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

Okay, maybe a troll...

[rho]

(The hot plugging is in fact so good now that I can put the machine in "hibernate" mode, in which everything in RAM plus video RAM is swapped to disk and the machine is powered down, remove or insert a PCMCIA card, and upon awakening from the hibernate the card is recognized, initialized, and its module loaded. This is impressive stuff.)

Impressive, sure, if you haven't used a laptop with MacOS or Windows. I swap PCMCIA cards in and out of those platforms fairly regularly, and I don't even have to power down to do so.

It's only impressive because the PCCard code is so poor on free unixen.

Awful

[be-fan]

The performance of Linux GUI systems in general is pretty awful. Recently, I upgraded from a 300MHz PII to a 1700+ Athlon. Why? Almost everything I did (compiling, etc) ran fine on my old system. The only reason I had to upgrade was to run my desktop at a reasonable speed! Win2K is pretty damn snappy on 300MHz, and instantaneous on anything above 700MHz. Meanwhile, both GNOME and KDE are only barely tolerable on my 1.5GHz Athlon! Its still not instananeous enough, especially in KDE and GNOME. In terms of performance, Win2K is about equivilent to window maker with straight Xt applications or perhaps some of the more well-made GTK+ apps (ROX, Sylpheed). Given that Win2K does a hell of a lot more features than any of those combos, however, that's a pretty pathetic showing for Linux GUIs.

PS> I'm using Debian (sid), so no, its not the packaging!