. The overhead of loading all of those additional UI libraries is unbelievable. Would Linux on the desktop be more effective if only one UI library was used?

Re:One data point

[Da Schmiz]

the "user experience" is very smooth. I wouldn't want to use anything else

Agreed. Ximian does a really good job of making it slick and easy to use. Mandrake + Ximian is the only combination I could consider getting my parents to use.

(Although, for the record, I found installing Ximian to a Mandrake 8.0 system kinda messy... I eventually reinstalled Mandrake without any Gnome packages, and then installed Ximian over that. It's worked fine ever since.)

Galeon simply has a smaller resource footprint and a better user interface

Also agreed. Galeon was the only browser I used for practically everything for quite a long time. However, I've since dropped it in favor of Opera, which is also very slick. Opera's MDI is, to me, a bit nicer than Galeon's tabbed mode, although either is far better than the resource-hog style of other browsers when opening new windows.

In short, Galeon is good, but Opera is better. But either one is far better than Netscape (although Mozilla is finally getting good) or MSIE (although I still keep a copy under VMware because some websites (like my bank) still won't work well with anything else. Hmmm... maybe it's time to get a better bank...

Bloat can never be good.

[Borax_Man]

I remember booting an XT and starting a word processor, off floppies, and it still took less time than loading KDE and StarOffice on my AMD 700 with RH 7.1. I also remember booting Word 2.0 on a 386 DX20, with Win31, still faster, also remember booting Word97 on a P100, still faster. Yes I'm sure KDE3 does more than KDE 1, but if you look at EVERYTHING it does, not just the snazzy stuff, but everything, including the window manager, drawing a panel,everything its responsible for, then KDE 3 really does not do all that much more, and the general usage is still pretty much the same. The point is, that my PC not has nearly 100 times the ram of one I had 5 years ago, and is approximately 500 times faster according the the benchmarks I ran, yet for software to run the same speed, or slower, is if you take this into account unforgivable. Even with 4 times the features, a desktop may run 10 times slower than Win 3.1 and by 10 times larger, but its 100's of times slower! With PC's exponentially faster than ones 7 years ago, we should be be enjoying the ability to support 40 people on 1 PC, AI, interfaces that are so fast, that theres no waiting whatsoever to load an app and everything in nice and instant, yet we are still were we where 7 years ago, just able to check e-mail, do word processing etc and still waiting for out PC to load an open file dialog box, and in 7 years time, it wont be any different. Computers 100 times faster than the ones we have now will still just be able to run office apps and a desktop. The point is, if coding was as efficient as it was back then, then we could have the extra features, and still be blindingly fast, but it looks as if were condemmned to be running as fast as we can with hardware upgrades just to stay in the same place. Progess should have had us being able to support many, many more features on our PC's efforlessly, the only software that has really advanced is games, well some of them. If you compare the difference between Quake3 and Wolf3d, youll see what I mean, then compare between KDE 3 and Win95.

Low end, high quality desktops

[Laplace]

At work I develop scientific applications. Since I don't want to waste memory, but still want to have a functional X server, I run a window manager called PWM (if you do a search for it on google, use the keywords "pwm" and "ion"). I like it because it takes almost no memory, and allows me to dock windows together. It suits my style of working.

I run a Blue and White G3 at home, with SuSE 7.3. I just reinstalled the system last night in (what appears to be a successful) attempt in building the perfect system. I downloaded the most recent version of Windowmaker (0.80) and spent some time configuring it. It is a sweet desktop. I have all of the applications that I use regularly at my fingertips, have lots of fun dockable apps to do useful things like establish my internet connection and play my ogg-vorbis files, and have lots of eye candy.

I compiled Windowmaker with CFLAGS="-O3" (highest level optimizations), and it screams. I'm not running particularly fast hardware, but with over half a gig of memory plugged into it and my favorite apps optimized, it hauls ass. I absolutely love it. Windowmaker is one of the most overlooked window manager projects out there, and takes a little to get used to, but is well worth the effort.

Do we *really* need file managers?

[gatoresque]

I use GNOME at work on a Debian Woody box. I use the GNOME panel and sawfish, and most other GNOME apps. But I use neither GMC nor Nautilus, and I find that the system responds really fast, hogs less RAM, and I don't really miss the icons on the desktop that much. So everyone, what am I missing here? How do you use these file managers in a way that I would benefit by reconsidering them?