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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."
I agree with the article - although my "low-end" machine is an even lower spec than theirs - 220MHz with 32Mgs RAM - I have a few hundred Megabytes of harddisk free and have yet to find any small version of Linux that I can actually get to work! Hopefully I'll have more luck with this distro!
Video Game cheats, hints a
It's the same with *any* machine though. The more functionality and power an OS has, the more power and drive it's going to need behind it. If this wasn't the case, there'd be a time where faster hardware would become pointless.
Roadkill is yummy.
I've said this before and I'll say it again -- FEATURE REQUESTS!
:: See For Yourself What Everyone's Talking About
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
Time to pull out the ol commadore 64!
Hacker Media
Holy crap! on my Celeron systems, it's take days to compile it. But then again, I always felt KDE and Gnome were too slow, and have been sticking by WindowMaker.
The newest trend in computer software is higher requirements? Windows is lightyears ahead!
Try installing the Scalable Gorilla theme for Nautilus on your Gnome box. It's all SVG so it is very nice, but resource-intensive.
I tried it on my dual PIII-550 machine and it slowed it way down. The SVG fun pegged the processor at 100% quite often. But, I just return to a simple theme, or run Midnight Commander, and speed, speed, speed of Linux returns!
--
Fortran programmer...oh yeah. Array math for life!
Who says that you need to run the latest and greatest? I have my p133 sitting at school right now running slackware 4, KDE 1.1.2, with two 4 gig Hard Drives and 64MB RAM. Meanwhile, on my box at home, I jsut upgraded to KDE3RC3, 750Mhz, 384MB, 60G. At school, my computer is fine for exactly what I need, KDE has been stable, and honestly. Both machines are running at the same pace, and KDE 3 has more bells and whistles. If you don't want all the extra bells and whistles, why do feel like you need to upgrade?
The current versions of software are designed to run on recent hardware. This has always been true, if there is a need to upgrade your software, you may need to upgrade yours system.
Objects in the blog are closer then they ap
I use Linux for most of my work with WindowMaker, except when I'm at a client site. Right now I'm using an NT box and Exceed to work on a 4 processor AIX box. I carry AIX compiled GNU utilities whereever I go, and a tiny window manager called gwm. It does all I want or need: xterms and a virtual desktop, in 500K.
If you've got a really dinky box, I can recommend WindowMaker. If your machine is really REALLY dinky, then use something even lighter than that. Not a hard decision.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
I run Ximian GNOME and Red Hat 7.2 on a relatively old box: Pentium 233 MMX with 96 megs of RAM and 20 gig hard drive (the old 1 gig drive finally died.). It's a little slow; sometimes it takes a few seconds for a menu to be displayed. On the other hand, the "user experience" is very smooth. I wouldn't want to use anything else: not Windows, not KDE. (This is a matter of personal prefernce; ymmv).
My only major complaint is that Galeon isn't a part of the Ximian GNOME package. They have Mozilla, which is good, but Galeon simply has a smaller resource footprint and a better user interface. Obviously it's trivial to install the appropriate Galeon RPMs; OTOH, I often wonder why Ximian hasn't adopted this browser as a part of their standard packages. I look forward to the day when this changes.
Finding God in a Dog
Don't know if your trolling or not, but no. I run Gnome+Nautilus on a RH7.2 box with dual PIII-550. It flies. Of course, a modern P4 or XP make this box a tortoise.
Fortran programmer...oh yeah. Array math for life!
KDE3, soon to be released, does marginally more than KDE-1.x did
I'm betting there's hordes of KDE develepers out there that would gladly wring this guy's neck for that nasty little comment.
BlackBox is highly configurable, too. I was bored one day filling in at one of our data centers and decided to switch the Ops workstation to use BlackBox. One thing I wish KDE could do is run a program like CMatrix in the root window... :-)
-B
Ash and Hickory, straight-grained and true, make excellent bludgeons, dandy for the cudgeling of vegetarians.
Calling Gnome small is like saying the national debt is small. The last time I brutalized myself with red carpet my 30GB hard drive died.
"God is dead." - Frederik Nietzsche
Favorite quote from the article:
The toll for the computer is high; when there was no Linux, the price of software made it higher still. Now that there is Linux, we're doing our part to raise the fee by requiring machines that many cannot afford.
I was sad to find absolutely no mention of anything besides KDE and Gnome. Fluxbox, Windowmaker, ICE, etc are all great low resource alternatives. Starting Gnome takes at least 45 seconds on my 233 with 64mb ram, but much less when I start up twm.
It would be a real shame if people start saying "whatever Intel/AMD gives, linux takes away".
--
Long-term effects of Bush deficits
C'mon people. Let go of the past.
Low-end now is considered...300-400mhz, where the latest RedHat distros run great.
You can get a brand name, 1.6ghz, 256mb, 60gb, WITH a flat screen for $999
That should be low end, but it's not
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
The author does make a good point regarding bloated linux software but on the other hand, why bother with KDE/Gnome as your *desktop* when there are many decent, low-resource alternatives such as IceWM, Blackbox, Window Maker etc?
...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.
As a server, linux has an advantage over some other OSes in the fact that it has a small overhead and requires little power to perform well. It would be sad to see that being tossed out the window (no phun intended) in favour of feture bloated izzy wizzy cool capabilities few ppl really need. On the base it performs extremely well but the same cant be said about Gnome. Kde and Gnome seems to be headed the same direction as windows has. Some sort of value in new fetures doo need to exist before tossing them in. Do i need seven mailclients or is what i really need an easy way to edit configs? Fetures should be scored and compared and some of them should be dropped or removed if they dont add what they cost in overhead. Else linux is going to bee the same bloated pile of endless code and fetures few ppl use. I would like to see more diversety and less similar fetures that all do the same thing but n a slightly different way.
HTTP/1.1 400
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.
I will say, though, that I don't mind the menubar at the top of the screen. I've populated it with the things I need, and it rarely gets in my way.
Of course, I have a large screen and frequently use five or six virtual desktops to hold all my windows, so a few pixels of the top is not nearly as important as pager problems would be. On that front, I have always preferred Gnome's paging model to KDE's; I use a setup with four viewports per workspace, with a 1000-ms delay to swap viewports by moving the pointer to the edge of the screen.
In any case, the point of this long-winded comment is that Ximian Gnome is a neat package, but the overall speed is not nearly as nice as I'd like it to be. (And, before I get flamed, the reason I haven't yet turned off all the bits of chrome that Ximian installs, like Nautilus, is that I actually like chrome. I just wish I could have a schweet-looking system that's fast too.)
Ah well... Everything works for the time being, so I'm unlikely to change anything on this system anytime soon (I actually have to do real work on this computer). On my other machine, I use KDE whenever I start X -- which isn't often.
That's what I love about Linux... you get choices. If I want Gnome, I've got Gnome. If I want super-fast, geekoid-to-the-max sysadmin functionality, I've got bash. I'm happy.
"Anything is better than IE, and you can quote me on that." -- Wil Wheaton.
... even though I have a 0.9GHz T-bird. A generation behind the times, maybe, but still a snappier box than I'll need for a while yet. I can actually get shorty (my little 266MHz laptop) running with about the same configuration as gas-o (my big machine), and run much the same apps: emacs, moz, GIMP, LaTeX sometimes if I need to write something for human consumption. How, you ask? Two words: Window Maker. :)
N4st0r, trixx0r h0bb1tz0rz! Th3y st0l3 0ur pr3c10uzz!
Ok, he complains that KDE is slow, but also admits that on this little box he's running w/ antialiasing and mosfets liquid theme, both of
which are cpu hogs. As I understand it XFT currently has to parse all of the fonts every time it opens a window (don't know about redraws).
Liquid, cludges transparency and other nifty effects, these take cpu resources. If you are on a small machine, and want to use KDE turn off all
of the eye candy. The wizard that runs the first time you log in tells you this and gives you a sliding bar to choose between more eye candy, less speed or more speed, less eye candy.
He makes other comments that make me wonder how clued in he is too, like not knowing what gdm is,
being surprised that gdm logs him into kde when kde is in his defaults file, etc. I think this
"review" should be taken as a relatively new linux users foray into another desktop, not as
a comparison betwwen gnome and kde. Besides, any
sane user of linux on an old machine would not use either. Personally I think xfce is very fast on old hardware, and looks nice too.
Trying to use gnome on a low-end box? :P
:) }
Uh, yeah, sure
Might as well run windoze on it.
For low end systems we have WindowMaker, FVWM, and best of all, Blackbox.
{ Blackbox 0wns j00
Not saying anything bad about gnome, it's a great product, so is KDE, but it's for people that like eyecandy and windows-like features. Either buy new hardware or use a slimmer windowmanager. Gnome, KDE, and windows don't cut it.
We dance to all the wrong songs.
--Refused.
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.
There's a lot of good work being done in window managers, and most of them are a lot less resource-hungry than GNOME or KDE. (My particular favorite is Enlightenment, mainly because I find the design very creative.) Of course, they all cater to folks with a serious let-me-tweak-everything mindset. But then, who else wants to run a GUI on old box that most people would just throw out?
WindowMaker is an excellent window manager. It works great for my low end laptop. (Pentium 150, 72 Megs RAM, 3 GB HDD) WindowMaker is small enough to run very well on my laptop.
Gnome is all pretty and whatnot, but if you want a simple window manager that works well on low end machines, I think WindowMaker or something similar is the way to go.
Jeremy Baumgartner
This guy is complainng about bloat and performance of Ximian Gnome and KDE, then goes on to reveal he has been using Mosfets Liquid theme and other eyecandy goodies. Well OF COURSE it's going to be going slow. He also seems to blame StarOffice's slow laucnhing on KDE. He doesn't seem to have a clue what he is talking about.
If you want a fast desktop on low end hardware, use WMaker ir FVWM or something simmilar. If you want eyecandy, use KDE/Enlightenment/Gnome. There is no news here, everyone has known this for a very long time.
I was thrilled with KDE, until I used it. I had serious performance issues on an Athlon 750 w/512M of RAM (serious relative to Gnome performance, that is).
I switched to Ximian and haven't looked back. Performance is of particular interest because I do use several "ancient" machines for assorted purposes and I like to have a consistent WM/DM across all machines. So it runs comfortable on my 200MMX with 64M as well as my Athlon 750.
this is getting old and so are you
blog
Personally I point new linux users at the latest mandrake (8.2) running KDE. ymmv. KDE is more similar to windows and a little more "integrated" than the other DE's or WM's, and I find that new users figure it out very quickly. GNOME, in my opinion is better if you know more about linux, it has a high coolness factor some say. Strange thing is that while KDE might be the better DE IMHO, gnome/gtk apps are better and typically more mature since KDE has been a moving target and gnome has been relatively stable for longer.
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?
Likewise, people with low end comps are often getting screwed by missing out on great new stuff that they just can't run.
Being that I am a member of the former (I built my own uber comp and have two Dell uber comps) I am sensitive to the latter.
So I wonder if software can be developed to be sensitive to the user's comp. SOmetimes this is done - Unreal Tournament detects what video settings you are capable of. If this was done more, we wouldn't have to see software constantly coded down to the least common demoninator. The only piece of software that seems to be doing this in a forward looking way is (not surprisingly) a game - Asheron's Call 2.
This is just another chicken and the egg essay. Is it the availability of hardware resources that drives developers to write 'bigger' code with more features, or is it the 'bigger' code with more features that pushes hardware to be upgraded? In essence, it is both. They are completly symbiotic. Nither would exsist without the other, therefore the forward motion of the hardware industry, along with a higher number of features available, are natually occurring phenomina. Don't moan that you don't want to buy new hardware. Do what I did and bite the bullet: get a job, hippie! ;)
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.
Potato chips are a by-yourself food.
Really. Newer software is designed because newer hardware is available. The new software is generally coded for/with the new hardware in mind.
If this guy wants to run a system on older hardware, he should be using software that was designed around the same time the hardware was available. Try the Linux 2.0 kernel series, X 3.3.6. Older distributions had smaller foot prints. Older versions of window managers would be smaller and quicker to compile. Speaking of which, if you have an old system, don't expect to be able to compile all these new software packages with new features designed to take advantage of new hardware, in a reasonable amount of time. Use the older stuff with feature sets that match those of your hardware.
Older software is still stable, too. That's why at the time it was released as a 'stable version'. It just doesn't have some of the new features and additions that consume resources. Said features weren't around in old software, because said resources weren't available.
-kidlinux.
The great thing about Linux is that you can cut out the windowing system altogether and still have a useful, up to date machine. I was only half-way joking with a friend today that I wanted to pick up an old Powerbook 170 off of eBay and slap NetBSD for 68k powered procs on it (http://www.netbsd.org/Ports/mac68k/index.html) to make it a smooth links, elm, vi utilizing geekbox. That's a bit extreme, but conosle-only on my old Motoral StarMax 603e isn't.
So though I'd agree that no author has any obligation to keep hardware requirements down so that they'll run on a P1 133 MHz box and that you can't expect to run tomorrow's GNOME on yesterday's system, one bit of the "beauty" of Linux is that you can still run tomorrow's software without having to make updates to parts of your system you don't want to update -- or, in this case, add the part to your system at all!
It's all 0s and 1s. Or it's not.
I actually use a couple of gnome apps, and have the g/f on a very low end system (pentium 1 233).
WM = Windowmaker
Filer/Desktop = ROX
Works great!
Luckily, Enlightenment hasn't been updated since the days when 200mhz was the norm :)
--------
It's OK to be social, just don't tell anyone about it.
Remember that Redhat 7.x does require a minimum of 32 Mb of RAM to install.
:)
I'm glad my boss has some spare SIMMs there.
--- Sueños del Sur - a webcomic about four young siblings
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!
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
With the versions and default sessions I get with redhat 7.2, I measued the memory usage of KDE and gnome. KDE weighs in at a hefty 95 MB, while gnome uses "only" 41 MB. For comparison, the fvwm2 setup I use includes an email checker that tells me how many mesages I have, a clock, a loadgraph, cpu usage graphs (per CPU), button bar, and virtual desktop pager. The workings of the window manager itself are more configurable than either gnome or KDE. And all this is only 4MB! That's about 24 times less than KDE.
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.
-B
Ash and Hickory, straight-grained and true, make excellent bludgeons, dandy for the cudgeling of vegetarians.
Have you tried Fluxbox?
It is built off Blackbox 0.61.1 with some "enhancements". I really like using the tabs between windows.
Sorry but the author never told us what his definition of low end is.. My definition is a Pentium 200 or 233 mmx. and Gnome let alone the Ximian version is NOT sutable for it.
Nautlius is the biggest problem with it sucking up 90% of all your resources.. Best replacement? try your damnedest to delete Nautlius and install ROX. (Rox will even do the desktop dance for you if you like. and for some reason ROX is almost 1/10th the size of Nautilus.. and hellishly faster too..
Basically.. on a low end system.. you really need to abandon all the bloated (P-II and higher required desktop systems that are Gnome and KDE. they have their place with the Windows horsepower equiviliant systems (I use KDE on my 2 processor P-III 866 "low end system") but blackbox+ROX or Enlightenment+ROX or any combination of efficient and tightly written code will give you awesome performance...
I hope that someday both KDE and Gnome will stop the feature-add phase and enter the make is run superfast.... and it can, they just need to take time out from the "fun" of adding toys to the dull part of cutting cruft and optimise..
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I run Gnome on some 'old' systems:
One thing is that on both of these machines, I don't run Nautilus or GMC. Not a big fan of graphical file managers, I don't miss them. It's quite possible that they would slowficate the Gnome experience.
Oh, and another thing. Gnome 1.2, when I installed it, still looked like it could do with some sanding, and maybe another coat of paint. There were things left out of libraries, or in an inefficient way (thinking of some of the drawing routines.) These probably contributed to the memory usage and slowness of some graphical applications. Here's hoping that's all in the past now with Gnome 2 around the corner.
...now I have 32 Mb. Still with an Am586, and an Acer 7004P monitor... Crappy, huh? :(
:)
:)
On the other hand, I still have many gigs free in my HDD.
Redhat 7.2, WindowMaker, GNOME apps for my needs (as recommended in a post below).
Enough to make me happy.
--- Sueños del Sur - a webcomic about four young siblings
I'm using GNOME 1.4 on a K6-200 and it' smooth. I had to kick nautilus and use gmc as I expected but apart from that, there are no problems.
At home I run KDE 2.2 on FreeBSD 4.5 on 233 Mhz Machine with 128 Meg memory and a 3 gig drive. I'm very satisfied with the performance. Application launching is a tad slow, but 128 Meg memory is plenty for what I want to do with it, so leaving all the apps I wan to run open solves that problem.
:)
I think it may actually be faster than running OS X on my 300 Mhz Mac at work.
-mark
Nautilus certainly is maintained (by Darin Adler and Alex Larsson) see the developers mailing list for more details at the moment the gnome2 port is just about finished and the speed improvements they've got into nautilus2 are amazing. Eazel may have died a while back, but not all the developer left...
Here's looking forward to GNOME2.
... but at least blackbox is useable. :)
--- Sueños del Sur - a webcomic about four young siblings
I for one am glad that GNOME is finally moving into the realm of modern GUIs. Yes, maybe modern is synonymous with slow, but it's also synonymous with features.
If linux is going to make it on the desktop, it's gonna have to match closed sources OSs on a feature for feature basis. This means it has to have a level of feature bloat similar to windows -- and therefore similar compilation times.
I don't cry for those with slower machines "in parts of the world where fast machines are unavailable" (BS, by the way -- my friend in Bangladesh has a better machine than I do, and his family's yearly income is less than my weekly). They still have options: GNOME 1.x, for example. This is Linux, man, there's no need to upgrade if what you have now is working. Sure, the new toys would be great...but if the choice is Windows 3.11 or GNOME 1.x, you're still better off petting the penguin.
Hey freaks: now you're ju
Fluxbox is looking VERY cool - especially since they're working towards full ICCCM support, which means full support for KDE and GNOME.
I'd like to see this review looked at again with a gtk theme like Premier (uber-fast, uber-clean) and Fluxbox as the WM!
The Free desktop that Just Works
It is built off Blackbox 0.61.1 with some "enhancements". I really like using the tabs between windows.
I just heard about it last night, but never before that, I don't think. I mighta read about it once while perusing a blackbox site.
I may give it a try after kde3....but if it's "enhancements" slow it down, no way. that's what's so great about blackbox, it looks great and is extremely quick. but yeah...you obviously know that.
What attracted me to Linux in the first place was that it WOULD run on old hardware. My first Linux install was on a 486/66 with 350 meg hard drive (later added another 500 with a drive bought on eBay) and 16 meg RAM. My main machine at home is an IBM Aptiva from 1995, originally 32 meg of RAM but upgraded to 64 (all it will hold) and under 200 megahertz. I run Windowmaker with a nice theme and use text mode mc for file management, plus I run gnome apps like pan and sylpheed. I also do some development in Java.
At work I have a 486/33 originally purchased as a Novell server and left under somebody's desk. It runs Red Hat 5.2, mostly in text mode but I do occasionally fire up X.
The ability to run on low end computers is one of the best selling points of Linux.
Also, I use WindowMaker because I think it is the best desktop ever. It isn't lack of resources keeping me from using GNOME or KDE. On Windows at home I use LiteStep, and I'd use it at work too if I could.
I've seen in several places people say that its okay for newer software to require newer hardware. That's absolute bull-crap. Newer software should only require more power if it is more features than older software. I can accept a fully anti-aliased, transparent-everything desktop to be slower than a standard one, because of all the eye candy. However, KDE and GNOME in their present state aren't any more functional than Windows 2k/XP. Yet, they are much, much slower*. Say you're grading things wholistically. You're three important catagories (on the desktop) are features, performance, ease of use, stability, and security. Win2k/XP wins the first one, not only because it has features that GNOME and KDE don't, but because these features are much more mature and widely used. The KDE/GNOME component systems might be great, but far more apps take advantage of COM/OLE on Windows. Win2k/XP wins the second one, hands down. Even with my 1.5GHz KDE2 machine, I still sometimes look longingly at my brother's 750Mhz Win2K machine. The stability bit is a wash. WinXP itself is rock solid, but Windows apps are often flaky. On the other hand, same parts of GNOME and KDE (Konq and Galeon in particular) can be flakey as well, so its probably even. In terms of ease of use, its also probably a wash. As long as you've got a sysadmin, WinXP is as easy to maintain as KDE/GNOME. WinXP is more consistant than either, but Windows apps tend to be more annoying and less customizable, which cancels that out. In terms of security, both are even. WinXP has far more powerful security options (ACL, etc) which are important in multi-user desktops. However, WinXP tends to have more security faults, which cancels the advantages. Normally, security would go to Linux, but on a desktop, access control tends to be more important than hacking-resistance. So, in most of the catagories, its even between WinXP and GNOME/KDE. If WinXP performs a hell of a lot better, what advantage does GNOME/KDE have? The only thing I can think about is that its free software, which is the only reason I use Linux and not Windows. Its a damn good reason, but it would be nice to have some other perks too...
* Which is ironic in itself, because they're running on kernel that is much, much faster. They can't even blame X, because (from the benchmarks I've done) X is damn competitive to GDI, and in many respects (blitting bitmaps, for example) can even beat DirectX. Nope, after about 4.x, the "but X sux" arguement kind of dissapeared.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
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.
The middle mind speaks!
I knew people where going to post "So don't install it! Use **insert small window manager here**!"
I believe the point of this excirse is "is it possible?" not whether or not you should. Obviously on a minimalist system you don't install heavy weight software.
There is a reason to point out things like the fact KDE and Gnome have issues running on small systems. It is up to the reader or the developers to figure out for themselves what this means.
I have my Pentium 3 650 (64M RAM) partitioned with Win98 and RH 7.2, and I have been dissappointed with my first Linux experience, as far as speed anyway. Windows just runs a bit faster (which is not to say "fast"), and Red Hat hasn't been without it's instability either (nor can it play my damn Soundblaster card).
;-), is exactly the same as before.
Some friends have blamed the partition/dual-boot scenario as the problem, saying that Linux occupies the "ass-end" of the drive (it does), but I'm doubtful, Windows, god bless it
Then again, the guy who wrote the article has had the same background for a decade, so who the hell knows............
And that's a shame, because a person needs only access to a computer and sufficient interest in order to create his or her own route out of poverty.
I'm not really sure I understand where this person is comming from... The largest Social Movement is South America, Brasil's MST (landless workers movement) use Land reform, land occupation, education, and community building to escape poverty.
If only it was as simple as loading up a computer with free software! Actually, the computer industry is terrible when it comes to poverty! The highest concentration of highly toxic waste sites (known as SUPERFUND sites) are in the Silicon Valley. We ship about 200,000 computers, which (including the monitors) high levels of lead, cadmium, etc to developing countries, where they pollute landfills and communities. This increases conditions of poverty, not helps them.
Especially Nautilus is a speed-demon in the latest Gnome2-versions.
This should mean that most people having trouble with Nautilus slowness should now be able to use it fine.
This also means that Gnome 2 is not a huge and bloated upgrade.
I use GNOME and the first thing I did was ditch Nautilus. My beef with Nautilus is it just has too much in it. Its a desktop manager, file manager, web browser, and theme manager. The problem with GNOME is there are other parts of GNOME that do the same thing. If you have a slow enough machine, mine is a K6-2 550, and use Nautilus you'll see GNOME start up and set your background color, pixmap, etc. Then the screen flashes a few times while Nautilus does the same thing. You can not turn off that feature of Nautilus but I you want Nautilus to do themes you're stuck first waiting for whatever other part of GNOME also does themes.
'Same speed C but faster'
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?
I have a few hundred Megabytes of harddisk free and have yet to find any small version of Linux that I can actually get to work!
I run Slack 7.1 on my P90/24MB laptop.
Slackware requires that you know a little about Linux config files, but it runs very smoothly.
I run Ximian Gnome on a P133
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.
Recently I was trying to get Ximian Gnome to run on an 8bpp pseudocolor Tek Xterm (a piece of hardware). Conclusion: it can be done, but don't try to run any other apps that rely on using pseudocolor. The panel or sawfish took all the colors, even with imlib set to a low color pallete.
Now, most somewhat modern apps will allocate a private colormap if it can't get all the colors it needs but there are some old apps that don't do that.
I ended up running icewm.
My two toshiba laptops are both slower and older then the examples provided. One is a Pentium 75, 16 megs of memory, and the other is an old 486 with 4 megs of memory. I hate to think what the reviewer would call them!
Windowmaker works great in this scenario. Highly recommended.
314-15-9265
Blackbox, or fluxbox and a few little apps can be used to make a very, very snappy system. There's no need to give up one's graphical tools to do it either. I run on a p200 with 64Mb of RAM, and the following setup even makes it feel fast.
[Science] is one of the very few things that raises human life a little above farce and gives it the grace of tragedy.
I've not fiddled with it very much, but cmatrix doesn't want to run. XEarth will, though. Which is better anyway.
-B
Ash and Hickory, straight-grained and true, make excellent bludgeons, dandy for the cudgeling of vegetarians.
There is obviously a conflict of interest. Luckily for us, Linux has always been about choice. For most developers, the lighter, more responsive it is, the better. For users, the more intuitive, helpful, and feature heavy it is, the better for them to get their tasks done. In most cases these two goals are mutually exclusive, but I think the point of the article was that Ximian had produced a unique desktop that could be run on both low end machines for those who do not have the option of the latest and greatest, and also on the higher end machines. We should never forget about the users.
Now there are a great number of reasons why people and organizations are unable to use the latest and greatest hardware, most of which can be traced to one problem - financial. I myself have observed this firsthand supporting a school network full of P-II 333mhz machines. As hardware starts to fail (hard drives, power supplies, etc) they are only able to afford replacing them at minimal cost, which usually means finding used hardware. I couldn't think about replacing the entire system, but thanks to the freedom of choice offered by Linux, we can provide them options to upgrading the entire system. Currently, I am looking at purchasing a terminal server, and converting all of their current computers into xterms, and using the K12LTSP distribution.
At least this way, they will have access to the latest and the greatest, without a major investment in computing hardware. Lets see other Operating Systems provide these kinds of choices for these kinds of financially strapped institutions and individuals.
I haven't lost my mind!
It is backed up on disk...somewhere...
Yes, KDE and GNOME have issues running on small systems. What this means is that if you don't want to deal with that you stick to software that does run well on small systems. For example, Enlightenment as the WM/desktop and plenty of GTK apps in the menus works just fine on "low-end" systems, in my experience.
It just seems to me that this is pointing out trivialities - on a low-end system, don't use resource-heavy software (and keep in mind that most of the *really* good stuff in Linux/UNIX is command-line anyway...terminal windows don't eat much in the way of resource unless it's Eterm with transparency and half a dozen other effects set). Tool == job.
I'm surprised he wasn't complaining about not being able to compile a Linux kernel on his 8088 or fit all the source for it on a 5 1/4 LD Floppy.
"It's here, but no one wants it." - The Sugar Speaker
Ideally, apps should be better and better coded, so that a newer version compiled witout the newer bloat is faster than the old version.
In the real world, vintage is all that matters. I think distros like Mandrake should continue to sell and improve the best of their historic versions. When they produce a good vintage, they should at least keep it available for dowload. One 'historic' distro for each two generation of processors seems a good balance to me. As a Pentium-120 owner, I am tired of being left in the dust.
As a side effect, this would allow to clearly taylor the latest version to the latest hardware, so everybody is happy. I am certain distro making would be much easier if there is a moving wall saying 'anything older than 3 years is not supported, for this we have version X-1.2 that works fine and has been updated with the recent goodies.'
Minh
So I get to the end of the article which is pretty much a scathing recount of why the writer likes KDE more than GNOME and think maybe there is going to be some good conclusion. I feel kind of let down now. Wow Ximian GNOME is different than KDE, it won't fit on a 720KB floppy disk, and worst of all a Dorito isn't a powerful enough chip to run it. Please. This is crap. Just looking at a screenshot of Nautilus ought to give you a clue it isn't going to run well on a 6502 with 512KB of RAM.
KDE takes longer to compile than it did a couple version ago, it is ten times more usable now than it was with the 1.0 release. It also packs more applications into the default installation than it used to. If you just want to use KDE apps just install the damn base libraries and don't mess with the DE. The same idea applies to GNOME. Trying to jam KDE 3 or Ximian GNOME 1.4 onto an old POS computer is a fools endeavor and it is dumb to expect all developers to keep the absolute lowest common denominator in mind. I don't think KDE or GNOME EVER ran on a 386 with 4MB of RAM. This argument pops up every once in a while when someone has trouble getting their old computer running some piece of software, to make people listen they whine about the children of third world countries who can't afford a new computer to run KDE or GNOME.
That being said, there is an amount of bloat when it comes to software, there always will be. Not everything can fit on a single floppy disk and saying everything ought to just because some people have older computers is counter productive. Coders with a schedule want it to work and get it out the door, making it elegant just costs you time and may only reduce your compiling time by a couple minutes or the binary size by a couple kilobytes. If you had to write to very constrained hardware it would make sense to save every extra kilobyte but there are simply too many fast computers in the hands of users today to make it worth while to scrimp on everything.
If you know you've got shitty hardware the onus is on you to use software on it that is going to have acceptable performance. You DO have the option with Linux specifically and OSS in general. Linux for the rest of us my ass. Why use KDE or GNOME at all? Are you gaining much from their use? Why not use something a bit lighter and frothy like WindowMaker or BlackBox? Why bitch and moan about the ripple applet in E not being smooth on your Commodore64? There are several lightweight distros around and the major distros also have lighter than usual schemes for you to install.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
I don't understand, why to run heavy gnome|kde stuff on slow machine? there are things like xfce (here) (The Cholesterol Free Desktop Environment) and FVWM didn't hurt anyone yet too. When I was running 486, I had FVWM. Now running machine with almost 1Gig of ram and still on FVWM... FVWM isn't Feeble as first letter in acronym says.
"Today's KDE3 release candidate takes eight hours on an Athlon running at 1.2 gHz with 768 megs of RAM. And when it is compiled, it runs just about as quickly as KDE-1.x did on that P-133."
So if KDE 3 runs "just as quickly" as KDE 1 did on the same P133, where's the problem?
Sheesh.
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
Two words for ya. ROX-Filer
slashdot!=valid HTML
I've got a G3 PowerBook 500 that runs OS X pretty snappily...
Also work with a G3 350 that is pretty responsive.
Sounds like you were messing with a 10.0.x version, try 10.1.x, much faster....
i don't read slashdot anymore.
Sorry buddy, nothing is up to date about a text based UI
Personally, I don't mind it, but I'm a geek. Anyone who's not a geek is GOING to mind it.
In terms of what? I don't doubt that Linux is faster at actually doing *work*. However, I find it hard to believe that it is anywhere near as "snappy." I mean opening menus, starting programs, etc.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Oh my. Never mind resource issues. Fluxbox has a very interesting and original design. That tabbed windows gimmick addresses some of my pet usability concerns. And it supports KDE apps. I gotta give it a try!
The RULE project http://www.freesoftware.fsf.org/rule/ is working on an installer to enable a Red Hat install with less RAM. Currently works with 12 Mb, target is 8 Mb.
I'm a watered down geek. I wish I was a full blood Uber Geek, I wish I really was.
... I'm sorry Linux doesn't really have a chance in the Joe Six Pack market. I know Be Inc in toast. But one can only hope the boys and girls over at openbeos.org are successful in their endeavors, so one day Open Source Stuff finds its way on the consumer desktop, undermining the foundation on the M$ monopoly.
I might find this article interesting, if I didn't find it so sad. I think linux is great, for back end stuff, don't get me wrong, but for the every day Joe Six-Pack it is no wonder Linux hasn't made any inroads into the consumer desktop space, and the mentioned article illustrates the typical reasons why.
I've loaded Linux on a Pentium 166 MX with 32 megs of ram, avec KDE and Gnome and it ran, but the experience wasn't really suitable for any one. I certainly wouldn't wish this on any one in a developing nation. I was blown away by BeOS though. I'm sure the Uber Geeks have convinced themselves to turn their noses up at it, but as far as usability small size and speed in a GUI
Take out that foundation and the rest won't stand.
It was actually a usable system.
My point, finally, is that Jesus-H-Christ! Why won't either KDE or GNOME (w/ as little eye candy as possible) run at a speed that I can actually use. It should be at least as "snappy" as those beasts in the computer lab running NT. What's so damn hard about running both Galeon and XMMS at the same friggin time! mp3 playback while surfing the web is unacceptable. ( I haven't quite figured out how to make xmms work outside of KDE or GNOME - sound system issues).
Ignoring the no-mp3s-for-me issue, I tried running Blackbox, Ice, and xfce. Ice, while it did most of what I wanted to do, still had some UI problems, and on top of that was somehow slow! BB is pretty quick, but I need some sort of taskbar... (call me a windows weenie, I don't care.) xfce was surprisingly fast, and with the multiple desktops I was able to satisfy my taskbar-like needs. I've been on a Win9x kick recently because the gods have made my box relatively stable, but when the stability gods fail me I go to bb or xfce... and forsake xmms.
It would just be nice to have a few things in an otherwise minimal desktop
If somebody does all of this and makes it easy to install, you will own the low-end linux desktop forever and ever.
The parent to this should have been +1 funny.
I think some moderators mis-undersand 'troll' as its used in this context. It means the post is likely to elicit a response without having any meaning of its own. For example "slashdot sux" by itself would be likely troll content. "The slashdot moderation system has some weaknesses..." would probably not be a troll, but an inciteful treatment of the moderation system.
Moderators, take your time and take your job more seriously. If what you did didn't matter there wouldn't be a mod system at all.
Squigleslash posts at 2 by default because his karma is above 25. You would know that if you had clicked on the link next to the time where it says (#3204505). This link shows information specific to that post, including the details of all the moderation done to the post. I've seen posts which had 7 positive and 4 negative mod points for a total of 5 (including the starting at 2).
For more information on the moderation system, see http://slashdot.org/faq/
Have a look here and here. The speed problems with KDE are in fact being scrutinised in interesting ways.
Blearf. Blearf, I say.
I'm trying to get Linux running on my Casio Data Bank watch, and having trouble getting the kernel to compile. Also, what is the best video card to run in this situation? I'd like to set up Timex-Sinclair as a 801.11b mp3 server too, but I can't find a driver for it anywhere. Hmm, any ideas?
I have an old Dell inspiron 7000 laptop running at 300Mhz. - Instead of Gnome/KDE i use blackbox - Instead of Mozilla, I use Opera - Instead of StarOffice i use abiWord And my system work great! Thats the nice thing with Linux, you can always choose. I think its right that KDE/Gnome work after Moors law (2x CPU in 18 month) , and if you kant keep up, use old versions or other software.
So what this guy is telling us is that he wants to continue using his same Pentium laptop at good speed (why should speed decrease?) while having things like dithered fonts installed and so on. No that's not reasonable.
Being my fastest machine a Pentium-100, I think that it's just wonderful to see real modularity and interoperability in action: For example, front-ends are front-ends in Unix, and this means that I can toast an audio CD just fine on my 486, just use cdrecord instead of a nice frontend. Try this kind of story in the Windows world and you're screwed.
Also flexibility. This same 486 machine (to give an example) has no screen or keboard.. but it has an old network card and telnet. Again, try something similar in the MS world or any other world.
And still I can do sophisticated documents using vi to describe them. I can well imagine trying to run Windows 95 + Word to work with templates, huge images and so on with this 4 mb ram 486. vi runs great and then I compile and see the result with gv (remotely). Not damn quick but works great.
I really think that Linux is the best OS an old computer can run. And it is good and FAST.
... you are forgetting that older software doesn't get maintained at the same level as newer software. developers upgrade their apps according to the latest & greatest version of qt/kde (or gtk/gnome), and in the meanwhile also add new features. these new features aren't neccesarily bloat, and wil only be available in new (slower & less functional) versions of the app.
UNIX has endured and Linux garnered so much attention not just for what they are but what they are not. I recall a time not to long ago when Windows 3.1 was considered blot ware and GUIs while providing a shallow learning curve did so at the expense of power and stability.
My question is this: What's changed?
Why do people insist on trying to turn Linux and UNIX into the very beast they complain about?
With a command line shell or even a lite windows manager Linux and UNIX are stable, powerful operating systems that are best of breed and untouchable by their competition. As GUI based desktop OSes they are as awkward, clunky, bloated and unstable as any of their competition - more so in some cases.
I hear time and time again how Linux GUI based desktops are 3-5 years behind their Windows counter parts - Well guess what - By the time they catch up Windows will have evolved and left the Linux and Unix communities another 3-5 years behind.
I will continue to use Linux and Unix to serve web pages, as a development platform and as a mail and file server, but when I want to surf the net, play a game, create a quick document or most importantly keep users happy and productive with a minimum amount of support Windows is the way to go.
I am running slackware on a 486/DX2-50 8M RAM 240MB HDD with X (and FVWM95) installed, but I spend most of my time in console mode.
I use Pine for email, Lynx for browsing (with image links enabled and spawning seejpeg to view images using SVGALib), even play mp3's with mpg123.
older versions of Netscape and Amaya work fine also. I can also run remote X and VNC sessions to other computers with little sluggishness (other than one would expect with a dial-up access)
Zipslack reduces the nees for an installer that occupies memory. You simply need a single floppy distro with mkfs and unzip utilities
To the BSD fans, what is the best BSD for a low resource system? Open, Net, or Free? I would like to try out BSD on that system.
I recently came across emelfm (GTK file manger) and I think everyone should take a look at it. It works dual or single-paned. Supports drag-n-drop, has a built-in command-line with output window, and has user configurable buttons (open XTERM here, et al.).
It's so configuable that it even lets you specify what command you want to use to DELETE a file (if you don't want the standard delete behavior).
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant