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GNOME in the Year of the Monkey

Posted by michael on from the timmah! dept.

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."

2 of 227 comments (clear)

  1. Developing countries? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Developing countries? by arvindn · · Score: 4, Insightful
      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.