GNOME in the Year of the Monkey

An anonymous reader writes "GNOME Foundation's Tim Ney describes some of the project's efforts marking the Lunar New Year of the Monkey with a tip, "Never sit with your back to a lobbyist for proprietary software." GNOME is rapidly becoming popular in developing countries and you can donate to help."

Comments

Developing countries?

[Anonymous Coward]

How is GNOME becoming popular in developing countries when it's geared towards newer machines? I mean, you need at least 128M of RAM to run GNOME smoothly, and many systems in developing countries have 16, 32 and (just possibly) 64M of RAM. I would've thought they'd use IceWM or perhaps XFce.

This is the only problem I see for GNOME and KDE. Powerful and flexible as they are, they're so bulky and huge that they don't feel much faster than Windows XP. If we want to give people an incentive to switch, we want them to FEEL that their machines are faster under Linux. Instead, you can see on message boards around the Net first-timers stating that Linux is "slow" and "bloated" because of this.

I hope at some point KDE and GNOME developers really make headway into the bloat and performance, because otherwise it's not only unusable for any machine built earlier than 2001, but also doesn't give a good impression. Linux was always known as the speedy, svelte and lighweight OS - this image is being eroded.

Re:Developing countries?

[Anonymous Coward]

but memory is cheap. What's the big deal?

The big deal is that some people use GNU/linux because they can get it for $0.

We don't want Little Johnny to have to ask his parents to upgrade before he can give GNU/linux a whirl.

Re:Developing countries?

[Homology]

As you say, RAM does matter (I have 262Mb on the home machine) but memory is cheap. What's the big deal?

Read the parent post again, and note what he writes about developing countries and older PCs.

Memory is not cheap when you are poor, so, it's indeed a big deal.

For those of us that are priviliged, and still want to use older machines, we may have trouble getting more memory. For instance, I've got a Dell Dimension L466cx that can only use PC100 memory. Now, the online stores in my country only sells PC133 memory, so more memory may be hard to get.

Re:Developing countries?

[arvindn]

Linux was always known as the speedy, svelte and lighweight OS

You mean on the server. Which it still is. The *nix DEs never had much of a reputation for speed (except maybe wmaker and other niche WMs). Please don't confuse the two. I remember KDE 1.x being very slow on the hardware of the day. Today's KDE and GNOME are certainly way faster on today's hardware.

From my observations...

[Xpilot]

...I've always found slashdot to be rather GNOME-hostile, with many vocal critics always bashing it rather nastily (especially in comparison to the more "integrated" KDE). I use GNOME, and I don't get the hang-ups over "integration" and "consistency". I care more about applications (My favourites are Evolution, Gaim, Galeon, XChat...all of them GTK apps), so even though I don't require GNOME to use them, it seems all of my favourite stuff uses GTK, so using the GTK-based GNOME is only natural.

Re:Gnome

[digitect]

Heh, the theme you linked to prove your point was only uploaded today. Downloads per day at art.gnome.org is calculated over a very recent period. (Like maybe even 24 hours.) So popularity is nowhere close to indicating the most number of downloads.

GNOME users are not some homogeneous group. (Are the other desktop's users?) We come from Mac9, MacX, Win95, WinXP, KDE, Solaris, the command line, and others. So to define your "one interface" is perhaps not as simple as you seem to think it is.

Half of the real question about the quality of a desktop environment is how well it works for someone who has never used a computer before. (The other half being for someone who has.)