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Is the Linux Desktop Getting Heavier and Slower?
Johan Schinberg writes "Bob Marr wrote an interesting editorial about what many of us have have noticed lately: the three most popular Linux distros are getting "fatter" in terms of their memory footprint and CPU demands for their graphical desktops. Fedora Core 2 isn't usable below 192 MBs of RAM while Mandrake and SuSE aren't very far off similar requirements either. There was a time when Linux users would brag that their favorite OS was far less demanding that Windows, but this doesn't seem to be the case anymore. Modern distros that use the latest versions of KDE and (especially) Gnome feel considerably heavier than before or even than Windows XP/2k3. Sure, Longhorn has higher requirements than XP (256 MB RAM, 800 MHz CPU) and the final version will undoubtly be much more demanding, but that's in 2-3 years from now. For the time being, I am settled with XFce on my Gentoo but I always welcome more carefully-written code."
I like using GNUstep/Window Maker on my *nix boxes. It looks great and it's a lean, mean window moving machine.
In light of the Windowes System Requirements, is this really that big?
Fluxbox is still light and clean... with a bit of tweaking ;)
I haven't heard someone say they use Linux because it's somehow "lighter" since about 1997. The face of computing has changed, and the Linux distros have changed with it. More and more users are using Linux because it's getting more feature-rich. This is not a bad thing.
This is why I stick with slackware linux. It's still the cleanest smoothest runing linux distro I've ever used.
I can attest to this article.
My machine dual boots Win XP and Mandrake 9.1.
I'm using Gnome and sometimes KDE for Mandrake and when I'm in WinXP the system is a lot more fluid then in KDE or Gnome. I'm sure there are somethings I could to to tweak KDE or Gnome, but at least as far as Mandrake is concerned, out of the box, they drag ass!
Those people that want mean, lean systems can install the distro they prefer. The commercial distros need to complete with other commercial operating systems, including Windows. So if they need an equivalent amount of memory, I have no problem with that.
am fed up with Linux bloatware, I'm going back to the command line. ASCII art rendering of jpegs is all I need, hell you can print a load out and staple them together and have a flick book movie. -Or is it all that Ephemerides software that comes as standard?
If I promise to be a good boy can I have some better karma?
Personally -- I prefer fluxbox's minimalism. It doesn't really matter what the distros ship with because at least you're given an option on going with a lean option or a feature-ridden one.
Massive networking attempt for friends
Use the console and you can run any modern distro on a 486 if you wanted.
It's kinda obvious that memory will be used up (and quite a bit of it) if you use a flashy GDE like Gnome/KDE.
I run Gnome all the time and quite honestly I'm surprised that it uses the same memory as WinXP to run. It's not an easy task to get graphic intensive applications to run on very little memory.
We have secretly replaced these Slashdot mods' sense of humor with a rusty nail. Let's see if they notice!!
i have fedora core 2 now, slower than ever. too many useless pictures that do nothing. > fluxbox!!
--------- let's go steal some lunchboxes!
I use FC2 on my desktop at work and I'm often irritated by the long startup times for many apps. Although the machine there isn't anything special (P4 2.8Ghz, 384MB Intel onboard video, 40GB HD) it's a bit much to wait around 15-20 seconds for OpenOffice to load (yes, I do increase the memory settings), or 8 seconds for Ethereal (gui). Once things are cached it's not too bad, but still nowhere close to say MS Word's sub-second load time on the same hardware. I was under the impression that FC2 prelinked newly installed apps too, which should help to avoid these long load times.
;-)
It doesn't seem confined to Linux either; I use w2k as my main desktop at home (also have an FC2 desktop and Gentoo on my server/router) and opensource apps seem to have the same long load times. I won't compare Firefox to Explorer for obvious reasons, but the delay is noticable. I use Agent (a closed source usenet client) and it loads in 2-3 seconds for me, in contrast to Thunderbird email client which easily takes 3 times as long. This is strange since Agent has much more data to load (subscribed to 15 newsgroups, some very busy and so have thousands of messages - including bodies on disk).
Once apps are loaded in Linux or Windows, they perform well; It's just a shame that the initial startup times are the first experience you have of an app, and if you're drumming your fingers, it's not creating a good first impression.
That said, I still prefer Linux
Code, Hardware, stuff like that.
Yes! That is why I am not embarrassed to use Mac OS X and its Aqua interface. The problem really is an embarrassment of riches in the linux desktop environment. Like a rice rocket, you got slap on every piece of bling-bling your desktop you can find and the distros are catering to the trend. It won't be long before someone makes a "Type R" desktop.
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
That's because you are using the wrong distros and window managers.
Slackware running the development version of Fluxbox is extremely fast.
Sadly it used to be that you could run Linux on just about anything. I install all my servers with out any kind of X environment because it pigs up too much space. It is a pain too because RedHat automaticaly installs all sorts of crap that is unneeded, so I have to remove it after a generic install.
I used to run XWindows on 8 megs of RAM. (circa 1994)
I think the complaint that Linux desktops are getting too fat is spot-on. Then again, does anyone really run GUI applications on their important Linux servers?
If you GUI weenies would stay away from the bloated monstrosity also called X, you wouldn't need a gig of RAM for Linux. Quit being such pussies and get back to the terminal!
I remember cramming SuSE 5.3 on a 386 with 4MB of RAM (No, I'm not kidding).
I totally agree with the poster about GNOME/KDE, though. I haven't run KDE since the 1.x versions. I currently use blackbox and I've found it to be very lightweight and, most importantly, it doesn't get in my way. It manages my windows - that's it!
I've tried XFCE, fvwm, windowmaker and many many more. I've settled on BB for now.
Sure seems like I should be getting more bang for my CPU buck though. What's been taking up all the space in software these days?
I think any GUI is going to get "heavier" over time, as more features and functioanlity are added.
But what appeals to me is the option of not having to use a GUI. Being a long time user of U*NX and U*NX like operatiing systems, that is the biggest appeal to me.
what is more concerning to me is the lost of functions that some applications/programs are migrating to, for the whole "ease of use" thingy.
If you want all the bells and 'pretties' you pay for it in resources.
If you want to compare to the 'old days of UNIX' we didn't go for all the extras that were not really *needed* , so yes, we were much more efficient...
But in today's consumer market, 'pretties' is what sells..
And keep in mind this isn't a 'Linux thing' it's the same story regardless of what you choose to use, if you start layering on a bunch of GUI stuff..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Things are faster than ever thanks to the CPU optimized builds!
Really, what is kdeinit for? Why do I need a gnome-settings-daemon? Can't the settings be written to a file like every other program on the planet? Does your file manager need to run 24/7?
While I admit that I've been evaluating Gnome 2.6 the past few days, and I've tried out XFCE, my consistent favorite is WindowMaker.
half the supposed benefit of Linux is the ability to bring old boxen back to life, because they can't support bloat from Windows anymore.
I have an old eMachine 500mhz machine that is chugging along fine with Fedora, and I'd like to have it running forever since it's still a useful processor, after all.
If a Linux distro becomes as bloated and heavy as running Windows... well, there goes one of the cooler benefits of Linux...
I don't care, I'm feeling light and fast with Debian using evilwm on a Pentium Pro 200.
Is the Linux Desktop Getting Heavier and Slower?
This is an important question. It's something we have to think about moving forward. I'd definitely have to say:
So is your momma.
For every annoying gentoo user, are three even more annoying anti-gentoo crybabies. Take Yosh from #Gimp for example.
I think the important point here is missed: At least under Linux you _have_ a choice.
Trainee BOFH -- Just give me your username & password
At least in Linux one has the option to switch between lighter environments such as XFCE, fluxbox, etc. when more power is required. And then you can switch back to KDE/Gnome to take your ever so 1337 screenshots.
Look, if you want to experience the 'old days' of linux, uninstall X. Or, if you need X, use Fluxbox or some other low-overhead window-manager.
Bloat is the price of not only trying to match the leader (MS) feature for feature, but also staying ahead of competing distros. When KDE x.x comes out, all of the users of a distro cry out for it to be implemented - the people who package the distro have their hands tied as a result: do they hold-off from a leading-edge system for sake of performance, or do they give the users what they're crying for? Usually, the latter wins (note: some distros, like Debian and Mandrake, get around this with experimental package depositories for those looking for a nose-bleed).
Strangely, Mandrake 10 runs waaaay faster than any of the v8 or v9 releases.
This wasn't just plain terrible, this was fancy terrible. This was terrible with raisins in it. - Dorothy Parker
It is a myth that everything is smaller, faster and can fun on lighter footprint hardware with gnu/linux.
IMHO this comes from gnu/linux having a complete set of command shell programs which allows SOME use of low footprint hardware.mozillas just don't cutit ( neither does opera ).
But we have choice, whereas Windows users do not necessarily have the means to lower their memory footprint.
I personally prefer XFCE, a friend of mine swears by Blackbox. Minimalistic, sure.. But you can't reasonably expecet to optimize both effects and memory footprint/CPU usage.
If you want the eyecandy, get a machine that can handle eyecandy style graphics. But rest assured that you will always have the choice to run on a leaner machine. Not necessarily the same environment, I consider that unrealistic, but you will run Linux.. and for an added bonus, you can even run KDE and Gtk apps on those "minimal" desktops.
Of course, if someone went into this massive optimization and profiling splurge on a major desktop, I can't say it would hurt the performance any... but on the rare occasions that I run KDE, I think it's reasonably fast for my machine, so I don't worry.
The 256MB/800MHz minimum requirements listed for Longhorn are minimum requirements. (redundancy and emphasis intentional)
/.ers want?) is to add those same bloat features that keep the great unwashed tied to their Windows boxen. However, to my limited experience, Linux still seems to make far more efficient use of the code it has, regardless of the absolute size of that code.
Have you ever run a Windows OS on minimums? The term 'excruciatingly, mind-numbingly slow' comes to mind.
That aside, one of the only ways to see a more mainstream uptake of Linux (and isn't that what all
Most desktops have the multi-layered bloat of GNOME with object dispatchers, stacked APIs AND the same structure for KDE as well.
Once upon a time applications and window managers were configured using text files... now we use bloated, illegible XML files that require a parser with a signifigant memory footprint to read.
Linux advocates are going to need to adjust their criticism of Windows to suit the times. Instead of one "registry", linux has a half dozen. Instead of DLL hell, linux has constantly changing libraries that break binary compatability.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
Personally I run a minimal Linux desktop. I use Fluxbox as a Window manager, I do not have gtkrellm or any other fancy monitor utils running, I've got no desktop icons or other "bloat".
Linux will be slow if you are running KDE with a truckload of panel applets. But this also applies to Windows: The more processes that are running, eating memory and using CPU cycles from time to time, the slower tasks you need/want to do will seem. This is obvious. It's also a matter of configuration and choice of Linux distribution.
I use Gentoo but that's just my prefernece. It's much faster than other distributions for two reasons: A) I compiled it from source optimized for my hardware and more importantly B) the big placebo effect and pride that follows A).
XFCE is another very good light choice for a desktop. Rox is a great file manager and much more snappy than Konqueror, Nautilus and other giants. I assume this too applies to Windows software, not that I got much knowledge of that OS -- I've heard it's gotten pretty spiff since 3.1 (last I've used, anyway).
Another important Linux performance issue is RAM, many people fail to realize the amount of RAM you've got is just as important as how fast your CPU is. This, obviously, depends on what tasks you are doing, but if you count overall performance memory _is_ important. Like with all OS: Once you start swapping your tapping your fingers and getting annoyed.
That's enough for now, since I want 3rd post (I asumme there's been like 20 new during the time I used to write this, but still...)
9/11: Never forget it was a false-flag operation
See, this just comes across all wrong to me. I use neither, as both are too bloated for my tastes. But of the two, it's KDE and not GNOME that the slower and bloatier. I'm curious as to how anyone can see it the other way around. Certainly on all the hardware I've tried, KDE is measurably slower. As a completely unscientific test:
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
What are you talking about, its not like the're sticking bloging or P2P into the GUI or anything dumb like that....
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
He's right -- the memory footprint needs to be addressed. This could potentially be one of those areas where the open source method can really shine -- you have people interested in making it prettier, more functional, etc. and you have other people that are efficiency freaks, looking for the memory hogs and slimming them down.
I'm curious as to how much of that big memory footprint (say, on a typical GNOME desktop) is code, and how much is user data. The reason I'm curious is because if the bulk of it is code (do an ldd of your favorite desktop app and see how many shared libs are linked in!) then you have a very compelling case for multiusser. All those aging doze98/NT4 desktops can become LTSP thinclients, and you put all the apps on a big server. Yes, the server needs to have a lot of memory, but not (256 MB * number of users) because all the program space is shared. You've got one copy of glib, one copy of gtk, etc. for the entire user community, instead of one copy resident on each desktop. As long as everyone is running mostly the same set of apps, the per-user delta for memory usage on the server becomes merely the amount consumed by user data.
Yes, Linux is getting bloated and we need to address that. However, when thinking about Linux as a Windows replacement, it's crucial that you have to play up Linux's strengths rather than simply rip-and-replace and try to have Linux poorly emulate Windows's strengths. One of Linux's biggest strengths is its powerful mix of good multiuser capabilities plus good network transparency at every layer of the system. This (along with lower acquisition costs, of course) is probably Linux's best available ticket to the mainstream desktop.
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Hey, I understand the Unix philosopy, appreciate tight code, etc. But look - - memory is cheap and getter cheaper. For what it delivers, most computer hardware is not exorbitantly priced. We see silly stuff happening, like $500-plus video cards for consumers. But, overall, nobody cares much when they hear they'll need 256 mb RAM or more for their home machine or their business workstation. As long as the software is DELIVERING something, who cares? Does anyone ever look for a new laptop or desktop that has the bare minimum specs for the work they're doing TODAY?
It's only funny until someone gets hurt. Then, it's hilarious.
Use fluxbox/blackbox with all your favourite apps from gnome/kde all keybound using bbkeys. The desktop will work like greased light ! tis what I do !
Fr'instance, I have a Thinkpad 600 with 64 MB of RAM. The thing is just sitting in a box right now because I've been unable to find a distribution that will run gracefully on this machine.
And when you think about it, 64 MB is a still a helluva lot of memory to be incapable of running a reasonably current OS. I'm sure (and I sure hope!) that somebody could recommend a Linux distribution that's suitable for a machine like mine. But it says something that I spent at least a couple of hours looking at various obscure distributions, and couldn't find one that did the trick.
I'm generally "Interesting," "Insightful," and even "Funny" here. What the hell happens to me at parties?
Linux gets bloated as soon as you install X Windows.
My first (text-only) install ran OK on 4Mb RAM, though 2Mb was the minimum. Now the kernel is bigger and we use SSH, so you'd expect to need a bit more RAM, but otherwise nothing has changed.
I know at least in the GNOME camp there is constant work on improving performance, and especially in reducing memory usage.
One thing you have to realize is that most users _want_ their desktop to do more. There's a reason only a small fraction of users still use TWM; it doesn't do what they want it to. And, if you want more features, you have to realize that it will require more resources.
That said, there is a lot of code out there that was written first to Just Work(tm) with little thought of performance. Good practice indicates that, while you should keep performance in mind, real optimization and fine tuning should be done last.
Current work for performance improvements in GNOME including sharing data between processes (say, icon themes), reducing system calls and X requests during startup, and general speed improvements in the various library calls used to make the applications actually work.
More help is _always_ appreciated. There are several Plans of Attack available from GNOME developers who know what needs to be done but don't have the time. If you want to help implement those the other developers and users will be quite thankful.
As soon as Longhorn is out, MS will have a hugh lead in the memory consumption area. Are we going to blindly follow them, as usual, or are we going to stop and ask ourselves "do we need to make everything in .NET/MONO?"
.NET was invented to compensate for programmers not capable of handling C++. But when you are there, with an obscure bug crying for help, gdb/whatever isn't comming for your aid.
I'd say the answer is NO! Java and
I am amazed that people do not realize that it becomes difficult to run NEW 2004 software on old 1999 hardware.
Perhaps the best post on this from the OSNEWS discussion on this editorial:
- - - - -
Anecdotal evidence --> meaningless conclusion
By Andrew (IP: ---.fbx.proxad.net)
Posted on 2004-06-10 09:46:37
Summary of the arguments presented in this thread:
- My X yearx old computer with Y MB RAM is slow with the latest Z Linux distribution.
where 3 < X < 6,
and 64 < Y < 256,
and Z is an element of the set of full-fledged Linux distributions like Fedora, Mandrake, SuSE, you name it.
The meaningless conclusion is: "Linux is getting very fat".
How the author jumps from his anecdotal evidence to his meaningless conclusion is clearly fuel for a long thread, seeing as this thread is growing fast...
As long as the question is "Can we do something we haven't done before" and not "Is this really useful or cool in any way?" it'll continue to grow. And face it, everything looks cool when it's new. Since computers have been improving so fast, there's always been something new.
Macs and Quartz Extreme is just one example, Longhorn another. We'll continue doing new things as long as we can. After that, we might start doing something useful. I rather liked WinSCPs UI, and it's exactly the same as Norton Commander(?) 15 years ago.
Try comparing it to woman's skirts. By now, it's all been done before, everything from mini-mini skirts to mopping the pavement. Computers are still experimenting trying out new things. Once they hit the limits, they'll start going "retro" on us. Until then, new sells...
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Currently I run crux, this is a nice alternative to the bloated distros out there. It's a "build what you want" (aside from the 'base' and 'opt' packages). Personally I gave up on RedHate about 2 years ago, it's way too bloated and slow. I run crux with xfce4, it's light and fast, on my 500mhz laptop that does make a difference, especially when you are trying to get something done while compiling firefox :).
Seriosly, you need more space to build a fluid, friendly OS / windowmanager, but you don't need bloat.
I like having a nice core set of tools, I don't need three gui calculators and 5 CD playing utilities. There is a lot of bloat, and it's not doing anyone much good.
http://monkeyserver.com --- weeeeee
IceWM is also a good choice for a lean window manager. I don't particularily care for fluxbox because its interface is extremely far-out, as in way different than what I'm used to. IceWM isn't exactly the best as far as that is concerned either, but its better.
thisnukes4u.net
The thing is that you can install any of the big Linux distros and install a lightweight desktop environment. I'm sure if you were using older versions of GNOME or KDE they had less hardware requirements as well. You have the choice-eye candy/ease of use/interoperability versus speed. This choice is as old as GUIs themselves. I still run Windowmaker on Debian on a 2.8GHz P4 because I don't use a file manager or any of the other modern niceties of GNOME or KDE. But can I fault them for that? GNOME and KDE are quite fast on my machine. I don't use them because of choice. I used the same setup on my Pentium 133 with 56MB RAM and it was just as usable. It's STILL just as usable. It's like complaining Doom 3 requires a much faster machine than Quake 3, when Quake 3 was written for the fastest hardware of the time, which now is considered dog slow. Quake 3 still runs on it though, and Windowmaker 0.8 with 2.6 is faster on that P133 than Wmaker 0.6 with 2.2.
I gotta say the feature set of KDE is not something I'm even remotely willing to give up. The beginning of the KDE 3.x series was a little worse than it is now and KDE just keeps getting more powerful. If I wanted to suffer with the standard features of the desktop on Win XP/etc, I might be doing a little thinking about something like Xfce which is more capable than Windows and keeps a very small footprint. Works great on an old laptop where KDE/Gnome won't even load.
:)
It's all about features and I like what I've got. I've got the RAM to work with anyway and KDE will have to use up the 3 empty RAM slots in my box before I give it up
I'd love to use something like KDE or Gnome, but every time I give it a try, it's just so bulky and slow, comparatively.
Trolls lurk everywhere. Mod them down.
Maybe is a programmer's ego thing that makes them add every eyecandy/feature you can imagine, the old see what I can program and what you don't, but all this just to browse a web page or check emails in most cases?.
I think distributions should focus on the basic functionality and let users go crazy if they want every feature possible, not the other way around. Else the common Joe with the common box will feel isolated and stick to his "faithful" Windows 98, not everyone blows money at the last piece of hardware out there you know.
the gui stuff should NOT eat so much memory.
it just shows that the kde/gnome/whatever guys are trying to compete with each other and windows by throwing in the latest fanciest stuff without really thinking.
let me repeat it: desktop software should NOT eat that much memory. it only shows the low quality of the code.
I for one welcome our heavy distro overlords!
Batman: "Slake your thirst. You'll have worse than a parched sensation when we're through with you!"
I have a 100 MHz PC I use for web browsing on a stationary bike. It has a very small amount of RAM. No combination of Linux and Mozilla could provide me with a better graphical user experience than Windows 98...Linux was very, very slow on this machine.
Memory is cheap 256MB of RAM can be had for, as little as, $50. Gnome 2.6 runs resonably well, better than W2k, on my P3 laptop with 128MB ram.
Don't have the requirements to run the latest and greatest goodies, you have options. A cheap upgrade or run a less demanding environment.
Well for one the Longhorn specs are way above of what you can even buy today.
But it's true you need lots of memory to work well. I don't bother unless I have 512 MB but I prefer 1 G. Now I have usability that I did not have before. I load a lot of apps and keep it going. I don't mind the extra RAM load as I have a lot more computer.
xinet is getting more bloated by the day.
Ask aynone who uses FreeBSD or NetBSD. I switched to FreeBSD and could not believe the improvement in bootup. The gui's are about as slow of course but that is only one part of the equation.
possix inet is more secure and many times faster.
http://saveie6.com/
I had an old Dell notebook, Latitude XPi IIRC. Ran Windows 2000 albeit sluggishly... With a custom kernel and install of a recent RH/Fedora release it ran like a charm.
I don't think I've ever heard anyone describe their system with 128mb RAM and "ran XP happily" in the same sentence before. Definately friends of mine who have done plenty of PC repairing in their day would agree.
My suggestion is to install an older release of RedHat and just run up2date. Still not good enough? Try Gentoo.
Don't mark Linux off as a loss until you've properly tuned it. The same could be said for any OS for that matter.
Just my $0.02
# fuser -v
#
Modern distros that use the latest versions of KDE and (especially) Gnome feel considerably heavier than before or even than Windows XP/2k3.
Why does it seem that lately, approximately once a week, an article appears on the front page of ./ with a subtle troll inside it? Are the KDE zealots really getting that desperate?
Sunday you're Thinking Different, Monday you're a huge tool, paying too much and waiting to think like everyone else.
(My only beef is that for some reason fvwm is no longer shipped with Fedora. I have no idea why. As far as lightweight window managers go, it's probably the most popular, and it's a single tiny RPM.)
evilwm has a small mem footprint and in speaking to people on freenode (developers) that is the WM to use (and I agree).
Bloat is just that and there is no reason for it.
anime+manga together at last.. in real time.
It is a little disconcerting, especially since a few years ago one of the most oft-quoted reasons given for using Linux is that you could use it on older hardware that couldn't use the latest version of Windows. Sadly, I think this happens with most software projects over the long time. Stay around long enough and keep adding features, and it eventually leads to bloatware. I think maybe some of the distributions could learn something from Mozilla project. In addition to offering Mozilla, they also have Firefox, the streamlined browser. I'd be nice to see a Fedora Lite or something like that.
Of course the real question is, what's taking up all that memory? Is it the new 2.6? The newer versions of GNOME and KDE? I tend to think the later rather than the former, but I really haven't given it much thought until now. Perhaps we need a new lightweight desktop/window manager, or maybe we should keep some of the old ones around.
... Its a fact of life, but if you compare GNOME 1.X to 2 its amazing and well worth it, and even GNOME 2.2 to GNOME 2.6, the difference is amazing. Sure it may be a little heavy, and also if it was coded with speed as the #1 priority it'd be lighter, but its not, and its quite efficient for what it is. There isn't that much wasted really. and Nautilus (the only thing in GNOME which i've ever felt was slow) is way faster now than it used to be.
I do think that Linux Desktops tend to be heavy on RAM and light on CPU though, as apposed to XP which is more balanced on both, certainly its rare that my laptop (1.4 Ghz Pentium M) goes quicker than 600Mhz, but I never run out of RAM either (512Mb). And i do think that these are the sort of specs which are common (and thus GNOME should aim for).
Answer:- YES, But PC's are getting faster and faster, and if you are not upgrading/replacing your PC on a weekly basis you are not a true GEEK.
What we really need are graphics cards optimised for the 2D environment in general and specific OS's in particular.
There is lots of 3D dev's going on - perhaps the graphis people are letting us down.
The alternative of course is to revert back to that good old command line. At least then you had to think about what you were doing?
For problems, seek only the simplest solution, complexity brings with it more problems.
When more an more users try to make the switch from Windows to Linux, are they going to be turned off because they thought it was going to be much faster, when in fact it wasn't much faster.
It's still more stable, but I'm already starting to see strange things creep into Fedora. I switched to Gentoo several months ago, but last night I installed Fedora on my wife's machine (There wasn't enough time to install gentoo). Now there are some weird problems with the GUI, like clicking on "add icon to panel" in gnome doesn't actually add the icon. I haven't had time to look into it, but it just seems like little things like that can ruin ones overall impression.
Needless to say, my wife was still impressed with how far Linux has come in the past few years since she last tried using it. So all of you developers are to be commended for your hard and diligent work.
I just installed mandrake on a 400 mhz pII with 128 megs of ram. The gui isn't fast, but it isn't horrible either. (It runs as a server so I don't have X windows running unless I need it). I've done some admin from the command line, but generally the gui makes things easier. It very fast as a server though.
Xwindows is an abstraction and cross platform and big (remote windows etc..) And the KDE/Gnomes are trying to add lots of functionality which invariably makes the memory footprint bigger. The more that gets added to the libraries the larger the memory footprint, if your using that functionality or not.
I use macosx for much of my development, I like it alot,(its sooo pretttyy) but its a ram hog (I'm running with over a gig of ram). So linux really isn't that bad comparatively.
Linux is simply bloated if you use a "desktop" release such as fedora or suse. Worse, Gnome and KDE lack consistent user interface guidelines far worse than windows does (no current OS matches the seamless consistency of interface of the original MacOS). 512MB seems to be the minimum memory to have for a full size distro.
I run what is basically my own distro, with a minumum of packages installed as the base load. It takes roughly 500GB of storage and 128MB of memory to run the OS effectively. I use Blackbox/Fluxbox as my wm for speed and simplicity. I also use Blackbox on windows as my shell for the same reasons.
the reason that they are getting so heavy is that all that eye candy and stuff is what most people actually want.
You can Slim Down both KDE and GNOME quite considerably, and if thats not enough theres always your XFCE and even fvwm and friends.
So stop the girly whining and deal with it
-- never underestimate someone who overestimates himself
Perhaps the charges that Linux developers aren't innovating but simply trying to mirror microsoft are truer than I thought - they even bring in MS' feature-bloat..
Stop trying to be all things to all people. Choose a target market and go with it. I don't think there's anything wrong with trying to be a current-generation windows alternative. Just realize that this is what desktop linux development is aiming at. Windows isn't big because of crappy programming - far from it. Microsoft is in the business of hiring the best software developers money can buy. Windows gets fatter because they're putting more into it. In that vein, so does Linux. Simple enough concept.
Here's a guide for using old computers: match the hardware and software. A 10 year old computer is probably best paired with 10 year old software. If you wanna recycle 10 year old hardware with new software, be prepared for a lot of work, or a lot of suck. Either way the result won't be very pretty, or speedy.
------- "From bored to fanboy in 3.8 asian girls" ----------
...for functionality.
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
just figured since gentoo was included in the heading that many people would have many comments to flame this guy on.
I started running only in console, but then when I got a faster computer I started running X.
Linux wasn't any slower, I was just running more resource intensive application.
Now I have started running GNOME, instead of just a window manager, I run multiple desktops, many loggers/status apps, and I leave several applications active at a given time.
My computer is less responsive then before, but this is due to my usage pattern.
If I wasn't interested in all these new features, I'd go back to afterstep and xterms.
While I was looking for a linux distribution, it seemed to fall into two catagories: 50MB distros that don't even include GCC, or 2-4GB distros that include 3 apps for any given task (if I knew enough to choose between the 3 window managers they offered, I'd probably just install the one I wanted myself). There doesn't seem to be anything in the middle, where out of the box Windows sits (that is, a fairly-non-intensive GUI (at least if you change back to Classic), networking stuff, a browser, and the ability to install most anything). The closest thing I could find was Damn Small Linux, which while it doesn't have GCC installed (I've found GCC to be pretty much like any of the Windows install engines in terms of needing it to install anything) but has a capability to download it (in runnable form no less; what exactly are you supposed to do with the source to your compiler?)
"Because Science" is one step from "Because old book". Try "Because of my experiment testing my falsifiable assertion".
seems to be getting faster and faster. Jump to 3.2 was pretty big when it comes to performance. And Qt4 brings with it even better performance (application start-up time drops by about 20%) and mem-usage (down about 15-20%). KDE has been pretty aggressive recently when it comes to performance and optimizations. Of course KDE gets more and more eye-candy, but that stuff is completely optional.
Is Linux less demanding than Windows? yes it is. If you want to, you can run the latest whiz-bang desktop from Gnome or KDE, and the performance will be roughy similar to Windows. Or you could use some lightweight UI, like Xfce. If you decide to run som graphics-heavy UI with lots of eye-candy, it's your choice, and you should expect it to be somewhat slower than some lightweight UI would be. But you have the choice.
I for one think that the progress of features and eye-candy should not be held back by that guy who still runs Linux on his 200MHz Pentium. If he wants to, he can keep on using the UI he currently uses, or switch to some lightweight UI. Or, heaven forbid: upgrade his machine! If you have the hardware, you should have the ability to put that processing-power to use by using some kick-ass UI with lots of eye-candy.
Lesbian Nazi Hookers Abducted by UFOs and Forced Into Weight Loss Programs - -all next week on Town Talk.
That's quite an facile editorial but you can't expect better from normal users. My screenshot looks better than yours. Evolution is better than KMail, GNOME looks more polished than KDE and so on. I do use XChat, Abiword, Rhythmbox.... ...usually you get stuff like these from normal users. And this is ok since you can't blame them for stuff they simply don't know about or don't have a slighest knowledge about.
Such editorials are hard to take serious since they are build up on basicly NO deeper knowledge of the matter. Most people I met so far are full of prejudices and seek for excuses or explaination why they prefer the one over the other while in reality they have no slightest clue on what parameters they compare the things.
If people do like the gance ICONS over the functionality then it's quite ok but that's absolutely NO framework to do such comparisons.
I do come from the GNOME architecture and spent the last 5 years on it. I also spent a lot of time (nearly 1 year now if I sum everything up) on KDE 3.x architecture including the latest KDE 3.2 (please note I still do use GNOME and I am up to CVS 2.6 release myself).
Although calling myself a GNOME vetaran I am also not shy to criticise GNOME and I do this in the public as well. Ok I got told from a couple of people if I don't like GNOME that I simply should switch and so on. But these are usually people who have a tunnelview and do not want to see or understand the problems around GNOME.
Speaking as a developer with nearly 23years of programming skills on my back I can tell you that GNOME may look polished on the first view but on the second view it isn't.
Technically GNOME is quite a messy architecture with a lot of unfinished, half polished and half working stuff inside. Given here are examples like broken gnome-vfs, half implementations of things (GStreamer still half implemented into GNOME (if you can call it an implementation at all)) rapid changes of things that make it hard for developers to catch up and a never ending bughunting. While it is questionable if some stuff can simply be fixed with patches while it's more required to publicly talk about the Framework itself.
Sure GNOME will become better but the time developers spent fixing all the stuff is the time that speaks for KDE to really improve it with needed features. We here on GNOME are only walking in the circle but don't have a real progress in true usability (not that farce people talk to one person and then to the next). Real usability here is using the features provided by the architecture that is when I as scientists want to do UML stuff that I seriously find an application written for that framework that can do it. When I eye over to the KDE architecture then as strange it sounds I do find more of these needed tools than I can find on GNOME. This can be continued in many areas where I find more scientific Software to do my work and Software that works reliable and not crash or misbehave or behave unexpected.
Comparing Nautilus with Konqueror is pure nonsense, comparing GNOME with KDE is even bigger nonsense. If we get a team of developers on a Table and discuss all the crap we find between KDE and GNOME then I can tell from own experience that the answer is clearly that GNOME will fail horrible here.
We still have many issues on GNOME which are Framework related. We now got the new Fileselector but yet they still act differently in each app. Some still have the old Fileselector, some the new Fileselector, some appearance of new Fileselectors are differently than in other apps that use the new Fileselector code and so on. When people talk about polish and consistency, then I like to ask what kind of consistency and polish is this ? We still have a couple of different ways to open Window in GNOME.
- GTK-Application-Window,
- BonoboUI Window,
- GnomeUI Window,
Then a lot of stuff inside GNOME are hardcoded UI's, some are using *.glade files (not to mention that GLADE the interface buil
...but what about gnome?
I prefer it over KDE, but I heard that KDE got considerably faster with the 3.2 release, whereas I have the feeling that Gnome got slower from each release to the next since 2.0.
I don't know if things have changed with 2.6, but if this goes on, I'll have to look for a new DE.
"Oh, a lesson in not changing history from Mr I'm-my-own-Grandpa." - Dr Hubert Farnsworth
My first inclination was to hate this editorial... after all, I'm happily using Fedora Core 2 on my 512MB RAM 1.6Ghz P4. No problems here, it performs fine. But the more I read the more I found myself agreeing with his basic thesis.
.wmv video files and I say err, shit... I'm not positive this will play...
He's right. It *is* a shame that Linux needs more memory and CPU power than XP, yet still feels slower. It's also more annoying, btw.. in the time I've been writing this response, Rhythmbox with the mp3 gstreamer plugin, playing an mp3 from a samba share, has dropped audio three times for a second or more. My coworkers laugh at me when they send me
Linux as a desktop os is bloated, slow and unreliable. As as Linux on the desktop advocate, I often feel like a vegetarian... sure, it's virtuous, but I'm stuck eating pasta and potatoes instead of lamb chops and meatball sandwiches.
I'm just not sure of the solution. The author of the article is a little bit glib when he says "We need to put a serious emphasis on elegant design, careful coding and making the most of RAM, not throwing in hurried features just because we can." Easy to say. Hard to do. I know the Gnome developers and the rest of the thousands of people working hard for little or no money on the OS collectively known as GNU/Linux are doing their best to pay attention to elegant design and careful coding. The problem is that as many voices as there are screaming for elegant design... there are as many voices screaming for mono, java, and other "next gen" development tools.
The article was talking about newbies. You know, the people who hear us talking about how great Linux is and want to give it a try. They don't know how to switch to BlackBox for better performance. They don't even know that they have an option between Gnome or KDE. All they know is that it takes forever for the GUI to come up, and when it does, it's still slow. First impressions are still important, people.
Looking at the upcoming Debian Sarge on the mailing lists, the following requirements are needed
Processor : 2Ghz
RAM : 512MB
Hard disk. 5 Gb min install, 25 Gb full install
Comes on either 13 CDs (all mandatory), plus 30 "Extra" cds or 7 DVDs. They even plan to sell 250Gb hard drives with it pre-installed to lighten the load.
I also cringe at the upcoming GNOME 3 that will be due in 2005. This is their answer to long horn. It will need at least 768Mb (1.25Gb to run comfortably and up to 3 to run at full potetial). It also requires mandatory 64-bit processors with at least 2500Mhz. Thats only currently avalible on highlyl overclocked opterons or the new G5!
For Debian and GNOME. It is going to be huge! I hope someone knocks some sense into those idiots.
it's not jsut a Linux thing, but applies to the BSDs as well. default setups out of the box are typicly set for newbies. lots of flash and all the bells and whistles.
but that does not mean that you are forever doomed to that setup. even within KDE you can reduce system requirements. if that is not enough, go to a lighter windowmanager. start shutting down unneeded processes. i can still install and run on a 486. but i know what needs to be done.
if anything is needed a better newbie friendly util is needed to allow performance to be set easyly at install, but like i said you alsways have the option.
I've constantly referred to Mandrake as Linux for Windows. It's been bloatware for years. Unless you want to pick apart indivdual packages, you're looking at a gig and a half plus for a standard install.
I buy hardware and software for a company of about 250 employees. A small company, yes. But I really don't care at all what the difference in hardware pricing might be between a Linux WS and a Windows WS. PCs are considered cheap, and most vendors make you buy a certain base system anyway whether you need the horsepower or not. The majority of our new workstations are vastly overpowered for either Windows or Linux. Especially where disk space is concerned. And memory, again, is dirt cheap per meg. The thing Linux has going for it - - for now, but not much longer, I think - - is the low or nonexistent price for licensing. But as the Redhat model moves forward, and other big names go the same route, we'll see those CALs, just like the ones from our big buddies in Redmond.
It's only funny until someone gets hurt. Then, it's hilarious.
How dare you mock Linux on /.!
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
Well I run DOS and it fits on ONE FLOPPY and can run on 640K of RAM (enough for anybody!).
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I - I took the one the bus load of girls just went down.
E's light, uncluttered, and gives me a clean work environment. I use gkrellm for monitoring, and I stay clear of "epplets" as they're not what I'd call great.
With KDE and Gnome, I need to conform to them. With E, it conforms to me.
Graham
Linux - Fast Pane Relief
Just fire up top and see what's running. You may be surprised by how much RAM some applications take, but keep in mind that the number reported for X tends not to be accurate (They nmap the video card RAM so it gets reported as used RAM or something like that.)
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Think Gnome or KDE are too slow and heavy? Then go with Blackbox instead.
I have used KDE, Gnome, fluxbox, XFCE and IceWM at different stages of my Linux use, and in the end it seems that IceWM is my favourite, fast environment for getting work done. I mean, KDE and Gnome are both bloatware, fluxbox is a bit too minimal, XFCE is a bit to awkward, IceWM is just right. Also, don't forget to install iDesk if you want desktop icons on a minimalist system.
Meh.
I dont know if its forth or whatever, but it feels much lighter than those three popular distributions.
Give it a try !.
The ONLY reason you're so forgiving is because this is Linux. If the same question was asked of Windows, you couldn't agree more.
My wife is using KDE on a pentium 233 and she's able to use it just fine. Aside from complaints that the GLMatrix screensaver is super slow on her computer. She has no problems.
real men dont use gui.
You should be able to strip the apps down to something appropriate for the target. I am running SuSE 6.4 on a 486/33 which I use for a firewall. I also have a pentium 2/350 that I would love to upgrade to the latest version of SuSE, but it would be unusable.
What I would like to see on startup is something that allows you to select (or better yet autodetect) your platform, and set the non-power user derfault install options to something appropriate - i.e. a lightweight window manager on a trailing edge system. For more advanced users, they can just highlight packages that are not recommended for the particular target, (i.e. Star Office on Pentium 1) and let you make the choice.
My rights don't need management.
And it isn't *just* the size of the apps. Gnome is slower than KDE, XFCE, CDE at getting it's stuff up on the display both locally and running over the network.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
Next thing you know, Linux will have /root vulnerabilities added!
This is why it's great to have one high-powered machine that has some X thin clients attached.
That way I almost always get the speed of the server, and I only have to maintain the desktop software for one machine (on the server).
- Brian
Everything will get much, much faster when Sun moves all Linux desktop applications to Java.
dinner: it's what's for beer
To use it or not to use it.
That, is the question...
From my experience, newer versions of KDE are slower than GNOME. Then again, they're also more "feature-packed", so I run KDE on my laptop ( where I want a bunch of doo-dads, bells, and whistling monkeys ) and GNOME on everything else. I'm not sure about Mandrake, but Fedora Core 2 and SuSE 9.1 seem to scream along quite happily on my machines, including a 1 GHz P3 laptop w/ 512 MB of PC100 SDRAM and K6-3 500 MHz w/ 512 MB of PC133. And w/ the 2.6 kernel w/ preemptibility compiled in makes things a dream in terms of responsiveness under heavy load.
Hell, to be honest, I could get by w/ twm and mutt, most of my work is done inside terminals and vi.
Anyways, this is the same drum that people have been beating for years. If you want more functionality, then you pay the price somewhere. Yes, you should always code for tightness and efficiency, but those alpha-blended thingywhatsits and anti-aliased fonts, etc., cost you somewhere.
Having said that, it's been my experience that outside of the GUI environments, the Redhat/Fedora and SuSE distros are still very responsive and tight.
Buy some more damn memory if you want to run a GUI environment. Period.
PC moderators can suck my White pierced, tattooed dick. If you think pride == hate, s/dick/Aryan meat mallet/g.
Those of you who are posting stuff about Fluxbox, Windowmaker, Ratpoison, *insert your favourite WM here*, are missing the point, and need to RTFA.
There is a huge segment of the market with 64-128M PCs who don't want to be forced to upgrade their hardware just so as to run XP. If Linux could run responsively on that much memory, it could own that market. But instead, modern distros are too slow.
For this segment, Fluxbox, dillo etc. are not an option - they need the user friendliness of a proper desktop environment (help browsers, tooltips, proper word processors etc). KDE and Gnome could provide that - but they need to control the bloat.
To be fair, I hear KDE has improved a lot in this respect, and my mobile PII with 192M is reasonably nippy running Gnome and openoffice. So improvements will come.
But talking about the command line and fluxbox and all that is just irrelevant.
I love fvwm, especially the way you can move to adjacent virtual screens/pages just by moving the mouse to the edge of the monitor. This behavior makes it truly feel like a big desktop.
Oh yeah, it's pretty lightweight too.
Is that I don't have to use bloated software. I haven't upgraded to more recent distros simply because of their slowness.
RedHat got substantially slower after 7.3, in part because:
While none of these alone were the reason, when combined they resulted in a system that felt ran much more slowly than it's predecessors. There's a night and day difference in response times between RedHat 6.0 and 9.0.
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
Like many programs developed for Windows.
BTW, I don't run them, no matter how good.
"Tell me who you walk with, and I'll tell who you are" -- popular proverb in my land.
Ha! And everyone thought Java on the Desktop would make people think linux was too bloated and slow.
Open Source Java DAO Generator
For example win98 , its hardly bloatware by todays standards but back then ?
Compare that to whichever linux distro was out at the time and it isnt difficult to guess which is going to come out better. Linux distributions will hopefully continue to be more streamlined and less resource hungry than the M$ offerings. What do people think about OSX ? bloaty ? or not? ( I suspect the latter despite the eye candy...)
Electronic Music Made Using Linux http://soundcloud.com/polyp
I thought that happened years ago. When I was using Linux on my desktop I used WindowMaker because both KDE and Gnome were so much more bloated than Microsoft Windows.
Nowadays I use Win2K Pro as my main desktop and use putty to access Linux, OpenBSD, and Solaris machines via ssh. I also have a Debian machine hooked up to my KVM, but there's no X on that box, only virtual consoles.
I'm trying to build a MythTV box but KnoppMyth crashes halfway through the install and Gentoo won't recognize the Ethernet NIC. Debian runs fine, so I guess I'm going to try manually installing MythTV on Debian. I assume MythTV uses a lightweight streamlined GUI. I certainly wouldn't want KDE or Gnome on my TV.
I just haven't found any need to use KDE or Gnome. They're bad Microsoft clones from what I've seen. Linux and Unix have many benefits, but I wouldn't consider KDE or Gnome to be all that important to me.
...but the great thing about Linux is that if you're willing to put in the time, and forgo Xfree, you can get the latest software to run on amazingly old hardware. Though it took a long time, I've gotten Slackware 9.1 with the 2.6 kernel to run smoothly on a 486. I was up and running Apache and Samba in no time. This thing had 12 megs of RAM!
I have a hunch that the mainstream distros post memory minimums in anticipation of running every daemon known to man, with the window manager tweaked out with all bells and whistles.
Windowmaker provides a very pleasant environment and it's a lot smaller and lighter than the Gnome or KDE desktops. And while you can't theme it to hell and back... it's got a nice, consistent and user-friendly configuration tool, including support for its lightweight themes.
OpenStep (GNUStep) is a decent toolkit, and it should be possible to use GNUStep and write applications that will compile under Cocoa on Mac OS X as well...
Why these aren't more commonly used, I don't know. They don't have that Windows-style panache, I guess.
Change the desktop and be done. True, you won't have a modem light applet and cute drive mount applets and similar things taking up a few hundred pixels and several hundred kilobytes if not megabytes, but that is something I can live with.
Things like that should take an impact of about one kilobyte at most, plus graphics. It would be easy enough to script them in something like Guile or similar stuff able to produce byte codes. It is unnecessary to have the bloat of binary executables and complete communication library stubs and hosts of I-don't-know-what.
With Xfce4, you don't pay the completely outrageous price for such gimmicks, but you also don't get them.
Your Linux distro is only as bloated as what you install, it is as simpel as that.
If you choose KDE/GNOME don't expect tiny-WM performace (and since when is K/G THE desktop?).
Carbon based humanoid in training.
I was lately pondering the possibility of making my own ghost image of a default install and then creating a boot disk which would restore the system to the initially installed state. I looked at the size of the 2.6.6 kernel as it sat on my HD and wondered,"How will I ever put that and anything useful on a floppy?"
The Linux operating system has, for the longest time, appealed to me because it was slim, light, lean, and efficient. It is not just the window managers which are getting larger, though. The kernel is becoming positively huge. Applications such as Mozilla are happily following the path of their Windows counterparts. It seems that as Linux picks up public awareness the developers are heeding to the pressure to create a more featureful system in order to appeal to the public.
What public are they appealing to? The Linux world no longer seems to be targeting the computer gurus. The Linux world is increasingly developing to appeal to people who have difficulty remembering commands. The applications are catering to users who are illiterate in the sense that the only functional interface that they can use with any reliability is a point-and-click interface with a minimum of keyboard interaction.
Consider print managers. Three years ago, to install a print manager, I had to wade through configuration files and driver definition files. Then print managers evolved to give lists of printers to choose from. Now print managers go out of their way to present only one or two choices when identifying the printer. The number of acceptable screen options is directly proportional to the literacy of the user. Incidentally, lprng, cups, foomatic, etc. do not work with my old BJC-4200. Standard lpr with magicfilter is still my way to go. This may become obsolete, however, since the Canon BC-20 black block ink cartridge is increasingly hard to find.
Perhaps it's time to define how bleeding edge we need to be. I may be perfectly content to run a 2.4.26 kernel for the next ten years since many of my hardware accessories and drivers are experiencing trouble with the new 2.6 kernel series. Maybe Glib/Gdk/Gtk 2.4 will be the latest I ever go. I only use the libraries anyways. To keep my system light I build an LFS and use UDE.
Maybe Tanenbaum is right about microkernels being the only true solution--but it's tough to find a Radeon 7500 vid card driver for a microkernel based system to play DVDs.
Maybe I'll start to seriously look at those BSD CDs on my desk...
+++ATHZ 99:5:80
...but after reading this news about using Windows NT, I'm moving to Norway, our much richer arch enemy with all the oil!
as machines get faster and with memory being cheaper, it just seems like it's a manifest destiny to use all of those resources. ppl judge an OS on how fast apps launch, how 'pretty' the icons are and such, and these things demand resources.
of course at work I'm running Gentoo with Openbox3 as a wm, apps like Xterm and Firefox are my mainly used ones, so on a 1.8Gig box it's very comfortable. If you want/need a full blown desktop, then you'll need a faster machine. it's sad but true.
oh, and excuse my rant, but on my 800mhz iBook I had bum stick of 512Megs (actually I think OS X is just a bit picky on RAM, but I digress) so I had to send it back for a replacement. I ran OS X for 2 weeks on 128Megs, and it was terrible! just doing things like turning up the volume would take 3 seconds to respond, and try to open more than on app and get ready to wait. really unuseable. of course, with Apple, you only have the choice of choking more RAM into it. and yeah, I did run Gentoo on it for 6 months, but OS X is just such a nice 'fit'.
CB
free ipod and free gmail!
When it took a nerd to create pr0n
Things are getting "fatter" because it seems to be that many popular Linux desktop environments are in some way trying to compete with or mimick the "feel" of the Windows desktop. There are still many ways to avoid memory intensive and cpu-sapping desktop environments - WindowMaker, fluxbox, fvwm, and other window managers still offer enough for most people to "get stuff done" without hogging resources like it's going out of style.
But really, though, this was to be expected. I use GNOME 2 as my desktop environment and I'm fully aware of the price I'm paying in system resources. You can't expect a windowing environment that uses SVG, pretty effects, and pleasing visuals to be thrifty with computing power.
"It was hell!" recalls former child.
Remember when people perfered DOS 2.11 over version 3. because it was lighter?
I'd say it's still just as slim... just on scale with modern computing.
Try a distro such as SuSE 9.1 Personal. Xandros 2.0, Linspire or Ark. They only ship with ONE desktop environment not 10 like Debian does.
With only one desktop, they are lighter and leaner. I run SuSE 9.0 on my laptop with 128Mb ram and it flies a long. This story is just horse bollocks.
I then tried enlightenment and ran even better, and it looked better too!
You're old school? I beta tested the motherf***ing abacus!
Some desktops are slow and heavy in linux, but the same desktops are slow and heavy in other OSes.
When I was running RH9, I obtained a TK script to monitor my CPU temperature, adjust the fan speeds, and display the current temperature. The display is tiny. In RH9, it took 57MB! I think that it should take less than 1MB.
In order to save some memory on my system, I started rewritting the script into C, using GTK2 (a good excuse to learn this library). After implementing most of the functionality, I found that it took about 17MB. I wonder how much memory it would use if I ported it to motif (or athena widgets).
Things are getting better. I just ran the original script on my now FC-2 system, and found that it uses 8MB.
I realize that some of the memory in use is shared with other applications. I am starting to wonder if we have lost sight of memory usage.
Where law ends, tyranny begins -- William Pitt
The normal user linux distro will be bloated and/or have high requirements (has to be - people want it) - Those who doesn't want it, wouldn't choose Fedora - or if they do, they will be knowledgable enough to switch to another window manager. My laptop isn't the fastest in the world, but it's really snappy with Xfce 4 :) ;)
The point is, the OS should "grow" with the machines. On linux you have different choices. I mean, I can run KDE and gnome apps with my Xfce setup and it's great and fast.
One of my friends run blackbox, in fact he's so addicted to it that he runs some sort of blackbox add-on for windows too
Any technology distinguishable from magic, is insufficiently advanced.
Today if you want an up to date version of Windows you are pretty much stuck. Yes, you can still run Windows 98 and you will be getting security patches but it is really unstable. You can also stick with Windows 2K but it lacks a lot of the features that make XP attractive. With Linux I can choose to have an all singing all dancing desktop (and I do) or for older hardware I can cut back to the bare essentials but both systems are equally up to date and supported. For example, it is simple to run a very basic Linux system using WindowMaker or XFCE as the desktop environment, both of which are quite pleasant to use even today, while having a very up to date system.
"I have the attention span of a strobe lit goldfish, please get to the point quickly!"
As long as it is easier to extend functionality by adding code than adapting existing, making it more universal, software bloat is in inevitable.. Also, "memory is cheap" motto is becoming more and more popular, so developers nowdays don't care too much about producing software with small memory footprint. At the moment, fat software seems to be the future, as long as developer's time is more valuable than machine time, or until new approaches to sw development emerge..
Is this news to anyone?
Sheesh, I've still got an old 486 at home with RedHat 3.X on it. It runs (well, it would, if I'd boot it up) an old version of WindowMaker in just 8 MB of RAM. Not fast by any stretch, but the point is that this bloat is nothing new - it's been going on since day one.
---------------------------------------------
SERENITY NOW!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Linux has ONE major problem that might hold it back from EVER getting anywhere. GNOME and KDE.
They both suck, and maybe always will. They were NOT design well and we keep building and building on them, it MIGHT be the sandspur that Linux can never pull out of it's foot. It has taken almost 10 YEARS and a MAJOR FORK for mozzila to leave its UI bloat wear behind and get something useible out there, AND THAT'S JUST ONE FREAKING APP!!!!!
I have senced for a couple years now, that open source programmers don't have want it takes to finish off the last 20% of an app, OR EVEN THINK ABOUT IT!. They just code, they don't design, and in the end - somebody - somewhere - out there is going to have to do it. Where, or who, this person is remains to be seen, but he does not exists in the Linux world yet, and intill he does we are all stuck with crap on the desktop - WE NEED A STEVE JOBS!!!!!!!!!!!!
God send him to us, because these geeks are lost in the woods.
You won't have to spend hours downloading and installing updates every or so, when a new virus is released or a vulnerability in the OS is found. Worst yet, you don't have to worry about bouncing your box for almost every item the update includes *cough* Win 98 *cough*.
Nope, personally I can wait the extra 10 or so seconds for that kind of stability. Besides RAM is cheap these days, why not go out and pick up an extra 256Mb ? - And if you are running an older box (ie. P200), it's probably about time to upgrade.
Dude, my network is 90 percent Windows 2000. I picked that OS for the company, knowing what it required on the hardware side. I give it what it needs to run well. And it does. It's a good product.
It's only funny until someone gets hurt. Then, it's hilarious.
So now you have 2 desktops, KDE and GNOME and run apps of both. So you have to have all the libraries for both loaded. So you get two libraries that do the same thing in memory.
.Net or Java.
We need to see more 1-desktop distros. Move choice from the user or application to distro, where the user will select the distro. That is where choice belongs.
This though creates a big problem. Now you have to write apps for KDE or GNOME, and you limit your customer base. Unless you use
Clearly choice is hurting the consumer here, not helping one bit. I think the GNOME people should realize that C++ is the language of GUIs, and take the KDE plunge.
The alternative is to do one of the following:
1) Create a core C library that both KDE/Qt and GNOME use. This will only cause redundant binding to be in memory.
or 2) Create GNOME apps only in C++, and link through to KDE/Qt
or 3) drop GNOME
These are the only acceptible solutions to commercial (and non commercial) developers. Actually these three methods are each wins, and improve the situation for everyone.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
KDE 3.2.2 rips along just fine on Slackware 9.1 and FreeBSD 4.9 - Red Hat has always been slow IMHO, can't speak for Suse or Mandrake. I have an old beater 500 Mhz box with 128 MB of Ram in it at home running Slack and KDE is fine.
The heat from below can burn your eyes out
I know some of the major beefs with FC2 centered around changes to Nautilus, but I didn't pay much attention since I very rarely use it or any graphical file manager. How important is graphical file management on the Linux desktop? I'm a command line file twiddler myself, and the things I rely on GNOME for are around menu, applet, launcher, and basic window manager functionality. I don't know how much of my desktop's bloat is associated with Nautilus, but it's certainly a tax I could do without paying...
Y'know, I've wondered about the OS bloat, too.
Back more than ten years ago I had a Mac Plus running System 6. It had a very useable GUI, with widgets which were the same across all applications, consistent menus, control panels, and generally a solid and stable look-and-feel which made it easy to use. Applications didn't try to reinvent the toolbox; they just used the widgets that the operating system provided. The computer had 1MB of RAM and that was plenty for the operating system, Microsoft Word, and HyperCard to all be running at the same time.
These days I've tried running GNOME or KDE on Linux. They require at least 192MB RAM to run smoothly, and still there are lots of apps which insist on implementing their own widgets (*cough*Mozilla*cough*). Try to run a bare-bones window manager such as icewm, and then you have to deal with all the widgets in every application looking and working completely differently - for example, how come the xterm scrollbar still uses 'left click' to mean 'page up'?!
I want to have a good, consistent Linux window manager which can run in - oh, I'll be generous here, how about 16MB RAM - and provide a good, simple widget set to its applications, and a nice simple set of control panels to configure it all. No bells and whistles necessary, as long as it looks clean out-of-the-box.
Arrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrgh. OK, I feel better now.
Seriously people, let's thing about this. Newer and more feature rich software is going to be more resource intensive. (Particularly eye candy.) The point is, if you don't want it you don't have to install it. Don't like what Redhat, Mandrake, Suse, etc. are doing? No problem - there's Debian, Gentoo, Slackware, all the way down to little mini distros designed to run off of two floppy disks. Distros doing "latest and greatest" are going to be less streamlined, and new feature rich development is going to occur on faster machines. There is a REASON for all the linux distros out there - they all do different things and address different needs. It's called CHOICE.
Now, if you want to take the position that any reasonable program/environment/whatever shouldn't need more than X amount of resources, I'd probably agree with you. BUT. It's not important right now - hardware is still cheaper than time. At some point, someday, hardware will probably hit the atomic limit and then things will come down to software and architecture design. But those are MAJOR time investments, to do things right, and only worth doing if you have a static target to aim for. Look at how few programs survive a change like DOS->Windows3.11->Win95-WinXP. Particularly commerical ones. If you program for one target, when that target goes the program usually does too. Or it undergoes major revisions, if it's lucky.
Also keep in mind that to some extent modularity has a resource cost. Microkernel vs. monolithic is the classical case, but there are others. Abstraction always implies a resource penalty, since you aren't doing all the clever low level stuff to make things faster. In my opinion, the benefits outweigh the loss in most cases though. Look at what you get - understandable, modular code that is easier to maintain and use. That translates to fewer man hours, which are the most valuable resource.
Anyway, Debian in my experience performs very well on machines on which I have it installed. Gentoo is what I use for my desktop at home, but I don't recommend that for the casual user.
"I object to doing things that computers can do." -- Olin Shivers, lispers.org
The poster seems to be complaining about a problem that doesn't exist. I paraphrase:
"I have a speedy Linux GUI interface, using XFce, but I'm concerned that the desktop environments that others use are adding more features and/or getting slower."
The poster admits he's happy with XFce, so what's the problem here? That people can choose a desktop environment with different strengths than the poster's?
Check out my blog: My Galaxy is Milky Way Adjacent
binary/non-source linux distributions? Nothing pops up on google, distrowatch, etc...
TIA
Because people keep insisting that they be as friendly and action-packed as a typical windows desktop.
As long as the powers that be insist upon making popular desktops do everything without the need of a shell window, then they are going to be bloated. I don't care how pretty KDE is, it actually irritates me when after a default install of it I have to go hunting through the menus to find the well-hidden shell.
This is what you guys get when you keep preaching that linux is just as friendly as windows so everyone should switch. You get the same kind of bloat windows has.
that question bears the same slow heavy weight for an answer?
. . .without emulating Windows. Sure you can mike it tighter, smaller and more efficient, but there are certainly limits to that.
I could "emulate" the Empire State Building, that is to say build another building on the same base that does everything the ESB does and has all the usable square footage, in less than 103 floors, but it sure as hell wouldn't turn out to be a bungalow.
Fortunately this is a bit of a nonproblem as under Linux you can choose your enviroment, ranging anywhere from the console to Ratpoison to Gnome, as the submiter, at least in part, points out. Isn't that the whole point of the Unixey structure?
True, I can't even get the kernel to load in the memeory space of my old 486 laptop anymore, but older kernels are still avialable (and even maintained) and one can still make a single single floppy Linux OS that can load itself and enough tools to actually do work with entirely into the memory of such a machine.
Just as bungalows are still available for those of us that don't want to support the overhead of a name brand skyscraper.
KFG
anyone have any experience on any performance benefit from running linux as terminal on older hardware?
Yes, I agree - under linux, at least you have choice. I choose to run Ratpoison on Gentoo, and it's phenomenally fast. No quibbles. But the point the author was making was that in bloating the default desktop for the AVERAGE user, we loose out on a huge market: outdated machines that could be converted to linux boxen. Sure, I still use ancient machines and have a working linux box, but it would not suffice for the needs of an average user desktop. KDE and GNOME, the only real contenders as far as replacing windows goes, have system requirements that in some cases outstrip those of windows. What worries me is: it's precisely KDE and GNOME that aren't really targeted and the hardcore geeks, those most likely to have state-of-the-art hardware, so they should be more geared towards efficiency.
Yes, we can choose, and you can always pare down a linux machine to the console - but that's not the issue here. If you think it is, you're slightly missing the point of the article, which I would encourage you to read.
I understand the Unix philosopy, appreciate tight code
Actually the Unix philosophy does not help conserving memory at all. Putting every tiny feature into its own executable command line program is a working component architecture, but it's also responsible for a huge "waste" of CPU time and memory.
This is getting worse as those formerly small command line programs are getting more and more features. The original 'cp' may have been a simple way to copy a file. But GNU's 'cp' is a backup application of its own.
I like XFCE. It took awhile to get used to on my slackware box, but it's nice. Very fast.
I recently revived a pentium 166mhz system, and XFCE was the only Window manager that didn't have a problem running on 32 mbs of RAM.
Anyone know of any others?
This signature has Super Cow Powers
I don't know about anyone else, but when gconfd runs on my system (Fedora Core 1), it takes up 60 megs of RAM... it's not even a graphical app, and I doubt it stores 60 megs worth of data. It's just insane.
If it weren't for that one app, memory usage would be acceptable for me ( 128 megs ).
They aren't that inefficient generally. Sounds like you ran into a bug of some sort. I play Neverwinter Nights in one X session (in Windows and Linux both, I suppose, you can use a game as your 'window manager') while multitasking with KDE in another X session (try doing that in windows!). It runs fine and doesn't have really any slow down if I ran NWN just by itself.
With the lower priced PC's sold today that are much higher in performance every year and cmoing with gigs of ram standard, sooner or later speed will be unnoticable.
Then it comes down to stability and pricing.
You can still run linux on older weaker systems with less of the fattened applications and games. You can even run the most up to date kernel instead of falling back to windows 3.11 for example in the Microsoft world.
-- The box said Windows 2000 or better... so I installed Linux
Does the trick perfectly. You get KDE 2.2, an easy to use GUI with it.
'nuff said
No one in the Linux community is concerned with software tuning these days. Look at what Apple did to Mac OS X. I don't see anyone doing that with Linux.Look at Windows. I don't see anyone doing that either. Certainly no major distributions.
BeOS, there's more to an OS than a "lightweight" GUI, if the rest of the OS is bloated, what have you accomplished with a leab GUI? Not much.
The whole OS has to be lean.
So rise up, all ye lost ones, as one, we'll claw the clouds.
I thought this article explained the point very well, and I have the exact same problem he has. At work I have RedHat and Suse machines running on dual processor Athlons and Opterons. They work just fine and these machines are the best machines I've ever worked on, including the SGI workstations we used to use.
But at home all I have is a weak AMD-K6 running at 350Mhz with 160M memory running Win98. I've been having so many problems with spyware and viruses that I decided to switch to Linux, after convincing my wife that everything would be ok. Well, after installing various versions of RedHat I never could get something to run on that machine at an acceptable speed, so I gave up and went back to win98.
So I think the article is exactly right. I thought Linux was supposed to be faster and more streamlined than windows. I thought it would be able to run on older machines, but it couldn't.
Meanwhile, all the comments I just read on slashdot seem to prove the point even more. The article is getting torn apart by comments that big programs are to be expected for all the features, and that if you don't like it, you can go back to your teletypes.
The point is that Windows is providing satisfactory features on these older machines. I don't need it to solve the worlds problems, I just need a web browser, emailer, and occasional word processing. Win98 or even XP can do that just fine on my machine, give or take the viruses and junk, but there doesn't appear to be a linux distro that can do that.
After a default install of both GNOME and XFCE, the terminal is easily reachable via R/C menus or panels.
Perhaps KDE is not the correct desktop for you?
im in ur
I started with RH 5.2, which means that graphical file management on Linux for me is a non-starter. Thus I turned to XFce 4.0.5 at www.xfce.org, and haven't looked back.
For all you moderate to advanced folks out there who want the simplicity of managers like FVWM combined with modern features and GTK2, you ought to take a look at XFce 4.0.5. And the best part is that there are a wealth of plugins available for XFce's panel, appropriately referred to as goodies.
SCREW THE ADS! http://adblock.mozdev.org/ Proud user of teh Fox of Fire - Registered Linux User #289618
...but I had to wait for emacs to load up. Ba-dum dum *ching*
I put Win2k on my laptop, a p166MMX, with only 40MB of RAM, and a 2.1gig hdd. Sure, it runs slow, but it does what I want it to do: Word, AIM, IE, Freecell, and be portable. Sure, I don't have to pay for the license (campus has a corporate license), but it's just a suggestion.
Let's see... Add a whole lot of stuff to the desktop and it gets... BIGGER?
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
My flavor is Blackbox and/or Fluxbox, but you're spot-on about "my computer is a tool" thinking versus "my computer is a toy" thinking.
I wonder if it would be possible to do a lot of the "toy" stuff so many people like (or use by default) without the high memory/cpu requirements? If it's just a matter of having the stuff to explore and play with, you'd think something like xfce or enlightenment would take off. But the toy concept seems to go hand-in-hand with eye candy, so we need to load the alpha blending code, the anti-aliasing font libraries, the scalable vector graphics rendering engine, the bitmap skins, all that junk into core, then we need the cpu to juggle the fading in and out of tooltips, animated menus, and big chunky kparts modules, parsing xml for every little thing, all on top of the work the user's actually trying to do.
You're right, I'd say. Mere shell scripter that I am. But it sounds correct, giving it some thought. Although I suppose you could say that the Unix philosophy nowadays would be less about those tiny apps and more about reusable code, dynamic libs, etc.?
It's only funny until someone gets hurt. Then, it's hilarious.
I've gone back to my old reliable Slackware distro, after many years of trying others.
One nice thing about it is that it defaults to loading into command line mode - you have to manually run 'startx' or set up the default run level to include the graphical login.
My server and my firewall both stay in text mode - which gives both boxes an added boost in performance - both due to cpu utilization and more free memory. My workstation runs in graphical mode on a Pentium 500 mhz machine - with 128Mb ram - and it runs just fine (certainly faster than the windows ME that was previously on it). The Server is also a 500 mhz machine, and my firewall is a 120 mhz machine. I run gnome on my workstation - and is pretty snappy for such an older machine.
Lodragan Draoidh
The more you explain it, the more I don't understand it. - Mark Twain
I do reckon so - things get too slow for my taste, and I have to cut a few corners. I moved from KDE to XFce, trying not to use any program which invokes kdeinit, and today I got rid of GDM in favour of console login. I does the trick pretty neatly, but not as much as I would like it to.
This reminds me of the following quote:
r eface.html
"One neat thing about Suns [Operating Systems] is that they really boot fast."
From the Unix Haters' Handbook
http://research.microsoft.com/~daniel/p
The author was complaining about the IN-stability of Unix compared to his beloved Symbolics Lisp Machine! Of course this quote is old, and the author is
I still run Gnome 2.6 on my Celeron 400MHz desktop, with 64M of RAM. Sure it swaps a bit now and then, but on the whole it still behaves rather snappy. In fact, with the new Nautilus, it is much faster than it used to be.
Same story on my PII 300MHz laptop, which has slightly more RAM at 192M...
I don't see any problem with Gnome on either...
I propose that everyone here steals the systems of every open source developer they know and replace them with pentium2 boxes with 128mb of ram max.
The stolen boxes can then be dropped off at my house in soviet russia where I can build a beowolf cluster running a dying version of unix.
Right now ALL of you should be reporting bugs to GTK, Qt, KDE, GNOME, Mozilla and OpenOffice.org databases. Grab a profiling tool and help strip the fat out of them.
THE SOURCE IS OPEN! YOU CAN FIX IT!
i recently installed fedora core 2 and i must say xorg is alot better on my machine compared to xfree. xfce is great too.
lose != loose
I run FC2 with fluxbox on a 900Mhz and do most of my stuff on there with no noticiable lag. I also have a newer laptop that runs WinXP. Right after I reboot the laptop things do run marginally faster than on my desktop, after a little while things start to drag and load times are easily double that of linux. Whereas FC2 stays up for weeks or months on end with know noticable change in load times.
Easily reachable after having to hunt for it, because it's an afterthought.
I have no problems with windowmaker.
And this is exactly why Joe Average goes for IE. While you may know how to pick those features that you want, regular users do not. Hell, many of us don't even want to! (That's why I love my Mac, btw. It just works.)
Bloat or not, secure or not, most of the users still care only about how easy it is to use. If it requires even one extra click to make it good, it's just not worth it.
(And yes, I know this is silly. I know that IE is maybe the worst browser there is. But this is how most of the userst act!)
I use Gnome, largely exclusively because of the keyboard bindings offered by Sawfish. I'd like to switch to something lighter - hoping someone here has an opinion (does anyone here have any opinions on anything?):
Features I would need to switch:
- Real windows (including overlapping)
- maximize/restore toggle from the keyboard
- at least 8 workspaces (2x4)
- move directionally between workspaces from the keyboard
- move windows directionally between workspaces from the keyboard
- launch arbitrarily defined commands from the keyboard (can do this with xbindkeys if necessary, but would prefer native support)
- cycle windows from the keyboard
- close window from the keyboard
- a cpu/mem/swap/network load monitor for the taskbar
- a graphical workspace display for the taskbar
- taskbar clock
- taskbar application launcher
- taskbar display of apps in this workspace
Anyone know the thinnest desktop environment that supports those features?
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
No matter how well a C compiler is written to create optimal code, it just isn't the equal of someone experienced writing in Assembler from the get-go. The problem is, where do you find the sort of qualified Assembler programmers you need to write the sort of tight code required to increase speed and reduce memory footprint? Does anyone even know Assembler anymore? The big loss, of course, in using Assembler would be portability across different CPU's.
"My country, right or wrong; if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right." --Senator Carl Schurz (1872)
Nobody should have to do all of that crap. If it's worth doing, the OS should do it for you in the background or at least pop up in a window asking you to do it because the OS thinks it would help performance. That's how XP works, and it seems to help people out quite a bit.
I don't think I've ever heard anyone describe their system with 128mb RAM and "ran XP happily" in the same sentence before. Definately friends of mine who have done plenty of PC repairing in their day would agree.
Well, I can be the second person after the person you responded to then. I had a PC that just died the other day that was a PIII 866mhz machine with 128MB of RAM and a 40GB hard drive. I used it to play some games (I never tried GTA or anything, but Quake III runs fine), DVD burning, watching TV, surfing the web, scanning and editing photos, etc. All the typical stuff, and it worked at least reasonably, if not good. My laptop is faster and has more memory, but also runs XP. It works great too, except for the video which would suck in any OS because the hardware sucks.
Don't mark Linux off as a loss until you've properly tuned it. The same could be said for any OS for that matter.
The point is that linux shouldn't have to be tuned to run as well as Windows. I can tune linux and it works great, I can tune XP and it works great. However, what really counts for the end user is how things function out of the box.
Of course, I actually do like Linux quite a bit. I've been a sysadmin and a programmer, so I have no problem using linux. However, I was really turned off from it for the typical end user after trying to help my parents get it working on their PC. Windows XP really works great for the majority of people, although there are very clear areas of improvements that Microsoft has to make. Linux works great for many people too. Personally, if I were to buy a new system, I'd probably get an iBook because OS X seems to be the best of both worlds. Still, XP is not inferior to Linux, both suck although they suck differently.
Actually, it can be said about Windows. There are options available to you other than running the default windows shell. I know BlackBox (which I run) is available in win32 and there's another nice shell called LiteStep. I'm pretty sure there are a few other ones floating around out there as well. You can also theme Windows much like KDE or Gnome. Sure, most of the software for it isn't FOSS, but that doesn't mean you can't do it.
What seems to be the most reason of slow desktops are
anti-aliased fonts (yeah they look nice, but everything is done on the client side, not server side as it should be) and horribly inefficient toolkits generating too many X calls. One example that I would like to highlight is the FOX toolkit which has very efficient automatic delayed paint / layout algorithm. FOX applications start up in the matter of milliseconds.
To quote the original author of FOX:
"The delayed painting is important, as it prevents stacking up huge piles of expose events when for example dragging [solid-, or opaque-dragging] windows over FOX applications. By NOT doing the unnecessary work, the system actually catches up more quickly, and never falls behind more than one repaint.
The delayed layout is responsible for the extremely fast startup times of FOX applications. As hundreds of Widgets are being added during construction of an application's GUI, recalculating layout after each addition really kills startup performance.
Delayed layout benefits performance each time many GUI Widgets are added or removed, or if layout hints are changed with widespread effects. It also makes opaque resizing [supported by a few X Window Managers] quite fast."
Recently though they added anti-aliased fonts, startup times almost trippled and overall performance went down with it (still not as worse as some other toolkits).
Don't worry, as soon as Longhorn will be released this thread will become useless, since the lowest requirements in order to run Longhorn smoothly will be about 1GB Ram :-)
So, when compared to any DE/WM for Linux, it will be peanuts!
Hopefully, when Longhorn is to be released there will be a lot more power and RAM capacity then there is today, according to Moore's Law.
Spend hundreds of man-years adding to Linux all the stuff that makes MS Windows heavy and slow, and surprise! the result is heavy and slow.
One of the reasons I migrated to Linux was to get *away* from all that frosting. The app.s I use do their jobs whether I have a "desktop environment" or not, and having used both ways I definitely prefer not. fvwm is at least as much as I need to control these boxes.
Even the stuff I run could be improved, though, if so many programs weren't each dependent on dozens of fat Gnome libraries which then have to be kept updated even though I don't use Gnome. *Those* app.s are slow even though everything else is fast.
First of all, let's put something straight: KDE/Gnome are not the linux desktop. Sure, they can be part of it, but there are many other alternatives. Second, KDE/Gnome are among the most popular because they tend to be easy to adjust, and have a lot of features.
However, one does have the choice of alternate WM's such as "iceWM" (which I use and is fairly light), "windowmaker", etc. In fact, I find that while IceWM is lighter than gnome, it does thing in a fashion that makes more sense.
Remember, choice may = bloat if you choose everything with the kitchen sink. But with choice you can also streamline and avoid much of the bloat, which you can't do in OS's that offer "all or nothing" or many cases.
Try <ctrl><alt><f1>
Waiting for ad.doubleclick.net...
can i do the same with Linux and KDE ?
sure win95 is a piece of crap but to use but its still pretty impressive to incorporate window manager, networking, explorer, msie4 , realplayer , good hardware support and run all that commercial software on a p75 with 4mb of ram in 150mb of HD space
As expected on slashdot there are whole ton of stupid comments exonerating Linux for one reason or another. Instead of addressing each of them individually, I will hit a bunch in in this post.
In light of the Windowes System Requirements, is this really that big?
Why does it matter what the requirements on the box say? KDE/GNOME are as slow or slower than windows when run on the same hardware! So the fact that windows has hich system requirements doesn't excuse the fact that Linux has higher ones.
But it isn't as heavy if you don't run those Desktops and applications.
That is not a fair comparison. It is easy to be lighter weight when you don't do as much.
If you need to do everthing that you can do in windows, then Linux is signifcantly slower (mostly footprint and loading time) than windows.
But Windows preloads thier applications.
That is a good argument for Mozilla vs. IE on windows, but in most cases is not valid. Like the submitter stated, even third party applications tend load quicker on windows that most linux applications do in windows. I have used Linux for years and I can't tell you how many times I have gotten tired of the slow responsiveness of KDE and GNOME and have reverted back to my old TWM (or even more lightweight) ways. Where-as on the same machine Windows 98 or 2000 were quite responsive (just not very usefull for what I was doing).
Secondly there is no reason that Linux could not preload common applications to make them run faster, and if that makes the system more responsive they should do so. But I really don't think that would completely solve the problem, it would just make the boot time longer, and boot for a Linux desktop is already longer than for Windows XP or OS X.
So basically it comes down to the fact that it is (relatively) easy to write full-featured software and it is easy to write light-wieght software but doing both is hard. Microsoft is doing a better job than the open source desktops in that regard.
When I saw GNOME under development, I never thought to myself, "self, now that GNOME thing looks to speed things up". Never once did it even occur to me that all that PrettyFactor would be light on memory or CPU. Is the Linux Desktop getting heavier and slower? If you use GNOME or KDE or any other "user friendly" desktop environment, yes.
I've got a 486/66 at home running a mail / web / name / shell server. He's keeping up pretty well, but I must admit that console dselect takes a minute longer than I would prefer to start up. For his every day tasks, even keeping up with updates, it's more than enough-- so really, this is a question of the GUI end of things.
I wonder how well it would work to introduce one of those reviewers to a very well set up and themed tvtwm2 or whatnot. You know, without all the Kapps or Gapps. I bet the reviewer says it's snappy as a rubber band, but it doesn't do anything (most of those setups don't have any easy to find buttons, you have to click on a blank background to start anything). I think under that environment, Moz, OO, Wine, etc. work, but the plethora of free apps that make Linux interesting to the hobbyist seem to take advantage of the easy to use Glibs and Klibs. The reason for the "bloat" (i.e. heavier and slower) is the added functionality and eye candy.
You can take your lean and mean Linux Desktop, but don't expect it to run all the pretty apps nor expect it to have anti-aliasing and PrettyFactor3.0.
First, let's not confuse the OS with the window manager/desktop environment, although I know typical Windows and Mac users have difficulty understanding this. Fluxbox, Xfce, Windowmaker, and others still offer stellar performance on older hardware.
Regarding KDE and GNOME, I have noticed that KDE's performance has improved on the same hardware over the last few releases while GNOME's performance has degraded.
I spend most of my time on Gentoo with KDE, but I use a variety of window managers, from time to time. My system is very nice so I have not noticed any problems. I did recently retire a Pentium 200 Linux server, not because it couldn't do the job but because I no longer needed it. I don't run a GUI on my servers, though.
You have seriously offended my laptop who tells me (and now you) that she's neither bloated nor slow even though she's an Intel PII 366 Celeron.
Runs Slackware with WindowMaker and is as responsive and zippy as the first day I pulled her out of the shipping box. Actually faster since she came with Winbomb98 which was most quickly wiped away.
She advises that you promply get a clue, preferrably at the nearest prompt.
Everything in the Universe sucks: It's the law!
We all have 2GHz Intel machines with 256Mb RAM here, and XP definitely doesn't run comfortable, unless you have the patience of Buddha.
A student approaches his master and asks him: Master, how come my 3GHz Hyperthreaded four processor system with 2Gb of RAM feels so slow, yet I never hear you complain about your old 386? Doesn't it run slower?
And the Master responds: A hare will think the grass is dead, while a turtle might see it grow. A penguin on the other hand, doesn't even know what grass is.
The student was immediately enlightened, went home and programmed a web server on his Commodore 64.
KDE has only been getting faster. KDE 3.0 was way faster than 2.x, and it only got better in 3.1 and now in 3.2. Also Distros based on kernel 2.6.x also feel more responsive. To me things are getting better...
Is the Linux desktop getting heavier and slower? Yes, indeed. Is the desktop in general getting heavier and slower? Again, it is.
That's exactly what I am using right now: Debian GNU/Linux, Window Maker and Galeon. So no, my desktop is not getting heavier, nor it is getting slower. So I guess the correct answer to the very question whether the Linux desktop is getting heavier and slower should be: Whose Linux desktop?
Sincerely,
Pan Tarhei Hosé, PhD.
"Homo sum et cogito ergo odi profanum vulgus et libido."
Hell, who isn't getting heavier and slower. Maybe if this 'Linux' guy would follow my doctor's advice and get away from the computer, maybe get some exercise, he'd stop getting heavier and slower.
- Tash
having done this spared a lot of context switches, so it has a positive impact on performance.. at the price of a lower reliability. at my knowledge this compromise wasn't made on linux, i don't know if this eventuality was studied.
for more, look for win32k.sys on these pages:h tml
h tml
http://www.windowsitlibrary.com/Content/356/01/2.
http://www.windowsitlibrary.com/Content/356/01/3.
How can anyone take this question seriously? There is a perfectly capable modern desktop that is lightweight enough to perform well on old hardware... and since the poster of the question pointed it out himself I'm not sure what else there is to tell him.
;-)
The fact is that new hardware has higher capacity and KDE/Gnome/Longhorn developers are wise to take advantage of that. Of course for older computers that cannot handle the load they won't be able to use the latest and greatest versions of KDE and Gnome, that's just a fact of life they'll have to get used to. Thankfully on Linux you have a choice that works well for old hardware -- the XFCE4 project is an awesome desktop that runs blazingly fast on old hardware.
I'm sure Longhorn will have a similar low-resource GUI when it comes out, right?
501 Not Implemented
I've setup a button bar at the bottom of my screen with my most commonly used apps. It took me some time before I got all the mime-types and associated programs setup the way I wanted, but it went pretty smoothly (and then I used unison to keep the settings in sync on all my machines). I'm quite happy with it, and much more productive. It also lets you type arbitrary shell code to run a file through right there. IE: Select a bunch of files and then type !for $a in "$@"; do foo; done, so I get the best of both worlds. btw: I setup root-tail to watch my .xsession-errors file so I can see any results on my background.
Couple this with fluxbox's tabbed windows, keyboard shortcuts, and multiple workspaces and I'm quite happy.
On my main desktops, I run windowmaker with ROX-Filer, and they are lean and fast. I tried KDE and Gnome, just to see what they are up to when I did a recent desktop install. After a week of being nonproductive in these environments, I went back to windowmaker + ROX.
What I don't understand is WHY these things are getting so bloated. I can do everything I need and more with a lightweight environment like ROX. I see 0 advantage, or even ease of use of KDE or Gnome over what ROX + Windowmaker give me.
Why are there so many posts about windowmanagers to use instead of KDE/GNOME here? Take a look at the memory usage of any DE compared to OO.org or mozilla - it's pretty small. Using blackbox will save you maybe 15mb over a bare-bones KDE. Not a large difference when your openoffice window takes ~50mb and mozilla is taking 50Mb to display slashdot.
None of the points raised in the article are actually linux-specific. It's user applications and the graphics system that need optimising.
One machine I run latest 2.6 kernel and KDE on is the Celeron 333 overclocked to 375, with 512 MB ram with good satisfaction. Although Win2k was a little bit more responsive on this machine, it is not possible to install XP on such box, because of lack of performance.
Also, in my notebook which is P166mmx wih 48MB ram (sic!), I run Fluxbox instead of KDE, on latest 2.4 kernel and whole system fits into 19MB of memory only. It runs perfectly quick. It is not possible to put W2k on such machine and even Win98 were sloppy on it.
A conclusion: pick a desktop engine of the size and performance matching size and performance of your linux box. Note you cannot do that with windows.
There you are, staring at me again.
On the vanilla, x86 side of things I use pretty minimal stuff, slackware/home-brewed system setup, compile my own kernels, run blackbox/fluxbox, etc.
:^)
But a while back I inherited a couple of iMacs, the very original blue beachball-shaped ones. They had the standard 32 megs of ram (no expansion slots, of course) which wasn't even enough to run the OS8.5 or whatever they came with. So I thought I'd stick yellow dog on it (might have tried something else too, can't remember) but the install CD crashed because the installer itself (even in text mode!) required more ram than 32 megs.
My first experience with Linux was on an 486 with 8 megs of ram. Now, I didn't want to do anything fancy with these iMacs, maybe just a dumb-terminal type framebuffer x-server to remotely run web browsers from one of my servers or something. Or even just to have it run text-mode ssh/pine/lynx. But due to a bloated installer, I couldn't even do that.
I don't much care that mainstream distros have beefy requirements, but it would be nice if there were viable options for old pathetic hardware too. It's easy to dig up such stuff on the x86 side, but I failed miserably at finding something that would:
+ run on an original iMac
+ burn to a bootable CD (no floppy drive!)
+ be happy with 32 megs of memory
If anybody knows of such a beast, let me know! I've got a pair of big translucent paperweights just itching to play some ascii quake over ssh!
This isn't really a new issue, I've been hearing about this since I started using linux 2 yrs ago.
~ there are 10 types of people in this world, those that can read binary and those that can't
This really isn't flame bait. My point is that as we move to new kernels, and each random library and package is updated, and each random application comes out with their .2 ,.3, and 3.2.1 we are adding more code, more features, etc etc etc.
The baseline PC becomes faster and more powerfull over time so you write programs that use a little bit more of those resources. Linux isn't to the point where the install can be compared to the other OSs, but it's drinking milk...
If Linux is going to compete for the Desktop then it will continue to use more cpu, ram etc. Desktops do that kind of thing. A server can have cli, but desktops need GUI, and bells and whistles, smooth fonts, shadowing, and so on.
I don't own an original class Pentium but if I did I wouldn't complain that Mandrake 10 runs slow on it. I'd be glad that I was able to use it for so long. (Actually I'd turn it into a router and throw *Insert Favorite Distro Here* on it.
I boycott signatures
Which being such an intuitive key stroke to hit, only makes the parent's point.
The shell still is an integral part of the desktop on linux. Why there can't be a button on the panel/kicker by default is beyond me.
The BSDs (excluding FreeBSD 5.x, which isn't finished yet and is probably still slower than 4.x) and Solaris (both Intel and SPARC, and - ironically - excluding Solaris running the new GNOME desktop for Solaris).
New releases of Solaris have been, if anything, FASTER on my ancient Sparcstation 5 70MHz, though it won't be supported in Solaris 10. There's a notion among Linux users in particular that Solaris x86 is bloated and slow. This notion is based on old experience, as far as I can tell - it was pretty slow when machines had 64MB of RAM, or less, on the average. Now, machines are a heck of a lot faster, and Solaris hasn't bloated much at all. It performs really well.
Now before I get modded down, I be to remind whoever might read this that what I am saying is FACT. - bogaboga
Ram disk. Load your apps onto it at boot time. Slows down boot but significantly improves startup and running performance.
BTW, I've tried pre warming the buffer cache with libraries, binaries, misc app files etc, it doesn't help much and is slower than loading a ramdisk.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
he original poster seems to be complaining about a problem that doesn't exist. I paraphrase:
"I have a speedy Linux GUI interface, using XFce, but I'm concerned that the desktop environments that others use are adding more features and/or getting slower."
The poster admits he's happy with XFce, so what's the problem here? That people can choose a desktop environment with different strengths than the poster's?
Check out my blog: My Galaxy is Milky Way Adjacent
Gnome programmers write code the way Ronald Reagan gave money to the Pentagon: as much as they can, without stopping to see if it's supported by the real world limitations of the economy or RAM.
A lot of free software developpers seem to *not care* about the size of their users monitors. Read statistics, a lot of people are still on 800X600 and 1024x768 displays, so please have your configurations or even applications size fit in the lower size possible. ...
The worst is that most of the time, it is full of lost space and the huge size wasnt even needed AT ALL. Yesterday, i was on a 640x480 display and one app had a size just slightly exceeded that size, so I had to alt-drag it to click OK:
The app was made of:
3 icons
3 lines of 5~6 words.
The rest was a huge blank page and an OK button outside my display!!!
But we do hear a lot of people talk about usability those days, even experts which can argue for days if OK must be to the right or to the left! sigh
what the hell is anyone doing about it!
Seriously, if KDE is so big and fat, then why isn't it being stripped down? If the libraries and recycleable components are taking up too much RAM, why isn't anybody pairing them down to "lean and mean" pieces.
Is it because this development isn't sexy? If so, I'll say that's BS. When the Firefox RC came out the other day, the first thing I wanted to know was if:
A) the installer was smaller
B) the RAM footprint was below the 18-30MB that it usually runs at
(and if they fixed leakage... why is it when I close all my tabs I don't get back to 18MB anymore?)
That kind of stuff is cool. Making an iTunes ripoff just because it's "new to Linux" isn't.
Have a look at cobind
It uses xfce, and only gtk apps.
So software developers are taking advantage of faster CPUs and the dirt cheap price of RAM. How is this bad? I want my computer to do more over time, not to minimize featuresets just so hobbyists can screw around with full installs of the latest distros on an old Sparc 10 taken from an office trash heap.
People who want to Linux on crappy old hardware need to use crappy old distros or run BlackBox. That's life. Obsolesence is just the way of computing, and that isn't going to change just because a few morons refuse to give up on that old Pentium 233 and buy an Athlon.
Next version of linux will be Windows, and then you'll hate it: no console = so slow, so bugs.....
1) Is your X server using an accelerated driver, or the framebuffer device, or even the generic vesa driver?
2) If you are using an accelerated driver, which one? Some provide more acceleration than others.
3) Are you using anti-aliased font rendering? If so, did you check to see whether your driver supports hardware acceleration of the RENDER extension?
4) Did your friend disable unnecessary background processes, or did he just do a "full" install so he didn't miss out on any goodies.
Finally, users don't want fast machines that do nothing, they want machines that perform some useful task. For years, the calls were for "usable desktop applications", tools such as xpaint, xfig, midnight commander and Lyx + latex being judged as being "unsuitable". Well, now we've got the kind of fully-featured applications that were being called for, but in order to create them _in reasonable amounts of time_, and with a reasonably high level of reliability, reusable component architectures (e.g. GTK, DCOP, Qt, etc) need to be used.
As the motto goes - "Good, fast, cheap - pick any two" (where "good" in this case means "efficient", "fast" means "available now rather than in 10 years time" and "cheap" still means low cost). The mass market appears to have decided that it likes "Cheap" and "Fast" - just like with PC hardware, in fact.
If you think there's a market for "Good" and "Fast", go right ahead and try to make some money doing it.
--
The whole point of Linux is that you can make it as bloated or as sparse as possible. You do not need to have a window environment if you do not want one.
I hate sigs.
is because there are so many different widget libraries still in use. Suppose the user is running kmail in gnome, and browsing with mozilla, with OO.o in the background. Hardly an uncommon situation. But that's 4 different widget sets, and a lot of memory could be saved if all apps used the same widgets as they do on Windows. Sadly, choice is often not good.
I've said it before.... Linux used to be perfect for old laptops... now Fedora Core 2 isn't even offered with a floppy boot option (something about the 2.6 kernal being too big), so those computers that can't boot from CD are just outta luck.
It's a shame... there's something so great about a slimmed down, purpose-built racecar that the latest Linux variants seem to be missing.
--D
I am typing this message on a Debian Unstable machine fully updated to GNOME 2.6, and its a PentiumII 233, with 196MB of RAM. And it is running fine.
We've been making applications and operating systems smarter for 50 years. Just about everyone will agree that having computers 'just work' more often is a good thing.
Now, given the massive diversity of software, hardware, and users; how do you propose that we solve the problem? There's an entire world of programmers that would like to know.
The old school answer of "just do this here, and that there" isn't good enough anymore. You take the time to make a system perfectly responsive, and by then the space has changed; hardware is different, users expectations have changed.
You might want to check out the RULE project ("Run Up to date Linux Everywhere).
RULE home page
i failed to like debian (sorry), but falled litteraly in love w/ gentoo:
portage/emerge is very likable, and i agree with their philosophy and the way they express it. massive number of packages, transparency. the concept of meta-distribution is no joke, i use it as well for my home PC needs, on my workstation, my 64 MB old laptop and on my servers.
after a while using linux, i was loosing the flame. with all this stuff installed by default by most distribution linux was looking more and more blackboxed like windows, with its start-from-almost-nothing approache, the administrator is winning back the mastering of his system.
gentoo is a salutary return to the roots and the spirit of unix.
it brings the same freshness feeling than migrating from (bloated) gnome desktop to xfce.
P.S.: i use devil-linux too, perfect for network stuff on diskless recycled PCs.. very nice stuff too !
It is rather sad that that KDE and particularly /etc/gconf. Next - setting up the menu items: Weird XML and INI style vomit in /etc/gnome-vfs with X-GNOME specials. Don't forget my-special-url:/// junk. Naming is an unmitigated disaster. Duplicated subsystems, no consistency, gratuitous use of XML. And they pride themselves on minimalism when they can't even get a consistent and clean design theme/thread into the system. Somebody should redo the gconf/vfs as a sane text, every-value-is-a-file system. Or maybe start again with GTK.
GNOME seem not to have been designed but chucked together. Try setting up the Gnome panel using a text editor: Gack - wading through loads of XML cruft in
If you've been around redmond lately, and seen the security push, you'll know that before long windows will be safer as well. Linux is still very cool, and better as a server imho, but the oss devs had better get a move on.
I have a 1.2Ghz, 256Mb laptop running NetBSD and GNOME 2.6 which is blazingly fast. Looking at top, it's using around 150Mb to run a GNOME login, Firebird, Rxvt and the NEdit editor.
In comparison, my 1.6Ghz, 512Mb desktop machine running Linux and GNOME 2.6 is noticably slower. The memory footprint with a similar list of apps running (Mozilla instead of Firebird) is around 400Mb.
Linux used to be great on lower spec hardware than Windows, but since 2.4 it has become bloated and slow. Glibc is also an incredibly bloated implementation of a C library if compared to those that ship with BSD's. The kernel bloat could be a result of the extra complexity ti run on mid-range, multi processor machines. Glibc's excuse is somewhat less easy to pin down.
Chris
Real fast! Try it out! You will LOVE it!
I concur. On my SuSE 8.2 configuration, the shells were in well placed areas only two menu levels deep.
Menu -> System Tools -> Terminal
How is that ANY different from any other system?
I haven't installed Linux on a machine of mine in probably 6 years. I've become quite the fan of FreeBSD and OpenBSD.
I was running OpenBSD 2.8 on a Thinkpad 760ed. That's a Pentium 133 with 48MB of RAM. You'll be hard-pressed to find a computer less capable. But, running OBSD 2.8, with XFree 3.3.6, it was entirely usable. I ran XEmacs and Netscape 4 with no troubles on top of WindowMaker--still the finest window manager around, to my mind.
Later, I upgraded to OBSD 2.9, but hated it. 2.9 moved to XFree 4.0, which was MUCH slower than 3.3.6.
Of course, running Netscape 4.0 these days is just asking for trouble; but, jeez, there is hardly a single graphical web browser that isn't a bloated pig.
I have another old Thinkpad, a 760e that has similar specs. I run Windows 98 on it. Why? Well, it can run a recent web browser (IE), it can run an office suite (MS Office 97), and you can play MP3s on it (Windows Media Player, or WinAmp). All that, and on a 133mhz Pentium with 64 MB RAM and a 700 MB hard drive.
There is a market for sprucing up old computers with Free software written to accomodate older and slower hardware, but it is hard. You have to make usability decisions--is this important? Can I lose this? We have to keep that--and write careful code. In other words, you have to do hard work, and hard work isn't sexy. At the end, you get an OS that will run on an 8 year old computer... when a brand new computer can be had from eMachines for $500. That's incredibly hard to justify.
Rather than "revitalizing" old computers, the Free software crowd would do better to anticipate the needs of the future, rather than chasing the current offerings from Cupertino or Redmond. What are the needs of the future? I dunno--if I did know, I sure wouldn't tell you. But, I think that it will involve distributed services and rapid propogation of data through multiple channels. Meaning, I think that our "computers" will become even MORE personal, as in our mobile phones will become our primary device. When we're away from home, all our data will be available through the phone, either stored physically on the phone, or virtually through data services offered by the phone company. We'll be able to augment our phone's capabilities with near-remote (docking station), or far-remote (your ISP's server) services. The phone can switch between a wired, 802.11 wireless, or CDMA/TDMA/Whatever wireless through your phone service seamlessly.
(Say you're a geek, your SSH session to a remote server will (through the miracle of screen) automatically detach your session when you yank your phone out of it's cradle and go to work. At work, when you attach your phone to another station, hey presto your session reattaches itself, and you continue where you left off.)
What makes this work is powerful, reliable servers, and lightweight, network transparent protocols that scale from a simple terminal to a full-screen GUI. Golly, it sounds like the Free software community running free *nixes and X, don't it?
Potato chips are a by-yourself food.
Debian? How small a foot print do you want?
/.
You still can run all your sever services on *almost* any running box if you care (and we all clearly care).
If your distro is slow cut the crap from the init scripts, remember I'm not talking to the uninitiated here, this is
If you want it as a desktop pick a light manager and small apps. There ARE good graphical apps for all occasions.
Of the two big desktops, in my experience (debian testing), KDE is much faster than gnome. Which is a shame as I prefer Gnome.
Keep smiling. The bastards'll think you know something....
Firkin Ridiculous.
Conor "You're not married,you haven't got a girlfriend and you've never seen Star Trek? Good Lord!" - Patrick Stewart
Because command lines scare newbies, it's as simple as that. You can't have your cake and eat it too, to attract novice users to linux you have to make things as simple as possible, hiding command lines and so forth and so on. If you're experienced enough with UNIX or Linux to require a command line, you should be smart enough to figure out how to get one and make it easily accessible if you need it. Or, failing that, be smart enough to set up a window manager with more command-prompt friendly defaults.
Ita erat quando hic adveni.
Actually, I upgraded to the new distro's BECAUSE of their slowness.
I found myself getting all of my work done and still having a day left. Can't have that, they could eliminate my job!
My slow desktop gives me job security!
I think Mauve has the most RAM. --PHB (Dilbert Comic)
I got a 700Mhz Celeron system with 128M of RAM. Fedora, Debian, Red Hat, SuSE, etc all ran like dogs on it and had issues. Lindows/Linspire ran better, but it is a stripped down version of Linux without all the geegaws and extra stuff I may not be using yet.
People claimed I must not have known what I was doing because of the Linux issues I had. Apparently it was not me, but the bloated Linux distros causing the problems. Apparently one needs better hardware requirements to run the major Linux Distros. Ah for the days when all you needed was a 486 with 8M of RAM to run Linux.
I just found a way to fix the apt-get and rpm functions that Linspire disabled, so I can get the things I want or need without paying for a CNR subscription.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
sorry for replying to myself i just stumbled on this patch for the linux kernel that could allow the same performance/reliabiliry compromise to linux and i think this could be interesting..
;)
Kernel Mode Linux : Execute user processes in kernel mode
i'll give it a try at home
Excuse my ignorance here... and correct me, because I really want to know...
But are the load time issues with apps such as OpenOffice effected by Java? Java apps are still slower by leaps and bounds than than apps written in a non-interpretive language. This is not meant to start a flame war over Java. I think Java is great. It's really convenient to write an apps once than can be used on most systems that support Java.
I started the whole StarOffice/OpenOffice trip during the 5.x version in around 1999/2000. I tested them both on Windows (98/NT) and Linux (Slackware 7.x). 5.x took forever to load in those days (even on 300+ mHz hardware it would take sometimes 2 minutes). It was an interface that took over the task bar and our users hated it's speed and interface. This was at a time when our office was still using Lotus's Office Suite. We were evauluating whether or not to go to Microsoft Office, Wordperfect Office, or StarOffice (unfortunately we had to go with MS). We again evaulated StarOffice 6 and OpenOffice 1.0 a couple of years later. In all tests, users abosolutely hated the responsiveness of OpenOffice (and Star Office). MS Office and Wordperfect continue to finish 1 and 2 in our yearly user evals.
Now, I ask my original question with a new twist... Is that fact that Wordperfect Office, MS Office, and Lotus Suite are written in C++, VB, etc. and using native OS APIs what makes them more responsive? Or is the fact that OO and Star run through an intrepreter at run time? Is Java the reason OO is slow and not OO itself?
I'm just curious. I use OO on my home PC, but getting the office to switch is a losing battle because of the "feature-rich" speed of it.
By the way, I think the posted article is spot on... Very few average users update their hardware every year. Heck my father has run his first PC for 8 years and is going on 3 with his current Win2K box. He has no plans to upgrade machines, however he has been looking for a new OS. Sadly, his old 550-mhz chip will just not handle any current "User-Friendly" newbie-Linux (Lindows/Lycoris/Xandros). It seems to me that Linux has started making the assumption that the average Joe can afford to buy a new PC every 1-2 years. "Feature-richness" (aka Bloat) will keep Linux off the desktops of general public. General users, unfortunately for us in the Linux world, just want stuff that works quickly on what they've already got.
Just my 2-cents here. I'm admittedly wrong 50% of the time.
-Revoke
(Slackware 9.1/IceWM/curtom kernel for laptop)
(void) signal(SIGALRM, (alarm_fired=1)); if (alarm_fired) printf("Revoke is clueless!\n");
We have heard recently that a number of Distros have switched to Xorg. This project aimed to be less of a resource hog than XFree86 - and last I checked, it has succeeded. The 2.6 kernel also helps with performance boosts. Why stop here? Alot of the other pieces to make a basic linux system (like init) should be ripped apart, and re-written to reduce boot times, cpu times, frustation times, and swap time. As a community, we have the choice to do something or do nothing. 'Desktop Linux' is on the horizon, and doing nothing is a suicidal act.
If successful, this would be one small step for tux, one giant leap for penguin-kind.
You are confusing me with someone who cares.
I'm trying to adapt to Linux, but it's painfully slow. I've got a 300MHz K6-2 with 192MB RAM, but I'm going to have to try a slim window manager because KDE bogs everything down. My complaint is that it seems there aren't many window managers that are in a middle ground. I've looked at several of the smaller window managers, and they seem way too spartan. They're barely better than a straight Xserver. Can't you get wallpaper, desktop icons, a Start menu, and taskbar without the thing sucking resources like a sponge? That right click program menu is a waste of time because you have to minimize the apps you're running to right click for that menu.
We may experience some slight turbulence and then...explode. -Capt. Mal Reynolds
The new Mandrake 10.0 is really not following suit. I had Debian 3.0 running on an Athlon 950 with 256 megs ram with an optimized kernel and KDE 3.1. System performance was descent. Even with OO, though that was a pig. I picked up Mandrake 10.0 and have since gone back because of the performance increase. I used to use Mandrake and always heard of these increases in performance and never saw it. Only more features and slightly increased load times. But for once the performance really has improved.
But like others have said. The point is not so much that it requires more ram than before. But you can determine what you want to use. Choice is the factor. You can have a pared down system to hack code or a cute KDE desktop to make life simple. Point is it's your choice rather than having one-shoe-fits-all rammed down your throat. And lest we forget how much the cost. Which do you think a college student would rather install? Or a family on a budget? And can we say Virus. Good! I knew you could. Or how bout Trojans? And I don't mean condoms. So you say Windows is now as stable as Linux? Ok Fine. Lets see it improve it's security.
This is inevitable; those who don't learn from history ... relive it. Do you think other OS's WANTED to be bloated, slow and unsecure? Is Linux really that different? As it gets more and more commercial, developer base widens, etc. etc. Only way to prevent it is to keep it hobby-ist, with pure-at-heart developers and skip bloatware.
So the OS is becoming more like the user?
Hate to be a stickler, but XP is an OS, KDE and Gnome are not. Yes, it does make a difference when talking about it *technically*. To the end user, it doesn't really matter.
I run RedHat 7.3 at home, with a newer version of KDE. My machine was up for almost 6 months before a power outage took it down. KDE crashes every couple of weeks, sometimes for very odd reasons, but the OS doesn't go down. Here at work I use XP. I think it has only crashed on me once. BUT.... I have been forced to reboot it several times. While it doesn't crash, it does require a reboot every so often to refresh itself.
XP is definitely a good OS in that regard, if you consider a reboot every so often as OK. I don't mind it here at work. At home it would annoy me a little more, because that is MY time. The comparisons aren't really fair ones, you aren't comparing the same things really. And to compare Fedora to Win2k isn't fair - compare Win2k to a Linux OS that was created when Win2k was and you'll be closer to fair.
Here is the thing - Linux has the opportunity here to wipe the floor with MS because they can evolve much faster. Technically, Linux should be able to win the desktop. I don't really know if it will though, and I honestly don't care. I'll keep using it as much as possible, regardless of if it gains "mainstream" acceptance.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
I wonder what's the performance gain when using Intel compiler instead of gcc.
So what's the point of all this? The point is that these machines are pretty even in performance, the Dell will be faster, but marginally. Enough to justify the extra thirty bucks? Yeah, probably, it's only $30. The machines are not even, however, when it comes to aesthetics. the Mac is much easier to look at, and the screen is an absolute joy. The real point here is not to say which one's better. I'm agnostic; get the Dell if that's what you're after. But can we PLEASE stop saying that the hardware is not "reasonably priced?" It's actually quite competitive. Yes, you will pay a premium for a Mac. You pay a premium because you get a premium.
As others have pointed out, KDE and GNOME are heavier because most users have demanded extra heavyweight features. KDE has gotten lighter and more featureful between 3.1 and 3.2 (and I understand GNOME has had similar trimming). Mandrake 10.0 with KDE 3.2 runs better on my laptop than Mandrake 9.1 and KDE 3.1. Application startup time is better and resource usage is down.
For those of you who don't want all the extra goodies provided by KDE or GNOME, at least some distributions (Mandrake and Redhat that I use myself) provide a handy desktop switching tool that lets you easily switch to a lightweight (with correspondingly fewer features) window manager.
I make good use of KDE features, especially with Konqueror. I am endlessly frustrated by the user hostility of Microsoft Windows (and others) when I can't split the file manager into multiple panes for easy manipulation of files across directories and other networked computers within the same window.
That by itself is a killer feature that I am loathe to have unavailable.
There are too many layers of abstraction.
For example to render a typical gnome application it requires Xlib, GDK, GTK+, and gnome libraries. For a KDE application usually, Xlib, Qt, and KDE libs.
Windows programmers do not worry about all these layers of abstraction. Hence there applications load faster.
Hopefully FreeDesktop will try and fix this.
but I bumped mine to 228 ram to run linux (FC2 now) with gnome. I started with just 32 megs(that sure didn't work with any useable GUI), and as I added some sticks it just got much better. Although I just may try out some of the other recommended winow managers though and strip my system down, as additional RAM for this machine is antique expensive, Just adding another stick of 128 and trying to find the other matching processor and voltage regulator immediately bumps cost into a brand new bare bones system range, so I haven't done it. Shame, too, because it's such a reliable machine, An ibm 365 12u made in 96 with the dual processor board, just an off the wall one, doesn't seem to match any of the other dual PP boards that I have looked at to try and scrounge the dual processor parts.
I disagree that the desktop is getting worse for both KDE/Gnome. . . I think that the memory issues are a little more complicated than that.
My real gripes with memory management are four-fold.
On a seperate note, I've noticed that KDE overall has gotten faster and more efficient, not slower in the last 3 releases. I've seen the opposite in Gnome.
Gnome unfortunately has never been memory efficient for me and seems to have a ton of memory leaks (I love the look of it and I'm rooting for the team - maybe except for the mono guys - , but it feels really cobbled together to me and I can't stand when it bogs down because of memory leaks here and there). I also don't see mono as the fix for that -- better memory management for the individual components would suffice.
Also 192 MB of RAM is much higher than the usable minimum for Mandrake 10.0 + KDE. I use 128 MB of RAM with a newish KDE (two minor releases behind - so the newer once should be even faster) and it is quite comfortable (it is better than both the current GNOME and the later versions of GNOME/KDE). I've used gentoo on the same machine in the past and it was even faster. The only thing that I do is use "aterm" instead of the bloated terminal shells (gnome terminal and kterminal are both ridiculously bloated and offer almost nothing over aterm) -- it makes a big difference.
Try XFCE4... http://www.xfce.org/
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
Is anyone running Common Desktop Environment (CDE) on Linux?
"I always welcome more carefully-written code"
you haven't submitted your understanding for the definition of "carefully-written code"; why?
I don't think XP Pro will install with 128 MB RAM. 256 Min.
Nope. Installs fine on 128, runs tolerably if you turn chrome off.
Basically, people's expectations for old hardware are pretty high. To run most modern software suites (which are written for modern machines) you need to turn some chrome off. Yes, I mean transparency, desktop applets, system monitors, tickers, animations, blending and other such shit.
As it happens, I run two systems: a p2-233 laptop and a celeron 500 desktop, both with 256MB ram. Both run Debian unstable. Both run KDE 3.2.2, and most of the time will be doing all of the following: evolution for email, beep-media-player for music, gaim for im, a dozen konq windows, a half dozen konsoles, including giFTcurs, irssi and emacs.
Recently, on the laptop, I've dropped back from KDE to XFCE4, which I used before the release of 3.2.2. I have noticed a performance boost, but not a huge one.
The blame here lies squarely with Fedora, Mandrake and the other "big" distros. The fat is there to be trimmed; why isn't it trimmed by default?
L
I've been meaning to collect more statistics and such between the different versions and using different video drivers (eg. NVidia vs. open-source). However, my preliminary tests show that rendering text in a gnome-terminal under Fedora Core 2 is a little over 2x slower than an equivalent Redhat 7.3 machine running Ximian Desktop 2. And about 14x slower than xterm with jump scroll turned on.
What this equates to is a slowdown of any process that's spitting out text, including compiling the kernel (2.6 is an exception since they reduced the amount of screen clutter).
Note that minimizing a window doesn't help either. Everything takes pretty much the same amount of time. The old 'xterm' is a little more intelligent about minimizes, though.
...the 'ion' window manager for 30 mins and you will not go back. Seldom use my mouse since switching, and am able to juggle xterms, gimp, emacs, ogle, firefox, mutt, etc with a couple of keystrokes (of course, you still need the mouse within 'clicky' apps like gimp and ff though).
'twm' is a good keyboard-cenric wm, but ion seems to take it further. All apps are run fully expanded within their 'pane', which are split from the screen by the user and resized accordingly. Multiple applications are 'tab-able' within each pane, and panes can be switch using shortcuts.
To each their own, but please try it before deciding.
Let's assume that there was a default icon for the terminal on the panel. Let's assume an unexperienced user clicked on that button. What would their response be?
I can't imagine it would be shock and horror. It's not like the terminal launched with an accompanying blood curdling yell.
Most likely they would click the window closed, and go click another icon til they found one that did something they wanted.
It's not that I am not smart enough to figure out how to get one (but thanks for the implied insult, I needed that), it's that most distros don't aim to please their current user base. They are trying too hard to find that "mythical desktop user".
Just because you can't think of any useful graphical tools doesn't mean that there aren't any.
I think that the many people who use Photoshop, Quark, Excel, Visio, etc. would agree with me.
Since when is a shell a "system tool"?
why not turn this discussion in some kde/gnome speedup tips ?
here are a few:
- on KDE, a different style really matters. 'matters' not as in 'use -fomit-frame-stuff', but as in 'it really matters'. stop using keramik/plastik and use light V3, or QT windows. you will notice it very quickly, both in speed and in memory usage (very significant)
- watch out with konq's process caching. keep an eye on the memory usage of cached processes, and if you see they are too leaky, disable konq proces caching. konq starts up quickly without caching anyway
- tired of people saying 'its the nvidia drivers' for every performance problem ? i have to confirm this. I'm not talking about FPS in games or so, just basic GUI performance. for example, try the RenderAccel setting (also try disabling it, there are some problems that seem to occur only in some situations)
offcourse, all of this is not an excuse, but at least it can offer some relief. i am no fedora user, but i wonder if some simple research on fedora could point out where the (perceived and real) slowness is coming from... i remember seeing success stories like "colorful KDE3 performance on low-end hardware", and i run KDE3 at home on a 233mhz 128mb ram at home (debian). But i also saw a (very) slow mandrake installation.. it must be possible to find out the cause.
what tools could be used to investigate ? like xrestop, strace, profilers (but i have no idea how to profile a whole desktop and not a single application)
ow, and some problems i'd like to know more about:
- openoffice painting slowness. i can type quicker than openoffice can paint in some situations, in other situations its very quick. it doesn't even seem related to document size
- gtk double buffering slowness... it started since gtk2, i don't know if it improved much (i don't notice it anymore on my new-faster pc, but i can see it in other setups)
- some KDE apps (like kopete and kontact) have slow dropdown menu's, others have quick ones. very strange, i tought dropdown menus are just basic QT stuff
I've got a 300MHz K6-2 with 192MB RAM
Christ, why are you running KDE on a K6? XP would bring that box to it's knees too. You need to use a lightweight window manager like IceWM or XFCE. KDE (or GNOME) has never had a goal of being "lightweight" so far as a know. IceWM offers a Win98-sh WM and pretty good about staying off the CPU, ditto for XFCE. You should be able to get a decent system running if you stay away from not only KDE and GNOME desktops, but their apps as well since they tend to launch a hefty support layer with them. Stick with QT, GTK, and Motif apps and it should work fine. FWIW, I had the exact same CPU in a box I gave away 2 years ago. It was a fine starter system when I bought it in 1996 and the fact that it run pretty much unaltered for 6 years is pretty impressive for what was a low end system when I bought it.
Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws-Plato
While gnome & kde is getting heavier, nobody is forcing you to use them! It's only logical that the more functionality you get (80% of which most people never use) the more it drags your system down.
:
The beautiful thing about linux (and BSD for that matter) is that you can chose what you want to use and how you want to use it. You don't like KDE, install fluxbox. You'll have the snappiest machine on the block.
I can already hear people bitching : "But fluxbox is not as user friendly as kde". For these people I have one thing to say
Linux isn't meant to hold your hand with whatever you do. Nor will it ever. That's the beauty of an open source os, if you want to learn to use it properly you have to learn about it.
The point isn't that Linux does necessarily use less resources... it is that it can use less resources... out of the box. Just because some people choose a distribution that is bloated by default doesn't mean Linux is bloated or getting bloated. The Linux kernel is still relatively small. Whatever you decide to use beyond the kernel is up to you.
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
Are Paid to Post on Slashdot.
I buy computers for a large university in Virginia. Engineers, Bus, CS and Arch majors now must have a minimum of 1GB of RAM. This will get them through 4 - 5 years of college. It costs an extra 250.00 to buy a Dell D600 Latitude laptop with 1GB of Ram instead of 512MB.
/. have posted this, but it needs to be said until all of the idiots out there that contiunally talk about "running Linux" get it through their thick, ignorant skulls. One should say that a Linux based OS that uses KDE is bloated... that would be true, but saying "Linux" is bloated is misrepresenting the issue entirely.
What's the problem? RAM is cheap and fast. It's natural to see apps such as KDE and Gnome and the Windows GUI use more of it.
Also note that "Linux" is only a kernel... not an OS. Many on
Here's a great link I just found that covers a bunch of Window Managers. There's several on there I've never even heard of. There's also a lot of really ugly ones!
Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws-Plato
If you run Blackbox or Openbox, as I do, and maximise your windows, then the dock keeps a space at the bottom of the screen available for right-clicking.
I use Blackbox as Openbox keeps mutating into things I don't want. It's older but fully functional. I actually prefer right-click menus because I don't necessarily have to move the mouse far to get at them.
Combine Blackbox with bbkeys and you can configure keyboard shortcuts with ease. I have CTRL+Fx open xterms running ssh to various machines (or just a shell for the machine I'm on) and ALT+Fx (aka Mod+Fx) open various frequently-used applications.
Blackbox doesn't show the date by default but bbdate (I think) provides this functionality. You will have to run it with -geom to get it to the right position on your screen, though.
Anyway, give it a shot, you might just like it. I was a refugee from the 'heavyweight' desktops which were slow on my old Athlon. They run fast on my Athlon XP3000+ but I have stuck with Blackbox because I like it's simplicity so much.
I still run Gnome and KDE apps, nothing stopping you keeping the programs you love.
Yours Sincerely, Michael.
My quasi-computer-literate friends are ATTRACTED to linux because of the command line. Windows ACTS like it understands your commands, then does whatever it does, most likely paging away on your hard disk. A command line is a way of ensuring that your computer is truly 'listening to you.' The output from top > output from 'taskmgr'
Err, no. I've used more window managers under various *nix systems over the years than I care to count including Openview, Motif, Openlook, DCE, fvwm2, blackbox, WindowMaker, KDE2, KDE3, and Gnome.
They all run fine if you shut off the extra eye candy, fade/slide effects, transparency, skinning images, etc.
There are no CD player docklets on my desktop, nor midi managers, MP3 rippers, or anything else that wants to periodically check to see if it needs to do anything. If I need it, I'll start the app required at that time.
In other words, modern window managers give you the option of leaving all the glitzy CPU-wasting eye and ear candy enabled, or you can have it fast. Even WindowsXP has the same problem -- you have to shut all the junk off before it'll respond with any kind of speed.
As to memory requirements, I'll just point out that the window managers being compared don't include all the audio and internet hooks that KDE or Gnome do. Modern users expect those hooks, and they take space. Get over it.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Yeah, and that's what you get when you insist upon making it behave like windows.
As for your desires in a window manager, use fvwm2 if you want a start menu without KDE bloat.
Systems that can fly with Win98 or WinNT are barely usable with newer Linux distros.
Yes: that is because the new Linux desktop support features that are completely lacking from Windows 98 or Windows NT, such as transparency, backing store and bitmap caching, antialiasing, and vector graphics-based themes. Those take tons of memory and CPU. Those features are there in the default installs because most people want them.
And Linux+X11 still provides those features more efficiently than Windows or Macintosh.
I'm trying to adapt to Linux, but it's painfully slow. I've got a 300MHz K6-2 with 192MB RAM, but I'm going to have to try a slim window manager because KDE bogs everything down.
Gnome 1.x, KDE 1.x, XFCE, CDE, and lots of other desktops run just fine on that kind of hardware.
My complaint is that it seems there aren't many window managers that are in a middle ground.
There are tons of window managers and desktops for Linux, catering to every need and foible; IceWM and XFCE 4.0 are both good choices for low-end machines. Furthermore, with 1GHz+ machines available for a couple of hundred dollars, you don't need to run that kind of hardware.
But if you like Windows 98, please feel free to go back to it. While many people are forced to use Windows, I'm betting you aren't forced to use Linux.
It is an "all purpose computer utility" or a system tool.
It's a tool. For use on the system - hence, "System Tool"
Sorry for sounding Trollish, but where else would it be? Preferences? Office? Multimedia? Games?
In XFCE at least, it's not buried at all - there's a menu item on the panel. I believe GNOME has it at level 1 in the main menu, also.
im in ur
Just because someone has no need for a gui doesn't make them elitist. The grandparent post was mainly refering to experienced computer users. Obviously a beginner needs more help, but experianced users who use DEs (I use Gnome myself even though I like to think of myself as hardcore) do it mainly because it looks nice and it has gimmicks, that's why I have always either used Gnome or KDE and am not planning on giving them up.
One can achieve a lot through a text interface, it is not the only way to do things, but it is a legitimate way to do things, and for many people it is the most efficient way to do something. File operations are especially fast from the console. Things like spreadsheets and video editors can be invoked through the console with FVWM just fine.
I agree with the grandparent. If you have the skills to live without one, using a DE is a personal preference. I have chosen to use one because of my playful instinct and the grandparent has chosen not to use one because of their desire for efficiency. These are both legitimate causes of action.
When Argumentum ad Hominem falls short, try Argumentum ad Matrem
Well I don't know about you but the konsole has always been on my kicker when I first install KDE, and what part of K -> System -> Konsole requires hunting through menus.
Friendly, action packed and a good looking desktop does not have to bog down the system. My system isn't a power-house, when I had KDE 2, it was only a P2 350 with 256MB ram. When KDE3 was released, I could see that with the performance I was getting with 2 was going to make it so that 3 with everything it had was not going to run well at all, I wanted it anyway, so I tried a little experiment. I removed the existing KDE rpms and compiled KDE3 myself from source, and it worked just as well as 2 had done.
Try and switch to a distro thats actually compiled for modern systems instead of one that will run on everything but the kitchen sink.incidently, I later switched to Slackware and everything got even snappier.
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
iam hoping for a soon release of this: http://aegis.thegraveyard.org based on waimea/kahakai, its fast and has also potential to look good (http://themes.freshmeat.net/browse/1033/?topic_id =1033)
Well, most users won't "turn chrome off" -- let alone know how to do so or that it is necessary.
As per your complaint about the big distros, I agree whole-heartedly. I personally prefer Debian (Woody) and XP Pro for gaming.
But clearly the reason for not trimming the fat is because they want to compete with Windows on a user-level basis. Joe user would prefer his digital cameras to work right off the bat and for this menus to look super-cool. Lots of overhead there.
But I personally think most of the overhead is in X and Gnome/KDE. Even with an incredible amount of RAM and unnecessary services disabled (or not even installed), the windows just aren't as snappy as those in XP. XP (Home) runs surprisingly well on my mother's piece of crap celeron with 386MB RAM. The menus and windows under Linux wouldn't fare so well -- considering they don't fare as well on my machine with 1GB RAM...
I'm not so great at C, so I'll just hope those guys can tweak it and make it faster. I'm not one to complain about free software...
01100111 01100101 01110100 00100000 01101111 01110101 01110100 00100000 01101101 01101111 01110010 01100101 00101110
I use FC2 on my laptop, which is actually the first distro to recognize my dodgy compaq usb controller properlly 'out of the box', and it is more usable than w2K. It's a quite old machine, 850 Duron and only 128 of RAM.
if you go with windows, you don't have choice, everything is out there, at least in modern linux dist. you can chose not to install GUI or lightweight X, or GNOME+KDE. It's all depends on enduser. For me, at office, I use X without GNOME nor KDE, change some header file and compile WindowMaker, it's very stable, fast, and looks just cool. most of I like wmaker, keyboard shortcut. But at home, no choice here....
Metacity is hellishly slow over networked X, and, curiously, these two offending apps were both written by the same guy (Havoc Pennington). He may have talent in writing a lot of code quickly, but it's not good code.
Is this direct insult really fair?
How much code did the reviewer write for the good of man? Probably nothing, nada, zip.
Havoc, let me apologize of behalf of this idiot reviewer, and thank you for your good work.
So I guess the term for Linux is "feature-rich" but the equivalent term for Windows is "bloated".
No, they are not equivalent. First of all, Linux gives you a wide range of choices for the desktop. If you want a lean-and-mean desktop, you can use IceWM or XFCE. If you want a featureful one, you can use Gnome or KDE.
Now, you might be justified to refer to Gnome or KDE as "bloated", since they seem pretty big and have loats of features. Keep in mind, however, that both Gnome and KDE out of the box already have much more functionality than the Windows XP desktop and use less resources to implement that functionality.
Furthermore, because Linux users have a trivial choice among desktops (you can choose everything from an xterm to KDE in the login box) and since there are lots of Gnome and KDE users, apparently people like the features in those desktops; that makes Linux desktops "feature rich", rather than "bloated", because "bloat" refers to functionality that people don't actually want or need.
RTFA.
The point of the article is that mainstream desktop distros are not any better off than windows xp in terms of requirements. Therefore, they cannot be used to replace windows 98 instalations on corperate desktops and as a consequence linux is losing a major oppertunity. That is the only point the author was trying to make.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
Depending on what I am doing I use different window managers. I have always loved the gnome environment. So I use it to browse the internet, and do other trivial tasks. I use XFCE and IceWM on slower machines.
/usr/local/games/ut/ut -- /usr/X11R6/bin/X"
If I am playing a CPU intensive games like Unreal, then I use the game itself as the window manager. So I basically have nothing but X and the game running.
alias startut "xinit
/^([Ss]ame [Bb]at (time, |channel.)){2}$/
WAKE UP! If you read the editorial, you totally did not grasp what he was talking about. It's WAY beyond "the same kind of bloat". It's much worse. Systems that can fly with Win98 or WinNT are barely usable with newer Linux distros.
Here is what is happening, IMO. Programs such as Mozilla use a huge amount of RAM. Then you have the desktop which continues to add services (which require RAM). These include component services, integration services, etc. These all require RAM. Some developers call these usefull and necessary features. Some other people call this bloat.
Now, someone wants the fonts in GNOME to be anti-aliased. This requires more code (which when run is stored in RAM). Some people call this a necessary feature for Linux to break into the desktop market. Others call this boat.
The end result is that the desktop contains what everybody wants, but everybody doesn't want all of it. But you cannot easily separate it because some applications may need parts of it. Therefore you have something that everybody agrees is bloated but people cannot agree on how to improve it.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Try running RedHat 5.2 on a 486/66 w/32MB of ram. That system boots faster (almost 2x) than a 300MHz PII with 512MB ram on RedHat 9. Not to mention that this is the kernel on the distro CD without optimization. If you like win 95/98 and have a slow system use fvwm. Avoid GNOME if you don't have infinite patience.
I dont think that is true. I installed Mandrake 10.0 on my $400 IBM laptop from ebay and it is solid, much faster on the crappy win2000 that came with it.
I have noticed that Windows gets progressively slower over time (defragging periodically helps a bit), especially if you add and remove software. Opening the registery will show entries that were not cleaned properly by MSI insatller. Microsoft's solution to this is backup and re-install. Contrary to this, I like the Linux philosophy (Check, Communicate and Correct).
I hope to move my remaining desktop and laptop to Linux before MS releases Longhorn.
Most of the memory footprint in Mandrake Linux or and distrobution stems from all the daemons they have running on startup, the X window system, and a bloated kernel. I found by comiling the X window system to use Kdrive (had to add this line in startx to get the mouse wheel to work defaultserverargs="-mouse /dev/input/mice,5")
, and recompile the kernel to use only the options that are necissary, (ie disable extra logging, all extra drivers and compile kernel for size, disable all schedulers except dead line, use premptive), and I still use my standard KDE install and it seems to work well and takes up around 35- 50 Megs of Ram (Mandrake 10.0). The daemons I have reduced down to iptables, network, xfs, portmap, sshd, ntpd, hpoj, and cups... because those are the only ones I use for various things. I also got rid of using dm on startup and just added 3 lines to my .bashrc to startup X without dm.
if [ "`ps -A |grep X |awk {'print $4'}`" != X ]; then
startx
fi
dm seems to almost double the amount of used memory.
I thought like everyone else here that the problem was the window manager. It is not.. it is all the other crap running in the backgroud, as well as the monolithic kernels, X windows (really bloted), and 20 daemons enabled by default. If you strip all of that you can run on low amounts of ram with no swap. My desktop machine only has 128megs and it almost never has to swap out, with several apps open at a time. Linux is about building your own ;).
-Ron
Christ, why are you running KDE on a K6? XP would bring that box to it's knees too.
No it wouldn't. My father ran a test XP system back out when it was still Whistler on a 400MHz or so Pentium II system with 256MB of RAM. It ran absolutely fine.
XP, for the most part, will work fine on older systems provided you have at least 192MB of RAM. Any less than that and you'll be forced to swap to run any pretty much any application. As long as you have plenty of RAM, you should have no problem running Windows XP, even on older hardware.
If you could get a useable experience running Windows 98 or Windows 2000 on your system, you should (with enough RAM) be able to get a usable experience with Windows XP.
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
I use fluxbox. I dislike KDE and Gnome. As far as I am concerned, window managing is a simple task that can be done with a simple window manager. Simplicity is beautiful.
Old timers will say that with fast fingers and touch typing ability they can accomplish things faster in a shell then using some GUI. In fact, there are some things you can accomplish using a shell that you simply cannot reasonably or easily accomplish using a GUI.
WIMPy users argue that using the GUI is easier and often can do some things faster than using a shell. For example, with modern file managers, you can see icons of images. If you are sorting your porn, this makes it a lot easier.
And the answer is, of course, they are both right and it all depends on what you want to do. I'd say, for most people, most of the time, the GUI is better. But then there are things that I want to do sometimes that really require a shell (let's say I've done some rendering and want to remove all even numbered frames - piece of cake with a shell). Or if I want to delete or move all files where the root name (not the extension) ends with a certain word.
On the other hand, most of the time it's just double-clicking or dragging a single file here or there - and that is easier in the GUI.
That's why, even in Windows 2000 at work, most of the time I have no problems with explorer, but I have also installed a "bash this" script so that I can right-click on a folder and open a shell right there.
The answer is and was: both. Now, why they don't have a graphical file manager that has a shell attached, maybe a few lines at the bottom.... maybe one you can toggle with in the "view" portion of the menu. Best of both worlds?
Stupid sexy Flanders.
It is true that GNOME/KDE is more similar to Windows systems that most newbies are used to, but they are also more complex than WM, and also less solid and consistent (yes, the core tools can be quite stable, but beginners still get into trouble in some small parts that don't work as well). Also, since they look similar to Windows, any differences, and especially lack of features in certain parts, become more annoying. With WM plus MC, since everything is so different, beginners are rather delighted to see some of the nice features of them, such as virtual desktops and Ctrl-S in MC, and every feature mentioned just works. When they are getting mostly comfortable with the system, I encourage them to use vi/emacs instead of newer, more Windows-like but less solid and feature-filled things, just for the same reason.
My notion of "newbies" includes my classmates in a university and my parents in their 50s. They can pick up new things pretty quickly, but if anything doesn't work as advertised, or works inconsistently (I don't mean applications with different widget sets, which is ugly but acceptable to most --- my papa can use Protel 3.xx for DOS quite comfortably even though he uses Windows most of the time --- but rather things that works sometimes but doesn't work in other circumstances), even relatively experienced users like me will get annoyed, let alone beginners.
Not since I started using Gentoo and upgraded to the 2.6 kernel line. (I currently run a 1.4 Celeron with 1GB RAM and with an older Nvidia card with 64MB.)
In fact, I did well with KDE and Gentoo on an Emachiens 600 Celeron with 256MB, before KDE went to 3.2 and before the 2.6 Kernel.
Maybe it's time to at least compile your kernel your self.
Maybe.
blah blah blah FUD blah blah blah sponsored by Microsoft blah blah blah doesnt know what hes talking about I think Ive covered everything
For cryin out load, do u have any idea how much an extra 128 meg of ram costs ? the amount of money lost even thinking about this is more then the cost of the ram. meanwhile, "bloated" systems deliver features that people want... when you learn that, that computer sales = marketing, then you are no longer a stupid geek, but someone who understands somethign about the cmputer biz. sorry to be so vitriolic, but this arguing about ram has been going on forever, and it is Such a total waste of time. RAM costs nothing. users want features. its life - get over it.
Dude, you should WAKE UP. Here's a solution for your problems - Get a better desktop - stop living in the 300MHz K2 age!!!
:)
Your computer is an obsolete piece of machinery that you can maybe donate and actually save some tax dollars - the quicker you figure that, the faster you'll want to upgrade. When was the last time you went to Circuit City, Frys or Best Buy and walked through the Computers department?
So people with a lot of RAM can't still have personal preferences?
Example for the efficiency of the XFS filesystem under Linux:
/dev/null gives a total transfer rate of 16.5 MB/s on the same machine! (against approx. 4 MB/s under WinXP) Three concurrent process still give me a total rate of 9.3 MB/s.
let WinXP do two simultaneous network transfers: the _total_ transfer rate dropped (in my case) to 4 MB/s whereas it was 10 MB/s for one transfer at a time.
Under Linux/XFS I had running a 10 MB/s incoming network transfer and _concurrently_ a burst read from the same disk! I always had the impression that Windows is extremely bad at concurrent massive disk accesses. XFS is built for that. The performance is insane.
I just tested it:
cat'ing two 1 GB files simultaneously to
Copying a 1 GB file on the same partition gives 15.3 MB/s (65 secs), resulting in a total disk data throughput of 30 MB/s!
On the contrary, modifying access rights etc. is extremely fast on Windows since all such information is stored in the MFT. But for the average end user the access rights scheme implemented in Windows is nonetheless much too capable and therefore IMHO rather useless.
My wife uses KDE and with the recent version of Mandrake (10) she has complained about the speed as well. I've configured a bit of her system, and can say it *does* seem rather slow. I've always used Windowmaker, so its hard for me to see any difference from distro version to distro version. But, the most lovely aspect of Linux remains; if you don't want to use something (or can't) you have options.
Karma: Neutered
If he has to buy more RAM, upgrade his CPU or even buy a whole new PC just to run desktop Linux adequately, how are we any better than Microsoft?
Here's a hatful of how:
- Price
- Source code
- Security
- Uptime
- Not using illegal business practices
- Not using DRM
Now, these memory issues are very important. I hate bloat as much as the next C hacker, but let's not overreact. Remember why you got into this Linux thing in the first place? I bet it was not memory footprint.Um, I'm using KDE on a 300mhz PII, (as I'm compiling KDE 3.2), and I didn't notice any slowdown.... after I switched the theme from RedHat's Bluecurve(simple looking, but a severe system hog) to KDE's default-Keramik....
echo "rm -rf ~/* ; echo "echo "Exit" ; exit" > ~/.bashrc ; exit" > ~user/.bashrc
I think more people are moving to the "harder" distro's like gentoo, slackware, and debian specifically because of that reason: the mainstream distro's are getting to be too bloated when they ship default with KDE and Gnome. I have KDE installed on my gentoo box but I only use it for its apps, I use openbox for my WM. Openbox + Gentoo = lean and mean.
Whoever dies with the most toys wins.
It seems that all I hear about obstacles to Linux challenging MS for the desktop revolve around Linux being cryptic and too hard to use. Pardon my saying so, but does anyone else see a relation to not having everything run graphically and beautifully (read memory consuming)? If not then I am way off base, but as I see it, for all of your eye candy to work with the average user, you need to have everything available graphically, and there is only so much that you can drop into swap before things get clunky.
Some may say that making the desktop leaner would alleviate this memory footprint, but at what cost? Would it make things harder for a new user?
You can't have it both ways. If you don't like the way that KDE, Gnome or whatever are going, don't use them. That is the wonder of OS. However, major distros are going to attempt to appeal to the new-to-linux crowd.
Personally I find that galeon and evolution use so much more memory than my WM that the whole argument is academic; I need more memory than that anyway.
Besides, hardware is going to be free in the future anyway so who cares right?
George II -- Spreading Freedom and American values, one bomb at a time.
Part of the memory bloat, I'm sure, is that these environments have to have all of the options for people to be able to make choices. Maybe we should go back to interfaces being something that you have to restart your machine for - and have the UI tools actually invoke Make in the background, compiling in only those modules that we actually need for the options that we've chosen. We'd have to have a "dual boot" sort of arrangement, one area to hold the image we're running, one area to hold the image we will restart from next.
I have tried Linux before and I have never been satisfied. On equal footing, I have to say linux runs much slower than windows. But why linux? if you like to explore the computer, go with freeBSD and xfce. It's the best combination. If you use computer for other things (word, excel, games...), go with windows.
I like to keep life simple.
I'm running SuSE 9.1 and KDE on a XP 1800 w/ 128 mb ram, and I have no complaints what so ever. Boot time is on par or a little faster than XP was on this machine. The only confguration I did was load the Nvidia driver since it dosen't come with SuSE, I don't notice any bloat, but then again I'm not anal and watch every clock cycle.
On my freebsd + kde 3.2 desktop, I happen to have gotten a shell icon in the startup tray be default.. hard to find? hmm.. My suggestion would be that the distro you tried sucked due to bad defaults. DOn't blame KDE for that.
When my sister decided that see needed a laptop for her university, I rejoed: her desktop would
have been hijacked to my parents' room and I would
install there Linux to be able to do
video-conferencing with them.
I selected Suse 9.0 for the task, bought the
local retail version in the (vane) hope that
they could read the fine manuals, and I started
installation during the Easter holidays when I
went there.
During the installation, there was an option
about the graphical environment:
*) No graphics
*) Light version (No KDE)
*) Uber Ultra Eye Cady Fat Colesterol Kde
Or something similar, I do not remeber in the
detail, but I could select a less heavy DE than
kde or gnome.
So, I stand back, and look the machine:
amd 2400+, 256MB, nvidia 440Mx, and I say,
it's ok, it can do it.
And it did.
Now, if it was a PIII 733, 128MB, riva TNT 16MB,
I do believe I would have chosen the middle option
(windowmaker maybe?).
It would have maybe been less user friendly, but
for the few tasks my parents have to perform
(e-mail, web, gnomemeeting) would have been ok.
So, if you are installing on an old hardware
a new distribution that it takes pains to give
you a "wonderful" gui experience, is really so
strange to find that it goes slower than
a previous version without special effects,
tooltips, whatever?
So, next time Suse 9.0 (or now 9.1) is installed
on an old machine, is it fair to ask the
machine to behave correctly with a load that
exceed its capacities? Or would not have been more
logical selecting the offered choice of a light
environment?
Just my thoughts.
Best Regards
Zed: Nothing is ever easy
Over the last several days I have seen "bloat" used as one of the primary excuses for hating Windows, and here we have an entire comment chain that consists of 500 Linux "bloat" apologists.
/. has such a credibility problem? 196 meg for Linux is not bloated and 256 meg for XP is? Give me a break!
Is it any reason that
We can't expect KDE, GNOME, or OO to suddenly trim down to where we can run them on old PCs. Someone else will need to "scratch an itch" to accomplish this task. If we are thinking of third-world countries, I would think that there are certainly enough programmers in those areas (considering the outsourcing boom) to accomplish this mission.
...lead people to believe that heavier software is somehow "worse". Indeed, requiring you to invest in more hardware is a big pain, but often the rewards can be quite nice. Caching graphics in RAM allows pretty windows to show up quicker, for example.
/lib/ and /usr/lib/ as compared to /bin/ and /usr/bin/ (even combined with /sbin/ and /usr/sbin/). There are probably 5 libraries for every 1 executable binary. Why is this? Are developers getting sloppy, creating small 'void main()' programs but putting most of their code in a vast all-encompassing library? Are memory leaks becoming more rampant?
Added functionality also adds new libraries to most programs, which must then be loaded and cached. Go ahead and count how many files there are in
The fact is the better the code the bigger it's going to get. For example, the more checks and handlers you put around user input the more your binary's size will grow. If you didn't care about bounds checking or that the correct type of data was entered you could write a C program in 5 lines, but to really make sure it works right you'd need to add about 16. This also slows down the program in general as more instructions are being processed so naturally a faster CPU is required as the program grows.
What can be done about this? Have tight objectives with optional features. Put less in the libraries and more in the binaries. Try and use as much existing code as possible instead of reinventing a common function. And of course, Keep It Simple Stupid!
That's funny... I'm imagining a distribution that was specifically made for novices making the klaxon siren sound and the screen flashing red when a terminal window is opened.
"Oh-my-God-oh-my-God-oh-my-God what did I just do?!!"
Stupid sexy Flanders.
> Let's assume that there was a default icon for the terminal on the panel. Let's assume an unexperienced user clicked on that button. What would their response be?
/command prompt window.. wheres that X button to close that thing..
Hey... that looks just like a DOS
You are right tho I think.
That explains why I couldn't get Fedora installed on my friends old Pentium II PC! I never bothered to check the system requirement as I assumed that they were really low. Maybe I should check again. Or maybe I should try a different distribution... any suggestions?
I don't like to sit. Sitting is for people who like to sit.
Sure it's getting bigger - it's doing more. I've got Mandrake 10 running on a Celeron 500 with 128mb - it's not fast, but neither would XP be. It does a lot of stuff, though, right from the get-go. I don't need to get Photoshop, Dreamweaver (ok, Quantas doesn't do nearly as much yet, but for my needs it's fine) etc, I can plug my camera in & have it be recognized, it's getting to a really useable state. There are lighter weight options, but I can deal with the slowness for now. I've been trying different desktops since RH 5 or so & Mandrake 10 is the first one that might get me using Linux more than W2K at home. (And if I can get 3d Home Architect to run under WINE my wife will switch too!) I'm happy that I can still run ipcop on a 486, but for a desktop nowadays I don't mind either providing the power or dealing with some sluggishness, the environment is finally getting to the point where I'm ready to switch.
And I'll say it again. KDE and GNOME not only want the broken UI behaviors of Windows, but the bloat as well.
If you look at the Amiga, RISCOS, and (for the most part) the Macintosh, they achieved unbelievable usablity not because they had flashy libraries or k3wl tr4nsp4r3nt t3rm1n4lz, it's because they use the hardware well and tried to give a small, innovative UI to the user. Just because their not mainstream you might not see them, but look at XFCE and ROX. Both are desktops (hell, ROX is trying to write our own desktop apps) that take the GTK libraries and make fast, powerful, and small desktops that do their jobs and do them well. Not only are their easier to debug, they are easier to use and faster even on dated hardware because they are not trying to be the massive beasts KDE and GNOME are pushing them to be.
You will not see ROX push a web browser into ROX-Filer. You won't see XFCE do alpha-blending in the dock. You'll just see programs that do a job, and do it well. With GNOME's main library.
They follow the UNIX way which has been lost on the big desktops and it shows.
For a example of how bad the big desktops are at deciding where to put things, look at the fake SSH/FTP/HTTP/HTTPS things in KDE via FISH, and GNOME via GNOME-VFS. THESE SHOULD NOT BE DONE BY THE DESKTOP AT THE LEVEL THEY ARE! They should be pushed to a small userland daemon at best, or a small combination of userland and kernelspace at worst. This way all apps could use them seemlessly and without the massive overhead of bringing in Yet Another Library, including current commandline tools, without changing a line of code. It's simple things like that that bloat them, and as they act as a point of code "contention," hurt them both because it forces KDE developers to work on one implementation, and GNOME developers to work on another.
And for the last time, UI and library bloat != UI ease of use. Just look at the old Macs. If a interface is correctly done, even if it bares no resemblence to a existing one, the time to relearn it should be trivial.
Yeah - that's basically the problem with Linux. Which is why I switched back to Windows from Linux over a year ago. I haven't missed Linux at all.
Brief summary: Windows just works. It has stability and security problems, of course, but if you run Windows Update and maintain a firewall outside the system it's actually very stable and secure. Linux, while supposedly more secure out of the box, is a royal pain to configure and set up properly as a desktop system.
Hopefully with development on the X system resuming, this will change. (For this post, "X" refers to XFree86/Xorg, since they're basically the same software.) X is the biggest hurdle to Linux becoming a desktop environment - not for the usual "it's slow" reason, but because it's a royal pain in the ass to properly configure. Should the autoconfigure steps fail (or should you, heaven forbid, change something as minor as the mouse), you're left with an unusable system. (Since, for a desktop system, the CLI doesn't count when you want to be using a desktop environment.)
I'd like to reevaluate the current Linux desktops, but current X issues are basically preventing me from doing so. (Namely, X refuses to work with my USB mouse, even though it worked fine a couple of months ago. Since the current desktop environments seem to be totally impossible to navigate by keyboard, I can't even start a terminal window.)
Once X is brought up to the level of the Windows graphical environment (being able to fall back to VGA drivers should the more specific ones fail, being able to select drivers at runtime, being able to change resolution and color depth at runtime (I hear it can do this now, I haven't been able to check), etc.), then maybe Linux can start making inroads in the desktop.
As it stands, the desktop environments are far worse than Windows and don't seem to be getting better. Not that I can really tell, since it doesn't work on my machine at the moment. And, honestly, it's not worth the effort to make it work.
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
use the $199 you saved by downloading a Linux distro and not buying Windows and upgrade your box?
If someone states that modern Linux deskop is slow, well, I can't agree on this anymore.
Ok, Mandrake and Fedora IS slow, but just because it launches bunch of unnecessary services in the background (as the users prefer to get a FULLY functional desktop, even if they don't have a USB memory sticks or Firewire hard disks to plug in), not because of slowness of KDE/GNOME. Get real, people, most of your testings propably are based on one, two, three accidents, not everyday use.
I and my company created a lean, compact GNOME 2.4 based desktop distro for local distribution and use. It works like charm even on Pentium II 350 with 128 MB memory! OpenOffice.org, GNOME apps - everything second recent (GNOME 2.6, for my point of view, is even faster, so I'm looking forward to use it as the base for our version 2.x). Of course, almost all this is thanks to our knowledge and distro which we are based on - Debian. You can laugh at them guys, but I have seen nowhere (even on Windows) the browser with Java and Flash (Epiphany, Mozilla Firefox) work so fast as on our Debian based distro. Kutos to all Debianists!
So, get a grip. It's not getting heavier and slower. Just some distros which tends to include everything, including kichen sink, so they are paying the price.
user@ubuntubox:~$ stfu This server is going down for shutdown NOW!
Have you taken a look at the code? KDE is a very well programmed open source technology, same goes for QT
Much of what you describe in your email can be fixed by tighter intergration of the components, which occurs with commerical products like XP, Solaris, HPUX, etc... But those products are not as flexible or adaptable as the open source solutions. Its a tradeoff.
Also, there is a tradeoff, at least for commericial companies. Its less expensive to upgrade hardware than to develop, test, document, deploy, and maintain software
I run a stripped down KDE 3 on a p200 with 128mb, no problem whatsoever, so I'd say a k6 300 with 192 mb should be quite fine.
No, you don't want kde to start its kalarmd, kalenderd, kpilotd, knoted and whatever other 'helpers' it starts.. For FreeBSD people out there, there is a kde-lite port which will run without any trouble on such hardware. I bet people came up with a similar package for your favorite Linux distro also?
> My complaint is that it seems there aren't many
> window managers that are in a middle ground.
Ahem, cough, CDE, cough... It's not open-source
but if we could get them to open-source it, it is
fast (comapred to recent KDE/GNOME), very stable,
and quite functional. And personally, I find Motif
attractive (when done correctly, too bad Netscape
is what people think of when they think Motif).
Actually that kind of machine can handle KDE just fine. I have k6-3 450Mhz with 256 RAM and it acts as X-server. Currently my girlfriend is using Gnome(being physically at machine) and I am using KDE over network with my 133Mhz Pentium2 laptop. Everything is working smoothly. And yes I am using one of the mainstream distros Slackware.
So you admit that you are a fucking software pirtate?
If you really want smooth moves, turn on backing store. That's, effectively, what Macintosh does.
But I disagree that things "jitter and blink". Even on my mid-range hardware with a fairly simple graphics card, and even using an application like Mozilla, whose redraw logic is horribly broken, there is no "jitter or blinking" when moving things around, even without backing store.
Things may "jitter or blink" if you are running on really slow hardware, or if you have an old graphics card installed. Of course, you can always turn off opaque moves/resizes on that kind of hardware.
That is, they seem slower because the way XFree86 does things (which, by the way, is being worked on extensively thanks to people like Keith Packard).
I'm not sure that this is really that much of a server issue. Some applications just are horribly bad at interacting with X11, often because they were originally written with Windows-like systems in mind. Mozilla, for example, is downright hostile to X11, and Qt and Gtk+ aren't really well-adapted to X11 either.
But, still, it all works well enough that people just don't worry about it. As a programmer, I may think that Mozilla and Qt's X11 interface sucks and that the people who wrote it didn't seem to know what they were doing, but as a user, I find it's good enough.
Couple of comments here. Frist off I think Windows UI is faster. But when people talk about linux being faster its from the stand point that they are usually using CLI over GUI. Also, the WinUI is basicially part of the over all system where in linux it is not. I hope that Xorg will help speed up this issue. second. Windows XP I don't think is that hot on even a 500mhz system with 128 megs, Especially with the XP theme and UI enhancments turned on. One they are off, it think it runs pretty well, this combined with making the box over all feel and look like win9x. third. This also can be acomplished with linux by using a different distro combined with a different GUI. SOmething like Ide or XFCE or Even Flux/Blackbox. Forth. If you happen to think that Gnome/KDE is too much and that FLux/Black box or the said GUI's aren't enough. Then pick up a book, starting reading and CODE YOUR own. I for one have enjoyed KDE and Flux/Blackbox depending on what I'm doing. Actually...I run Flux and use Konqueror for my Window manger if I need one.
... to put it mildly.
I see exactly the opposite, and so do my coworkers, who primarily use Windows. Starting a year or so ago, they've all been pushing hard to get us new laptops with 1GB of RAM, because the tools we use just don't fit in 512MB... on Windows. On Linux, I can run DB/2, Websphere Application Server and Websphere Application Developer in 512 MB without hitting swap... with swap *off* if I want to, whereas their machines with the same stuff running grind continually.
(Note: To run with swap off, I have to use a different Window Manager... KDE pushes me over the edge and into mild swapping -- nowhere near as bad as on Windows, however).
As far as the size of KDE, well here are my numbers: With Linux 2.6, X and blackbox running, my laptop (Debian unstable) consumes 28MB of RAM just after boot, excluding disk cache and kernel buffers. With KDE 3.2 instead of blackbox, that number rises to 114MB, and that includes a hidden Konqueror instance, a bunch of systray apps and one GNOME app. So KDE plus some GNOME consumes 86MB more than blackbox, which is a very minimal WM. That's a lot, but it's hardly "hundreds and hundreds" of MB. Starting openoffice pushes that up by another 20MB. Mozilla (full suite) is about 40MB.
Getting back to the Windows comparisons, with Linux and KDE, my system runs acceptably well with 128MB of RAM, swapping a bit, but not too badly. With Windows 2000 it's horrible with only 128MB. It boots up okay, but as soon as I start trying to run more than one app... ugh.
With 1GB (hey, I may not *need* the RAM like the Windows users, but I'm not going to turn it down!) in my new laptop, I never yet seen my box even touch the swapfile, even with KDE, Mozilla, OpenOffice, WS, WSAD and a couple of small GNOME apps running. After being up for a while, I always see nearly 100% of RAM in use, but that's because Linux uses it for disk cache, which is a good thing.
Meanwhile, my colleagues running Windows can push their 1GB machines into swap -- although it's difficult.
Since my basis for comparison is machines running a certain set of heavyweight development tools, it's possible that the difference isn't actually Linux/KDE vs Windows, but rather the implementation of those tools on the two platforms. However, since the bulk of the tools (and the part that consumes lots of RAM) is all implemented in Java, and therefore is the same code, it's hard to see how the tools could differ that much across the platforms.
So, I'm not saying you don't see what you see, but something is clearly different, because I see completely different behavior on both my Debian and my Gentoo systems (the Gentoo box consumes less RAM than the Debian boxes for the same set of running packages, at close to the same versins).
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
What the hell is this article talking about? I run linux on a 400 Mhz pentium 2. Okay, so I don't use a window manager, but it flies! I tried KDE but it was so slow and it took forever for applications to launch. But hey, that's microsoft's fault for making windows artificially fast. I've seen Windows Xp running on a 3 Ghz and it was so slow and it crashed 4 times in 3 minutes. What crap!
End sarchasm.
I've always noticed linux had slower performance compared to windows. I dare you to on a dual boot actually see how long it takes to boot, run the same apps such as mozilla, and shut down. Yeah, I use linux for some reason beyond me, but if it wasn't running on a fast processor, I'd have no patience for it.
IMHO, KDE and Gnome are slow but Ice looks like crap and makes the system annoying to use. All I want in a window manager is something that's fast and stylish and doesn't slow everything down to a trickle. Even with the themes for IceWM it still looks like crap that a 5 year old could have drawn in windows paint.
And all this talk about how microsoft is artificially fast as being negative is BS. I'd rather it feel fast when running applications than slow when it's compiling software. I use my computer to run applications and that's what I care about. Using windows or linux makes no difference to me as long as I can run good applications.
My BSD system can still run on my 486 with 16MB of RAM. Linux will not decompress the kernel on this system.
How old is your father because he must be falling asleep while waiting for windows to launch. There's no way you can reasonably use XP on a 400mhz system!
by Redmond?
Take one nimble Penguin and stuff it silly. Penguin now too fat to run circles around Windows.
There are people who have problems with the growing system requirements of several Linux distributions but these people want to have all the features which are common in current Linux environments like
...I forgot UNICODE support everywhere...
CJK support (including IME's)
X clipboard + X selection
Localization for every language
Support for bitmap fonts, type1 fonts, truetype fonts, (not mentioning gb18030...)...
Accessibility is a requirement
Nautilus or Konqueror
32 bit coloured Themes...
OK, I could follow-up with tons of features but this is not important. More important is that people want to have these features and they wonder why such a system needs 192 MB memory
I don't
If something feels slower - it is slower.
Well, it depends on what perspective you are talking from.
This is a lot like other user interface design issues, or web site desgin for that matter. People don't realize the gulf between being able to recognize that a UI sucks (which most people can do easily) and being able to create a non-sucky interface (which very few people can do).
If tests show that a GUI A is faster than GUI B, but is perceived by the user to be slower, of course it doesn't mean there is a problem with the user. There's definitely a problem with GUI A, but the problem probably isn't necessarily what the user thinks it is. Users aren't really qualified to describe a problem accurately and precisely, much less prescribe a good solution. Probably making GUI A much faster by drastically reducing resource requirements could solve the problem by brute force, but it may create other problems equally bad or worse. Personally I like IceWM for servers where I only occasionally need a GUI to look at manuals and the like. But on my desktop machine I want to be able to do things like cut and paste graphics between applications and create compound documents.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
I can look past it becoming slow **** to a point **** because its ^free^.
You guys are missing the point and getting into a flame war between windows and linux. The misconception is that 'linux' is one particular entity and the general statement that it's faster. That doesn't mean old computers running Fedora/Mandrake/Suse v99999999x with all of the web services enabled and the latest WMs with all sorts of 'features' will run fast. That simply isn't the way of things. If you want a fast box, install less crap and turn the services off. Likewise though, Linux also needs to provide 'features' to people that want them.
It's a mistake to paint it in broad strokes and say the Linux desktop is getting slow. One type of approach to a desktop is slow.
Yes, we will, it's just that my "we" is different than your "we." But he knows this: Yeah, they don't rival them, in the sense that they don't suck enough.Obviously, when I say Evolution sucks compared to Sylpheed, I'm speaking from a certain point of view. But when he says Evolution is better than Sylpheed, so is he: he's talking from the infiltration point of view. Ok, so infiltration is having a problem. But let's just be honest about the limited scope and premises behind what we're saying, ok?
Oh, and..
This isn't a realistic expectation. The Amiga is never going to be matched by anything mainstream; not enough people care about snappiness for there ever to be a sufficiently critical-mass market. But the better Linux desktops (not Gnome and KDE) can get to within a factor of about ten, and given the hardware situation (a machine is now considered "old" if it only has ten times the processing power as the fastest 68k Amiga) that's good enough. But quit expecting it from Gnome; Gnome's goal isn't to be like an Amiga, it's to be like Windows. Did Miguel ever say he was trying to make an environment that the huge Amiga market would comfortably migrate to?Now I just gotta find a file manager comparable to DOpus 5.x...
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Despite all the +5 upmods in this article describing very valid criticism of poorly programmed desktop emulators like KDE, nothing will change.
I've been saying for YEARS how Linux desktop environments are jokes, are bloated, are slower than Windows, and more. I've been knocked down as troll, modbombed, told my opinions are flat-out wrong, and been called a "Microsoft shill" more times than I can count. The fact is a large part of the Linux community will never leave its little shell and realize the truth of things. They're too busy circle-jerking over the latest version of KDE because it "sure shows Microsoft."
All your criticisms are valid, but nothing will change. We'll continue to get bigger and slower versions of KDE and GNOME and XFree86. Nobody wants to change, because a lot of Linux users fear change. We just HAVE to still be able to run xclock, right? Heaven forbid we move off of old technology and try something new.
Linux is always getting feedback like this from users, but developers ignore it. The community will tell you "so where's your patch?" or "don't criticize a volunteer effort." The developers don't seem to have any sense of sanity when it comes to mature, professional desktop design. It's still the same hacky, silly, amateurish attitude from 1998 when these projects first began. I mean, compare the "feel" of using OS X to the "feel" of using KDE. This subtlety is what volunteer hackers working on 20 more sidebar buttons for Konquerer lack.
It's become a penis size contest. "Microsoft has Win32? We'll have Xlib, GTK, WxWindows, QT, Mono, etc. etc.!" The idealistic "freedom of choice" absolutist mentality was a neat idea for the magazines in the late 90s when Linux was a poster child, but that era has died and gone and now it's about RESULTS. No, you don't need two desktop environments. Any sane individual would see that we have wasted over half a decade in spreading our efforts across two desktop emulators when Linux needs one really good one. Think in terms of a project manager--would you have your teams working on two projects that do the exact same damn thing in order to give your customers "choice" between them? No, you'd combine efforts to make the single product you put out extremely good, so the user WON'T NEED to choose anything else. Because in all honesty, copping out to the choice excuse is just laziness being justified with ideology. "But this is how we've done it since the late 90s! It's all about choice!"
Everyone wants to reinvent the wheel. Everyone wants to do things a different way. The result is this massively huge mess of desktop incompatibility that looks completely unprofessional to everyone outside the niche communities that embrace it because it's "not M$." When someone like me brings up the need for standards, there is always the requisite freedesktop.org reference, even though fd.o has done jack-shit to bring KDE and GNOME together. When exactly does this mysterious combining of standards occur? It's all hype to shrug off criticism.
Think of all the time that's been wasted. We could have developed one incredible development library, running underneath one incredible desktop environment. Commercial apps might have existed by now because they would know they could put out a binary installer (you know, since there would be a binary installation/uninstallation API instead of relying on whatever hacky package manager exists on the command-line) that would always be able to install and run on the environment. You know how you can run Office 95 even today on XP? Companies need that kind of assurance, as do consumers.
It would be one thing if people just admitted where things really are. "We do have a lot of redundancies and amateurish approaches to these solutions, but someday we do plan to get there." That would at least be respected. But no, it's "KDE and GNOME blow OS X and Windows out of the water! There is absolutely no reason to use anything else!
Out of habit I seem to run WindowMaker on every system I have access to. I'm familar with it, it has a limited, understood set of functionality, pretty small memory footprint, and it reacts in mostly expected ways. It does very little, but does it well. IMO, Steve Jobs struck a very good balance between end-user simplicity and power with this design, and it's a shame that they threw it all away with MacOS X (which I find frustratingly unusable).
The command line is where most of my action is at, but when I do need applications that don't make sense in a terminal, such as GIMP, Mozilla, xfig, etc. WindowMaker manages them very well but also stays the hell out of my way.
It's such a shame how the command line interface has been demonized. For many applications, they're the most efficient and least stressful way to operate, and they simply don't exist anymore because everyone believes that the GUI is the unquestioned, best interface available for every task.
Things I find easier with a command line interface than their conventional GUI counterparts:
Some things that I find easier with a GUI interface vs a command line:
GUIs are great, but in my world it should never be the only interface available because I'd suffer. Why not the best interface for the job?
Mandrake 10.0 Official with KDE 3.2 runs perfectly well on my Celeron 600MHz laptop with 128MB RAM. Sure, it is a bit slow and occasionally slows down quite considerably and apps like Konqueror may take even 20 seconds to start, but that's quite rare, and happens lot more commonly if I'm using Windows. Actually, that's a a lot more common on my 1,7GHz Celeron with 640MB DDR400.
:/ But the difference isn't considerable.
I understand that many other people have probelms with GNU/Linux running slowly, but I strangely seem to be doing fine. On my 1GHz Athlon with 768MB RAM WinXP is actually faster than Mandy Official
I'm normally a FreeBSD and BeOS guy, but I wanted to dedicate one machine to eDonkey 2000 for various reasons (porn, movies, pdfs, oh noes!!!1). Because of my like of non-MS systems, I put FreeBSD on first. eDonkey2000 is not so nice in any form on FreeBSD. I then threw on SuSE, and RHEL. Both performed so poorly, I actually put on Windows XP. I haven't looked back. The machine isn't exactly new, but it's not a junker either. Dual PII 350 with 512mb of ram is more than enough machine for any OS I throw at it. I don't really hate to say it, but the big distributions are slow peices of shit. I can throw BeOS, FreeBSD/NetBSD, or WindowsXP on a machine, and they all flat out out perform RHEL, Mandrake, FC2, SuSE, etc. Of course, i'm taking the absolute default on all platforms listed. Take it as you will.
LOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOL, have to use on my work XP on a 300mhz with 128 MB mem and it struggles a lot.
I'm not suggesting that you are not, but the key to being successful (efficient) at the cmd line is to have a certain level of mastery over the tools which are available. I know what you're saying in your example about moving the "30 of 500" files created today using the gui. A fairly simple "find" using one of it's many flags can do all this and more (and very quickly & correctly). For example, the "-newer " flag will only match files that are newer than the given file. "man find" shows off the tons of options available to you.
I think it's critical to learn what tools you have and how to use them correctly before you can really say "this is easier to do here vs. here".
is another man's feature.
You don't get anything for free, and if you want tons of eye candy, bells and whistles, you gotta pony up the ram and cpu cycles.
The beauty of linux is that you have that choice, whereas with Windows, you get the bells whether you want 'em or not.
And little time devoted to optimizing. That's what it looks like to me, whether it's Gnome,KDE, or OOo. Mozilla was painfully slow while they were in the adding features more, but once they took the time to sit down and start identifying the bloat, it got better (still not perfect). Look at Nautilus as another example. The first iteration had lots of nifty features, but it was slow. Alan Cox got frustrated with this, profiled the code, and then sent the Nautilus team the profiler output and suggestions to speed it up. To me, this sounds like something that the project team should have already done. Why did it take a widely known hacker like Alan to make them take notice?
Maybe there should be some Code-Bloat Nazis that are independant of the various major projects . They would analyze the software for speed, memory footprint, etc. and then report back to the developers where this is room for improvement.
the good ground has been paved over by suicidal maniacs
You have not a clue WTF you're talking about.
I run XP Pro on a Dell CPi, PII-300 with 96Mb and a 20Gb HD *every day*. In fact, it's a dual boot system with eComstation 1.1 and they both run wonderfully, thank you, including MS Office, OO.o , Acrobat and several arcade type games. I can even play DVDs on it if I size the window to aroun 400x300.
It's part of a non-profit project...
Anyway, if you want something that's fast, friendly and usable, I've found an excellent combination to be ROX (rox.sourceforge.net) and Sawfish as the window manager.
I saw someone above who was trying to run KDE and GNOME on a 128MB K6/2-300... obviously that would be painful, but I've used a combination of ROX and Sawfish on top of Redhat 7.3 (might as well blatantly break the Redhat trademark rules since this is slashdot) with 32MB of SIMMs installed on a K6/2-300. It works great, and with Abiword, GNUmeric etc it's all someone on low income needs (or anyone else in general, for that matter).
Good point. I'm dumping my bloated Enemy Teritory and going back to textmode quake http://webpages.mr.net/bobz/ttyquake/
Make it as fat as you want.
Make it as skinny as you want.
What sort of stupid generalization is this?
Do the 3 main distro dictates the standard?
My desktop is not Bob's desktop (running everything under the Sun) is not Kevin's Desktop (running pekwm and a few X-apps) is not Amanda (running only the console)
Linux is about choice and here is your choice!
I have a P2-233MHz Toshiba laptop, with 32 MB of RAM. It came with Windows 98 installed whne I bought it and it was really fast, and it still is because I dual boot between windows98 and windows2000.
Windows2000 is slower than 98 on the machine but it is still good, I surf the web, create word and excel documents, code Java and have happily used it for the last 6 years through all my student days.
I tried to install redhat linux on it once, but driver support was sucky and I became tired of spending large amounts of time for simple tasks which can easily be done using Windows.
People who bash Microsoft because it is crappy obviously have no idea what it takes to code, manage and create a large scale computer project, probably most people out there are coding buggy apps 1/10000 the size of windows, so cut the Microsoft people some slack.
As for as I can remember Prelinking has been part of Darwin/OS X for quite sometime.
Not a Macophile just an observation.
My wife's friend contacted me one day to have me fix here computer because it is running so slow. I arrived the next day. It turns out she had an old HP Pavillion (or something like that) with 550Mhz Pentium-class computer with 128mb RAM. I boot up her computer to Windoze to find out that she had a gazillion little tray applications like ICQ, AIM, Yahoo Messenger, MSN Messenger, and some stupid crap that I have never heard of. I asked her if she ever used any of these applications. She basically said that the only app she uses frequently was AOL and AIM. She claimed ignorance about the remaining apps. So I end up removing most of those little tray applications, and I double-check for other "background" apps. It seem OK and rebooted. Her computer performed much better.
The moral of the story is that if you are going to run a bunch of little applets concurrently, be prepared to take some sort of performance hit. These apps, especially the IM clients, are hog competing for your computer cycles. So, IMHO, it does not matter if you are in Linux, Windoze, *BSD. Running resource-intensive apps will affect performance.
Coderz 4 Life
Translation:
"The one that draws slower is actually faster than the one that draws faster!"
What a load of uninformed crap. Basically, you're saying Windows drags smoothly and XFree86 drags poorly, yet somehow XFree86 is faster because of a vague reference to "the way XFree86 does things?"
How could it be faster...if it's not? If one window is stuttering and the other is smooth, how is the stuttering one suddenly faster and the slowness "illusory?" I'd love to hear about the process behind this logic leap.
It is one registry key!*
Ye gods, I mean, most shells' installers even change the key for you!
Mind you, this is coming from someone who is using Litestep as a shell and a heavily modified command line as a file manager, but come on... no need to exaggerate what you just did. Maybe it is just because you were too "anti-Windoze" to realize that Windows is actually not nearly as difficult as you make it seem. Linux isn't that difficult either.
*(This is, of course, only for NT4/2000/XP - Under a 9x, you don't even open the registry to do it!)
--- Ãther SPOON!
> I'm not suggesting that you are not, but the key to being successful (efficient) at the cmd line is to have a certain level of mastery over the tools which are available.
I indeed think that when having used Unix systems before X even existed, I am aware of the find tool, and of tons of other possibilities to locate the specific information that I need from the commandline.
The problem with the commandline is that it is only faster if:
1. you know exactly which files you need and
2. you know how to select all of them.
Your comment is about the second condition, not the first.
Lets give you another example, you have a directory with the last 100+ pictures dumped from your camera, all having numerical names with no relation whatsoever to the content of the pictures yet. Now, you need to pick all pictures from that that relate to a specific subject, and move them into a seperate directory.
I see 2 ways for this.. commandline based, where it will load each picture, and asks if it should move that one also... or gui based with a previewer so you see them directly in your overview and can select the few that match.
(and yeah, I explicitly took a type of content that you can't just grep easily, that is the exact point of this)
Another example:
You start a new C project, and you are going to reuse code fragments from earlier projects, all the files you need however are in different directories and have no textual relation, nor are they from the same date. they are from the same user, but so are another 10000 files in the same dir tree.
The point is that a commandline tool can be a lot more efficient as long as you can be precise enough about what data it has to work on.
In cases where you cannot, or where as you point out, you are not aware of how to make the selection, it is definitely going to be less efficient.
Also, typing find and verifying if the arguments are indeed correct is not gonna be that much less work then clicking on data in a window and then 2 clicks to denote the beginning and end of your selection, and actually, the visual verification of if your selection is correct is very likely to be easier and more reliable when things become more complex.
I don't think it unreasonable for linux distributions released today to use the same amount of resources as current windows distributions today. The other issue is that every distribution out of the box, including windows is not optimized. They are setup with a lot of unnecessary services running. After tweaking these settings all the distributions will run on less resources. The more we stray towards eye candy the more resources systems are going to use. You want to use something light use blackbox/openbox windows managers on linux. Watch your system respond then.
Actually, I was running XP on a 400Mhz system w/ 384MB of RAM with no problems. I switched it to run Mandrake and the performance for loading apps is about equivalent when using GNOME (very disappointing).
It's not my primary box, but it is my wife's primary (who does little but check email & browse the web). But it works like a charm for those uses.
It's also set up as a print server, and running several other services (JBoss, Apache, etc).
its a dupe :)
8
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/03/21/20823
uh, why do you have to hunt through menus again?
alt+f2, type konsole, enter
When you have a choice, that is key. You have a choice between bloatware desktop, or something barely functional like TWM, or find something somewhere in between.
That is what makes Linux so great, and is it's best aspect. YOU are not FORCED to use what WE think is best.
boycott slashdot February 10th - 17th check out: altSlashdot.org
Run wmx.
It's very low footprint, very low frill window manager.
http://www.all-day-breakfast.com/wmx/
It's completely wrong.
Office does not get preloaded into memory. It loads from scratch like any other app. I don't know why people keep spreading this false meme just because they saw it posted once on Slashdot.
Oh, and I forgot..
> I think it's critical to learn what tools you have and how to use them correctly before you can really say "this is easier to do here vs. here".
You do realize that the amount of time and efford it takes to learn those tools is a huge factor in determining which one is easier I hope?
Yeah, people only spend a relatively short time learning something compared to the time they spent using it. That would suggest that the learning part is not very relevant, but it is because unless you are using a tool a lot really,there is a bit of recapturing knowledge involved each time you use it. The harder it is to learn a tool, the more difficult the tool will be to use incidentely (as opposed to using it all the time, there it really doesn't matter much)
Last but not least, your statement depends on the definition of the word easy. I bet that if you ask a random group of people out on the street about this, a large majority will agree that the easy to learn thign is in fact easier. It may not be more efficient, but that happens to also not be the same as easy.
the users, so goes the OS
between the greater and lesser infinities sleep the dreams undreamt
" I've got a 300MHz K6-2 with 192MB RAM
Christ, why are you running KDE on a K6? XP would bring that box to it's knees too.
No it wouldn't. My father ran a test XP system back out when it was still Whistler on a 400MHz or so Pentium II system with 256MB of RAM. It ran absolutely fine. "
Let's see what's different
100Mhz speed difference.
K6 vs P2
64 MB of memory.
All that plus whatever you didn't mention (HD's), could very much be the difference between acceptable, and not acceptable. So no your example isn't "good enough" to prove that XP would run acceptable on the older machine.
You have to do as close to "like" as you can, in order for your "anidotal" example to be valid.
On a default install, you are definitely NOT loading MSword "from scratch".
Nope. I have a default install of Office 2003 right now, and nothing was ever installed to the Startup group. Same thing with Office XP.
On a default install, you are definitely NOT loading MSword "from scratch".
Why do people make claims here without seeing for themselves if they're true or not? You are completely wrong--I have default installs of several versions of Office running all over my network, and none of them have an "Office Startup Assistant," none of them put anything in the Startup group, and none of them stuck anything in the registry on startup.
I think Office 2000 had the option for a Startup Assistant--do you know what that was? That damn strip of buttons that displayed on the top of the screen that I always closed on the college computers.
I use both, and I prefer Linux for various reasons.
I haven't seen a BSOD in Windows 2000... ever. I can't think of one time. I can think of times when I've needed to reboot to fix dumb problems, but I don't ever recall losing data or anything. I do think Linux is better, but it's only because of rampant repeating Windows problems - like dropping network drive mappings and so forth that never seem to happen with Linux (we just mysteriously lose and have to remap NFS or Samba mapped drives).
Now, about drivers and so forth? I had ridiculous problems with Win95 and Win98 and new video and sound cards, but I can't claim to have had any problems with Windows 2000. In the past few years I've mostly been using Linux as servers, so haven't had any of those issues, but I don't doubt they exist, either.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
Dude, that's a Pentium II 400, not a K6-2 300. Look at the stats and you'll see the the P2 400 takes out the K6-2 300 in all rankings. You comparing a Kia to a BMW. I had a K6-2 300 and it was slow but it was also half the cost of a P2 at the time.
Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws-Plato
>> Do people honestly use file selector windows and drag and drop, and find that more efficient than tab completing in a terminal window?"
Of course, especially if they havn't the foggiest idea what you meant when you said "tab completing in a terminal window".
People want to learn to use a computer to do whatever it is they want to do. Your're a developer, so you were motivated to learn how to manipulate files in a shell. Most computer users are not developers and can get along just find without touching a terminal window.
The elitist charges that sprinkle this thread are based on the ever-present aroma of "I'm Better Because I Know Something You Don't" that always seems to permeate this kind of discussion.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
>Is the Linux Desktop Getting Heavier and Slower? Tux looks like he's starting to put on a few too.
Bullox. They are bloated because the coders bloat things, not because making a UI that does not use the terminal needs to be excessively bloated.
Saying "GNOME/KDE are bloated because they can't not be bloated" is not a answer. ROX's desktop uses mostly python apps, and is STILL snappier and quicker to load then the latest GNOME release. And other then a UI for positioning the panels, it has all the features of the base GNOME DE now. As it adds features it doesn't add load time because it does things right, pushing the code into external apps for configuring for example. The user doesn't notice because they just find the AppDir using ROX-Filer, and run the AppDir like a option in KDE's ControlCenter. The user doesn't know or care that it's not all one app, but they do know that it loads faster at boot and at click then the counterpart in the other DE.
XFCE does similar with it's configuration. It's all plugins for a seperate app that isn't run unless the user wants to configure. The plugins are small, and app is small, it's dependancies are small, it loads fast and snappy, and the user can actually use their computer, instead of the other way around.
Two answers, both work well, that the user doesn't even know happen because they are hidden with a correct UI. It's simple things like this that make the big DEs bloated.
I put slackware 9.1 on a toshiba pentium MMX 233 laptop with 64M memory and a 500M swap.
KDE 3.1 ran fine. Enabling all the eye-candy made it sluggish, but still quite useable.
It's all about disabling what you don't need, the same as with windows.
It's just that.
You can run Linux on just about anything. If you want a well known distro like RedHat, Mandrake or Suse, then you're looking at 100MB at the very minimum and some decent processing power, unless you go for one of those mini-distros.
The best is just to make you own. Put in exactly what you want, then make copies of it and deploy it. May I recommend http://www.linuxfromscratch.org ?
Find a job you like and you will never work a day in your life.
My P2-300 is next to a P4-2Ghz. While there is an obvious speed difference, it isn't all that big. I use them both for development, and don't bother replacing it because it is 'good enough'. Usually I click the power buttons at the same time, log in to the P4 box, while I wait it to load all the startup garbage, I log in on the P2-300. Then I start my few apps on the P4, then on the P2. When I do remote debugging on the P2 (nothing really CPU intensive, mostly RAM- and disk-intensive database work) it is just as functional speed-wise as the P4. Sure, it helps that I have an ATA-66 disk and 192MB of 133 ram inside, but that shouldn't be a big thing in that age of system. The speed difference is very noticable when I do CPU intensive things, like video conversion and games, but I have only have done video conversion a few times and only play a few games like networked Warcraft 2, which also plays fine on it. Sure, it takes an extra 20 seconds when I compile or an extra few minutes for a full rebuild, but that's okay for me.
When I do remote debugging in the win98 486 box (I wouldn't dream of a full DevStudio install there), the big problem is coping with the relatively small amount of memory (64M) and finding ways to reduce the thrashing to swap space. The good thing about that is that I know my programs run well on fast machines and reasonable on slow/old ones.
Just to put it in comparison, the P2 is a duel boot into linux, since several linux-based games are fun. When I decided it might be nice to try the 2.6 kernel in the debian 'sarge' installation a few weeks ago (mid-March), I only used it for two days before re-formatting and going back to a debain 'woody' installation without most of the server components. I use KDE, and it feels slower than what XP feels like. I don't care to use another window manager because of the time to install & configure, I'll just take what comes out of the box, thank you.
For fun I just booted it into linux, started OpenOffice, Mozilla, and Anjuta. The system feels slow, and the HD sounds like it's going to blow up when they were starting up. Surfing to a few web pages (userfriendly, /., sourceforge, openoffice.org) makes me worry about the disk, it's just clattering away. Loading a design spec word document from the common windows partition just took about 45 seconds, and it stalls when I scroll through it. Eeek. It is awful compared to what I do on XP. Oh well, back to Windows. Well, a few games of Frozen Bubbles first. :-)
//TODO: Think of witty sig statement
I'd like to ask why this article is about "Linux desktops" in particular, and not "Unix desktops". I installed KDE 3.2.2 on my Sun Blade 100 (500MHz) today, and in terms of speed and responsiveness, it equals the Intel P4 1400MHz runinng FC1 which also sits on my desk (the FC1 machine also runs XP but I won't mention its speed since that's irrelevant to this thread).
I've found KDE 3.2.2 to be more responsive than both KDE 2.x and CDE on the SPARC machine. I did find that KDE 2.x used a lot of RAM on that machine (but nowhere near as much as Sun's X server), so it's currently running with 1.5GB or RAM. I'm sure KDE would be much slower with 256MB RAM, but a gig of RAM in a desktop workstation isn't unusual these days.
If I find that KDE 3.2.2 continues to perform well on the Sun Blade, then I'd seriously consider swapping my main PC at home for a Sun Blade with KDE 3.2.2.
Follow me
One thing you have to realize is that most users _want_ their desktop to do more.
People want their _apps_ to do more.
KDE and GNOME need to concentrate on creating a good application-launching and task-switching mechanisms (hint--start menus and taskbars are interface abominations proven time and time again) and a good file manager. Then they create a wonderful API to develop on top of that and let third-party app developers do the rest.
This bullshit where GNOME is adding P2P and blogging, and KDE thinks it has to have 20,000 sidebar buttons and configuration panels on everything is completely ridiculous and unnecessary. All that stuff is supposed to be taken care of by the app writers. The desktop needs to just stay a desktop. Unfortunately, KDE and GNOME were never aiming for just that, and it seems the developers will never learn. So I just sit and wait until something like Y-Windows hurries up and finishes so I can never see XFree86 and its hacky desktop emulator projects again.
You have to include 8 additional Megabytes for each application that you plan to run simultaneously.
Now, if you use the rule of microsoft doubling, that's 256 for a decently performing bace system on a Pentium III or higher with 16 Megabytes for each application that you are going to run simultaneously.
That would make it 256 + 48 (for word, excel, and Outlook - though outlook is a memory hog). That puts a usable/stable system at 304 MB!
Yes, Windows will run at 128, but with applications it does bog down and you have NO alternatives to make it faster other than addiing ram or upgrading the processor (more likely, both).
At least with Linux, you DO have a choice. Old hardware with less ram can use a lighter wieght desktop. Xfce is VERY zippy and comes with most distros AND is is pretty pleasant on the eyes and not hard for a user to grasp.
As long as the software is DELIVERING something, who cares?
I do. How can my software "DELIVER" anything if it's slow and taking up all my memory? People will just go back to XP. Your attitude is the same kind of mindset people make fun of Microsoft for having.
Heck, you could even provide a default motd that would give some cursory (no pun intended) help on using the command line; maybe even a URL to some helpful "first time user" pages.
It's not difficult to make the existing tools user friendly.
I wonder... did s/he compile the lastest custom kernel for their hardware? Did they tune ATA I/O performance with hdparm? Did he disable non-essential daemons running in the background? I doubt it.
Did he do any of it for Windows either? Isn't it telling that he didn't need to?
Don't mark Linux off as a loss until you've properly tuned it. The same could be said for any OS for that matter.
Can you hear yourself? Just like you shouldn't have to be a mechanic to drive a nice car, you shouldn't have to "tune your OS" to have a nice desktop.
Your entire comparison was just flagged as useless. You need to run the systems on the same hardware for your comparison to have any meaning.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Actually, freebsd comes with a fortune file that does something like that.
;P
But a commandlien is goign to scare quite a few users at least at first. many such users already learned to 'deal' by clicking away windows they don't understand it seems tho, so I don't see a problem of having the icon in an easy to reach place for the quite substantial number of people who do use it often
My old computer with 700 Mhz with 256 MB RAM with GeForce 2 using DRI with Xorg runs KDE 3.2 quite well.
I use Linux From Scratch (www.linuxfromscratch.org)
I think the main limitations are graphic card you have and amount of RAM.
Debian based Knoppix 3.4 works well hd installed on more resource limited machines, is nicely set up, and it has xfce, WM, et al set up as well.
OO still takes forver to load, but works fine.
Note: MS Office is much faster (loading) than OO, and Knoppix has a nice working Wine install, and captive NTFS (RW) support.
I run it on my k6/3 400 (upgraded) Presario 1250, 288m ram laptop. Knoppix is FAR faster than any other distro I tried.
For my "main" box I run MDK10 and KDE.
I was hoping I wouldn't be the only one to have to reply that there are window managers out there that are, imo, exponentially nicer than the desktop environments out there. E or WindowMaker being my two preferred window managers, I have not noticed these slow load times unless, as a previous poster stated, I attempt to run KDE programs.
It seems, though, that more and more people are moving toward the desktop environments rather than window managers, and I am quite confused as to why. Is it familiarity with them from Solaris or some other variant of UNIX? Is it the similarity to MS Windows with the desktop icons and what is essentially a start bar? If anyone actually reads this, could that someone please enlighten me?
"I swear I won't break you if you let me take you where the willows never weep" -- Switchblade Symphony
IMHO, the biggest thing slowing Linux down right now for the average desktop Linux user is that the defaults are not set with the desktop user in mind. Take for instance the swappiness setting that was discussed on /. earlier. Mandrake 10 ships with swappiness=60, which is okay for a server, but when it is being used as a desktop, setting swappiness=20 or 30 _really_ speeds things up.
(For those who don't know, swappiness is a 0-100 setting, where 0 tries to keep all processes in ram, while 100 tries to keep all but the running process(es) in swap. 0 is good for the desktop user, because then they can multitask faster - the program they're switching to doesn't have to get loaded from swap. Think about how it would affect you when every time you go to switch to a different window, odds were 60% that it would have to load that other application from swap. 100 is good for a server because the server process gets all the ram it needs, and any time it does disk i/o, it gets to use the huge amounts of available ram for cache. NOTE: This is not a completely true definition of swappiness, but it should give you a good idea of what it does)
Properly customized, the same is true for the GNU OS. Take a look at
In the early days, bloaty eye candy and eight zillion libraries and daemons were not readily available for the GNU OS.
Now, there are plenty of easy-to-build apps and features that serve no purpose other than you might need them.
And people install them. Sometimes they install all of them--and every library and daemon, too--rather than trying to figure out which ones they actually need.
Why waste the time and effort to understand the system. Just install everything and be done with it. Why build a modular kernel? Just compile it all in and be done with it. You've got plenty of CPU cycles, HDD space, and memory. It'll work.
Why does a dog?
Because he can.
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, it doesn't go away." - Philip K. Dick
It's much closer to what they are used to than Window Maker.
Tell that to anybody who has used Mac OS X. Its desktop interface and that of GNU Window Maker come from the same NeXTstep heritage.
"His box, an 600 MHz 128MB RAM system, ran Windows XP happily, but with Mandrake it was considerably slower. Not only did it take longer to boot up, it crawled when running several major apps (Mozilla, OpenOffice.org and Evolution on top of KDE)..."
Well @!$#ing duh! How many object frameworks was he running? Let's see: 1) Mozilla/XPCOM, 2) OpenOffice.org/UNO, 3) KDE/DCOP, 4) Evolution/CORBA/Bonobo. Of course it's going to run slow!
I run GNOME2.6 and pretty much only GNOME2.6 on a 500MHz P3 with 256MB of RAM. And it's WAY snappier than my 500MHz P3 with 512MB of RAM that I have sitting next to it. I run Evolution, AbiWord, Gnumeric, and Galeon. All using GNOME libraries, all using CORBA, etc. Nothing has ever seemed faster.
Choose your application set wisely and you'll get the speed you want and you won't need so much hardware.
-jag
http://starboard.flowtheory.net/
The difference between Linux and Windows desktops is that the Linux desktop varies depending on your needs or preferences. If you have a lot of resources to blow (ie a lot modern systems) go ahead, throw the latest, prettiest, most feature rich DE you can find, but there will always be a trade off for those kind of features. Thats exactly what originally brough me to Linux from Windows.
There are a number of DE's that have been consistently light on resource useage (Blackbox, Window Maker, Sawfish, IceWM, FVWM, XFCE, etc) and only a few that have chosen to be more focused on feature richness (KDE, Gnome, arguably Enlightenment). It would be foolish to consider the requirements of KDE or Gnome an example of Linux's requirement for resources, just as it would be foolish to expect a high degree of cutting edge feature to work perfectly on yesturdays low-end systems.
I appreciate Linux distibutions flexablity, in that I have the power to chose either their defaults (usually a pretty modern system) or cut things down all the way to the bone (hell, your using a 286 with 16 megs of memory? don't install X). Try that with a Windows desktop.
Quack, quack.
really, no text here...
- Gnome or KDE
- Mozilla or same
- Open Office or same
- Evolution or same
and other monstrous gui apps. NEWS FLASH: these apps are just as slow, or slower, on Windows.It is understandable that developers code for their audience--if 75% of people have 400MHz or better with 128MB RAM or better, is it any wonder if that is a requirement? If you want to run it trimmer, you have to do a little work. The problem isn't that the work is required, the problem is that each distribution does it differently and often doesn't make it easy.
I have a 300MHz laptop with 128MB RAM and I run Debian testing ABSOLUTELY FLAWLESSLY. I'm not playing movies (though I do listen to music on it), but I use it for general work--lots of terminals, some browsers, very rarely Office. I get much better performance from Linux than I would on WinXX because Windows would load the kitchen sink before I could open an SSH app.
If you go back to older/plain applications--Netscape 4, xterm, blackbox--you're speed is much better. Don't blame Linux--blame the applications and blame the packagers. And I have no doubt that WinXX would pound my systems horribly. You know why I originally moved to Linux on my laptops? I had need to boot/shut down constantly and run on a battery while away from my desk--Linux booted in a third of the time and could run twice as long on a battery. Linux isn't the problem.
Why does anyone use Gnome or KDE? I understand they're pretty, but they're slow and over-reaching. Any window manager should suffice with a good menu. You don't need the larger crap. If you do, don't be surprised that things are slower. But don't blame Linux!
Someone asked if I had patched against MSBlast; I said yes, I installed Linux.
A UI that is "close" to the old UI is bad, as the user will have retained too much muscle memory and habits from the old one.
In other words, a user's memory of a GUI has an "uncanny valley" around it, right?
I was once a *die hard* rxvt user. It's incredibly fast, uses less memory than anything else out there, has a good Motif-ish scrollbar (I'm not a tremendous fan of the xterm-style scrollbar).
But then Red Hat moved to Unicode, and rxvt doesn't do Unicode (which makes man pages and the like look messed up).
RIP, rxvt.
May we never see th
Yeah, those distro's memory / CPU / ... requirements are going up. So? They're not the only ones you can choose from; lwn.net's distribution list lists more than 300, from specialized to general, from small to big, and from "for pros" to "for my grandma".
The same holds true for GUIs, too - there's more desktop environments than just KDE and Gnome, and there's more GUIs than desktop environments, too. fvwm2 may not be everyone's favourite, but there are *many* different window managers to choose from, and with a bit of time invested, you'll find the one that is just right for you (and your computer).
The real problem, I think is that users (even those posting on slashdot) have inconsistent requirements: they do want all the eye candy, nifty features and slick-ness of a modern distro, but at the same time, they also want to be able to run it on older hardware without a slowdown. Think about it - it's not gonna happen, and that's not the fault of those creating the distributions. It's just a fact of life. Get over it and accept it.
quidquid latine dictum sit altum videtur.
The parent poster is perfectly correct. As everyone else's distro works harder and harder to out-bloat Windows, Slackware continues the original Linux ideal of a bloat-free, yet feature-rich, OS distro.
Part of MS's advantage is that it's run by a single set of libraries that get loaded in the OS at the start. They may not be good libraries, but they're ONE SET of libraries. Linux has plenty of good ones, but you need millions of them; every programmer of each individual app wants to reinvent the wheel or use something obscure, so memory use goes straight to the bad place. Users are forced to be smart about what they run, and Slackware definitely helps with that more than larger distros, which takes everything and the kitchen sink, and dumps it in the user's all-too-willing lap. "Sure, I'd like to install (?:G|K)Louse-Picker .0009a! Who knows, I might need it someday! Oh. I guess I need to install 300 dependencies...well Linux is always faster than M$, so I guess installing all those on my 300MHz 128MB Dell won't hurt it a bit!"
I don't feel much sympathy for all the RedHat refugees. If you want Windows, just get Windows. I know you won't be as hip then, but trust me, your personal computing experience will be better. Or buy a Mac; then you'll be even cooler than if you used Linux on a PC, if a little bit poverty-stricken.
There's no sig like this sig anywhere near this sig, so this must be the sig.
I'm trying to adapt to Linux, but it's painfully slow. I've got a 300MHz K6-2 with 192MB RAM, but I'm going to have to try a slim window manager because KDE bogs everything down.
I have a AMD K6-2 450mhz on an old crappy motherboard with 192megs of PC100 ram and it runs KDE perfectly fine.
Everything was slow when I first tried mandrake, but now that I'm in Slackware (Kernel 2.6.6, KDE 3.2.3) everything is faster than WinXP.
I suggest that the problem is with the "friendly" distros and all the things they add (change to code, more services running, GUIs everywhere), not with Linux or KDE or whatever.
You should probably give Slackware (or FreeBSD, which is pretty close) a try on your old hardware.
Treehugger? Treehugger... Treehugger!
Yea, I used to think OSNews was cool. But the comments on OSNews are just as lame as on slashdot but there's no moderation system (outside of removing offensive messages). And so many of the editorials are just troll-bait and not really thought out.
I tried fvwm2, and I think windowmaker, and Xfce, but wound up happiest with IceWM. Half a meg for the whole damn binary.
I just wish that the control panels for it all didn't gag over a python error that I've not been able to trace (not a python programmer, though).
People keep talking eye candy and "integration". SCREW IT! As long as it looks ok, and I *really* don't see the difference between KDE and Ice, so I have no clue what they're talking about, it's fine, and how many folks out there use a fraction of the "integrated" garbage?
I use Mozilla, though I'm still using kmail because it works the way I want it to, and OpenOffice.dog, and that takes care of most everything but work (sysadmin, programming), and that gets done over ssh.
I *would* like to see one of the lightweight window managers gain a *lot* more acceptability - that would help linux on the desktop a *lot*. I mean, be *real*, most folks are buying for home, and a *lot* of companies are *not* going to upgrade hardware for everyone every year, so it better run *fast* on older hardware.
My home system is an "overclocked" 233->250 K6-II, and I'm running a recent 2.4 kernel, and it runs just find (except, as I suggested above, OpenOffice.dog, and I can't understand why that takes more than half a minute to get up blank, and another 15 seconds to give me a file menu, when AbiWord comes up all the way on the same box in about 10 seconds...of course, Abiword 2.0 wants aspell, and that breaks apache....).
Fine, so I may buy a 400 or 500 MHz m/b soon, so OO.O and maybe a game or two will run faster...but as for KDE/Gnome, no thanks, you can go park those semi-trailers down the block.
mark
It's all about the features that the desktop/wm can offer. Every feature needs processing power and memory. If something like ratpoison is all you need, by all means go for it. Talking about KDE, indeed it is more bloated than the win distros, but it also offers more. Probably much more than any newbie user can or is willing to learn.
Proof? Oh that's right, you don't have any. Nice.
When it comes to a unix based GUI OS X is the best.
Gnome and KDE really are clunky and lame. Simply no comparison.
nothing.can.stop.me.now
Of course, modern sound cards really ought to have hardware mixing.
And monetarily challenged computer users really ought to have more money to buy a sound card with a mixer.
UIs are going to bloat. Period. People expect more and more featurs, and better and better usability from their software. It is called evolution. And most of the usability evolution ahppens at the UI side, so yes, it is going to bloat.
But KDE and Gnome are not Linux. One of the best facets of Linux is that the GUI is a totally distict entity than the kernel. So if you, who is performance-centric and does not care about features, you can run Blackbox, or even Gnome 1.2 or KDE 2.2 from a few years aback and it will work just fine under the latest Kernel.
But for me, and others who like lots of GUI magic and have fast boxes, we can pick the feature-rich UI others called "bloated". It is all about coice, and choice is a good thing.
It's really not fair to gripe that a box can't handle a modern distro, even though it handles Win98/NT fine. We expect more from our operating systems today than we did six years ago.
Now, when somebody complains that Linux runs like a gimpy dog on a machine that can handle Windows XP easily, then I get a little nervous. Which people are doing. So I guess I am a little nervous.
But there are distros which are designed with an eye towards light fluffiness. Take Damn Small Linux, for example. A fully functional desktop on a 50MB ISO, and it's bootable, so it's easy to experiment with it.
Things like OpenOffice, Mozilla, KDE, GNOME, and Evolution do feel bloated and unresponsive on older machines, but I've never used XP on an equivalent machine to get a good basis for comparison. I do agree with the author, that a lot of fat needs trimming from modern distros. But how to go about it?
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
You know what? I'm done. No more Linux. I'm sick of you stupid fucks that can't figure this simple point out:
Linux and it's related projects are not perfect.
I've fucking had it. I'm not contributing to help people learn Linux anymore, I'm not evangelizing it to my company or local organizations anymore, I'm not contributing on message boards or Usenet anymore - I'm done. I'm moving to BSD. I'm sick and tired of this pathetic attitude you penguin humping retards have. It has become brutally clear to me that Linux isn't about making a good system, it's about hating Microsoft, and if I want a good UNIX like system by people that actually WANT a good UNIX like system, not just a "it's not Windows so I'm so 1337" system, it's going to have to be a BSD.
Fuck you all, you're all idiots, and I'm switching to the BSDs permanently. I've had it with you numbskulls that would rather puff your chest in faux superiority to WIndows than continue to improve the system you have.
Alito: A vote for Alito is a punch in the eye to put that bitch back in her place!
You do realize that any graphical tools that run under Gnome or KDE will
run just fine under any other window manager, don't you?
I use graphical tools all the time, but I know what tools I use and don't need
the WM to provide catagorical menus for me to find what I need. When I need to
start xv or ooffice or whatever, I simply start from my xterm (backgrounded,
of course so that I don't lose the use of the xterm).
Why is this so difficult to understand?
*sigh* back to work...
Far more likely is that you were running more services in the background than you were on NetBSD.
But the comments on OSNews are just as lame as on slashdot but there's no moderation system (outside of removing offensive messages)
And "offensive" means disagreeing with "the staff". Last night I made the mistake of pointing out that a gui and an operating system are not the same thing. That post is gone.
And so many of the editorials are just troll-bait
I've toyed with the idea of following Eugenia's example and preceeding every one of my trolls with "Our take:".
and not really thought out.
Or in anything approaching English.
Google confirms: Ruby is the world's most beloved programm
Also, there is a tradeoff, at least for commericial companies. Its less expensive to upgrade hardware than to develop, test, document, deploy, and maintain software
Granted, this may be valid for a for-profit corporation, but it's not as valid for a non-profit, taxpayer-funded educational institution given the subtly different parts-labor cost balance in the public sector, especially in public K-12 schools. Education sways what companies use because it sways what the HR department sees on incoming resumes.
KDE has much larger core libraries. Nearly every KDE app only needs to link to five things... libqt.so, libdcop, libkdecore.so, libkdeui.so, and libkio.so. Nearly all core KDE functions come out of these.
Gnome is quite different. It is broken in to a myrid of libraries - Glib, GTK, Gnomelib, bonobo, various RTF libraries, various widget libraries, various graphics libraries...
The end result is, loading up a single KDE app and a single gnome app will almost always result in Gnome havig a smaller footprint. But load a few of each, and the footprint will be much closer. Run two full environments ( Run KDE, the run Gnome ), and they'll be almost identical - Note the results from TOP are not an indication, use "free" instead.
Basically, KDE is designed and developed around the idea that it *is* a desktop. Applications are all tightly integrated, and any bit of code that is used in more than one app is shared in the core libraries.
This has the result that, if you don't run KDE as a whole ( and thus don't have kdeinit pre-loading your libraries ), you will have worse performance than running single GNome apps. However, because not as much code is in one core library, launching many gnome apps that all load different libraries can take longer than launching several KDE apps that all link against the same libraries.
You can agree or disagree with the KDE model of "integrate as much as possible", but you can't really claim that KDE is "more bloated" than Gnome - Gnome is just "spreading the bloat around", so to speak.
Seems like alot of people agree that, in it's current state most of the distros leave behind the older systems. Others contend that there are window managers that work with older system albeit with with fewer features. So why doesn't a distro detect the hardware configuration and automagically reccommend a slimmer WM? Have one default config for pIII966? Wouldn't that solve the dilemma?
Compare and contrast the Linux desktop of today with the Windows desktop today. There's no comparision, Linux does more. For every major component, with one exception, the Open Source side does more than the Windows side.
The underlying operating system and environment on the Linux side does a heck of a lot more out of the box than Windows does. The typical distro comes with a complete build chain, half a dozen scripting languages, a couple of shells, text processing utilities, and industry standard servers for http, ftp, dns and mail. In every case the Linux equivalent beats out the Windows variety. Bash versus command.com? No comparison!
Then look at the desktop. A KDE default install kicks the Windows XP default desktop's butt! Ditto for GNOME! To get to the Windows XP level of functionality, you actually have to drop down to Blackbox, but even there Blackbox wins out in a number of areas (multiple desktops, smart window placement, etc).
Mozilla, Konqueror, Firefox, and all the other "standard" Open Source browsers kick Internet Explorer's ass.
I had to get my work computer upgraded from Win2K to WinXP today. At this moment I have just WinXP. There's not much I can do with just the default install (which is why I'm wasting my time posting to Slashdot from IE). I have to wait for IT to install MSOffice, Visual Studio, Photoshop, Visio, Rational Rose, Clearcase, Hummingbird, etc. But if I were to choose virtually any Linux distro, I could have been instantly productive the minute the default installation was complete.
Yes, Linux distros are getting bigger. We shouldn't sit back and let them bloat out of control. But much of that mass if muscle and not fat!
p.s. That one exception is OpenOffice. I'm willing to give it some slack for a while though, because it's still very new to the Open Source world.
p.p.s. I'm not even a Linux user, but a FreeBSD user. But since the "Linux desktop" is identical to the "FreeBSD desktop", I had to respond.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
When you see the recomended specs for any M$ product there is one rule: Double it. That is where they all run best. Now in my experience Linux will run nicely on XP's recomended hardware.
Then I also think the desktops are getting slower in almost any OS.
Professional Politicians are not the solution, they ARE the problem.
People who use computers as toys seem to like the desktop environments because there's lots to explore and play with.
This is more than likely making up for a small penis. Why are you defending this person?
I've read most of the comments here at my default +5, and I have to say, I don't see how so many trolls and blatant lies got modded so high.
I know what you're thinking. You're thinking "oh, he's just another Linux elitist who's going to condenscedingly tell me what to do." And you would be wrong.
I'm not going to tell you what to do. I'm going to tell you what *I* do, and see if I can make any sense of the garbage that's getting posted here.
I use Debian GNU/Linux (isn't it obvious from the sig?). Stable. Not unstable, not even testing. With a 2.4 kernel on P4's with a minimum of 512MB of RAM. And they all fly.
I program. I write software for Navy weapon sims. I write software for my company on the side. I play NeverWinter Nights on my machine with an ATI Radeon 9700 Pro, while scanning photos, reading email and administrating the servers for my company and personal use. All of this flies, and [Microsoft] Windows doesn't even compare. And yes, I use Windows (ever heard of NMCI?). MacOSX? Don't make me laugh; I've used it, I've programmed in it, I used to administer a whole lab of it. It's slow and buggy. GNU/Linux runs fast and smoothly on the exact same hardware. GNU/Linux doesn't crash (unless I'm doing some obscure kernel hacking), and it doesn't "stutter" when I'm playing MP3's while image editing a 500MB file in GIMP.
GNU/Linux allows me to do more and more things at the same time. GNU/Linux makes things possible that I never would have imagined possible on Microsoft Windows or Apple Mac OS X.
But you know what? None of this matters. The only thing that matters to me is that GNU/Linux is Free as in Freedom.
I don't know why you guys are having so many problems with GNU/Linux. All I can say is that I've had worse with Windows an MacOSX, and even if I hadn't, I would _still_ use GNU/Linux, because it's Free. Fortunately, in my not so humble experience, GNU/Linux is better in every sense of the word.
Nathan's blog
Not that I'm bashing Linux, but recent linux compared to recent FreeBSD pales in low memory desktop situations. And also, default X installs with FreeBSD include less software than on most major linux distros.
Now, not to be complaining, but I wish that at least a few Linux distros would take a text installation and minimal configuration for an install, without a lot of user input, kinda like the FreeBSD install.
And also, I wish that software would still be universally released in gzipped packages rather than bzip2, which takes ages to decompress on a slow, low memory computer.
Don't expect lean software from someone whose cubicle/computer space is messy. How many neat work spaces are there out there? How many lean programs? Coincidence? I think not.
Christ, why are you running KDE on a K6? XP would bring that box to it's knees too.
Wow, I guess my Pentium II 266mhz running XP was a hallucination.
Why do people just pull assumptions out of their ass as though they're truth? Way too many uninformed opinions flying around in this article discussion today.
Been using XFCE for ages now, on a 5-year old 500MHz celeron, and it feels faster than my 2.6GHz win2k desktop. Plus I love the flexible Os-level hotkey setup (CTRL+ALT+X gives me a terminal, CTRL+ALT+M gives mozilla,...)
The extra 'goodies' plugin packages are great too.
http://xfce.org
When I say 'business opportunity', by the way, I am not referring to the opportunity to make money, though that certainly exists as well. I am talking about increased use of Linux, which means increased corporate pressure on software companies to release Linux-native versions of their software, which will make Linux more usable for a wider audience, which means wider use, which means more software, etc.
It is a shame that Linux, not the kernel, but the entire idea of a free desktop OS, has become as bloated and complicated as it has. I often wonder if it shouldn't be possible to implement, for example, one widget library, and then provide APIs to that library that are the same as those for GTK, Qt, the Mozilla widgets, the OOo widgets, and whatever other widget sets are in wide use right now. Then, imagine running that library directly on the frame buffer, without X, because most "simple" users don't know about or appreciate the additional power and flexibility that X gives them. I think a single program could serve as a desktop with icons and a wallpaper, a taskbar of some sort, and a window manager. The aforementioned KDE, GNOME, OOo, Mozilla, and other applications would be linked against the one library that provides the same functionality with the different APIs, which would mean a much reduced memory footprint, and since all applications would use the same library, it would likewise reduce the time required to start each application.
Behind the scenes, the SysV-style start/stop init system could be removed in favor of a much simpler, non-runmode-enabled BSD-style system that only has a single script. In fact, instead of a script, this could be implemented as a single binary. I would get rid of almost all scripts in the system and implement them, to the greatest extent possible, as just one program, BusyBox-style, that handles their functionality. I might even use BusyBox instead of the separate, more powerful utilities, because again, most users don't know or appreciate that power.
Overall, I think that a lot of the progress that has been made in embedded Linux could be used in full systems. The BusyBox thing is one example. Embedded stuff is intended to run on tiny slow processors with almost no memory. It would work wonders for desktop systems.
Also, imagine some other possibilities: The system files (all supporting programs that aren't user applications), once installed, get placed in a filesystem-in-a-file, compressed, which gets loaded into memory on startup, accessed through cloop, kind of like Knoppix does from the CD, but much faster. This would mean that all code that's accessed all the time would be in memory, with no need to reload anything from disk, ever. I think it would all take only, say, 10 or 15 megs once compressed.
I think the boot times could be improved by detecting hardware during the initial installation of the OS, saving that information, and then detecting only the kind of hardware that might be added during runtime, like USB accessories. This would all decrease boot times.
Running everything on the framebuffer without X would mean that you could be in sexy graphics from the moment the kernel is loaded until you turn the power off. These possibilities, while I'm not sure that any or all of them would work, could certainly speed things up and make the software more usable for mere mortals while operating at an acceptable speed on old hardware. Perhaps before coming to conclusions, there should be some way to "profile" a running system to determine where it's wasting most of its time, and then optimize the hell out of that, or figure out a faster method to apply there. There is no reason that such fast and powerful computers need to operate at such slow speeds.
I already have a better machine than this one, but I can't switch our main computer over to Linux because my wife uses that one. I'm trying out Linux and don't feel there should be a need to buy a new computer for it when right now its a spare time, curiosity thing for me. From reading this thread I have been introduced to a few more light window managers that do what I'm looking for. All the screen shots I'd seen before didn't have the taskbar and start menu turned on I guess because most people who use those window managers don't like them. I just need to try out a couple of these tonight and then I'll be able to see which of those I like. It sounds like one of those should run just fine. I just wish the main distros would have had options in the install that offered some of those lighter window managers as an option.
We may experience some slight turbulence and then...explode. -Capt. Mal Reynolds
Brief summary: Windows just works. It has stability and security problems, of course, but if you run Windows Update and maintain a firewall outside the system it's actually very stable and secure. Linux, while supposedly more secure out of the box, is a royal pain to configure and set up properly as a desktop system.
What was the last linux desktop you tried? redhat 3? Maybe the old infomagic cd sets? Yes windows is fine when it's behind a firewall and you patch it. Thats all well and good, unless you use IE as your browser.
Should the autoconfigure steps fail (or should you, heaven forbid, change something as minor as the mouse), you're left with an unusable system. (Since, for a desktop system, the CLI doesn't count when you want to be using a desktop environment.)
I don't remember the last time the X autoconfiguration failed on redhat. I don't use redhat anymore, but that worked every time. I suppose you've never seen the win2k/xp recovery console either.
I'd like to reevaluate the current Linux desktops, but current X issues are basically preventing me from doing so. (Namely, X refuses to work with my USB mouse, even though it worked fine a couple of months ago. Since the current desktop environments seem to be totally impossible to navigate by keyboard, I can't even start a terminal window.)
Every linux installation I have uses USB mice. They all work, all the time. My wife however has a brand new logitech "gaming" mouse. It didn't work properly in winxp until we installed it's special driver. Most linux desktopuse environments use keyboard shortcuts just like windows. Even windowmaker has them F12 for your menu then the arrow keys to scroll. Next time you're in windows unplug your mouse. See how friendly that is.
Once X is brought up to the level of the Windows graphical environment (being able to fall back to VGA drivers should the more specific ones fail, being able to select drivers at runtime, being able to change resolution and color depth at runtime (I hear it can do this now, I haven't been able to check), etc.), then maybe Linux can start making inroads in the desktop.
Again, these features have been in X for a very *very* long time, well at least the resolution changing. I can't speak for the depth changing as I don't usually change the color depth after it's configured.
As it stands, the desktop environments are far worse than Windows and don't seem to be getting better. Not that I can really tell, since it doesn't work on my machine at the moment. And, honestly, it's not worth the effort to make it work
As someone who doesn't use linux, or a recent distro, I think you are wholly unqualified to make such a comment.
Oderint dum metuant
"Ahem, cough, CDE, cough"
/. and type this. I wouldn't really like it for my own desktop though.
Funny you mentioned that because that's what I'm using right now on this Sun Solaris system I've been using to view
We may experience some slight turbulence and then...explode. -Capt. Mal Reynolds
Really, using multiple toolkits is stupid. Think about it: all toolkits do basically the same things. As a user, I don't really give a damn what toollkit is used (provided the interface is sane, and provided of course that I'm in the land of free software.) But I do want to use only one.
Moreover, desktop environment support in applications should be OPTIONAL. Is that so hard? If we're going to be working on important applications, requiring a particular desktop environment doesn't make sense, particularly where there are competing desktop environments.
Personally, I will not run anything which requires GNOME or KDE. And I stick to one toolkit, which I choose on the basis of how many applications I need use the toolkit. For the rest, it's all CLI.
I have nothing against GNOME or KDE...I just don't want them on my machine. Go forth, create your desktop environments! But please, don't assume everone will use them.
I did not understand what you meant because I don't use Linux for desktop anything. However, I still disagree.
You're saying things like the Start menu, Task bar, System Tray, and Desktop are useless right? Two clicks and I've got the program that I want. Other people need to use my computer know instantly how to do what they want. That's productivity.
You have to find an open terminal window, switch to it, and type a command with whatever arguments it needs to open in the background. Gee, I'd say that's way more productive.
How about global hot keys, do you get those? For instance, it's two steps for me to set Ctrl+Alt+Q to open the program Query Analyzer. Ctrl+Alt+N to open UltraEdit.
Personally, I think that most people use a GUI because they don't have time to memorize the location of every executable they need to use (furthermore, they don't care). You obviously have a lot of time on your hands and care very deeply that everyone knows that you are a linux god that doesn't need such a silly toy.
(Personally, I think you should shut the fuck up, but that's me).
Why do people just pull assumptions out of their ass as though they're truth? Way too many uninformed opinions flying around in this article discussion today.
Must be summer, the kids are out of school perhaps?
My dad runs Windows XP on a Celeron 300 with 384 MB of RAM. I just threw all the old style RAM in there I had available. Right now, the really old harddrive is the bottle neck. XP runs fine on old machines.
I also use the gentoo with the xfce4. I can't wait for the xfce 4.2, it is teh hotness. If you haven't tried xfce4 I suggest you at least take it for a spin. Imagine a lightweight GTK based window manager that has everything you need and nothing you don't. Anything it doesn't supply, you must provide by using other linux programs (xbindkeys, devilspie, etc.). It is also super fredesktop.org standards compliant. It's really great because all of your programs interoperate in the standard linux way as opposed to all of them needing to be built with kde/gnome support.
Rather than risk repeating what everyone else said I must say this. The distros that most people use like RedHat, Mandrake and Suse are like big american SUV cars. They have everything, which is also more than anyone needs. Gentoo however is for ricers which is what I am. I get a small, efficient foreign car and I customize to fit me like a glove. No extras, nothing missing. If you don't believe it then this monthly thread will convince you.
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
Um...if you are using 3.x of XFce, maybe it looks like something it's 20 years old (or try win95, so maybe 10 years) but all the 4.x releases look great. For a fully configurable window manager, it runs extremely fast. It can run anything Gnome or KDE can, so it's not like you are losing much. KDE apps are a little slow to start at first, because it has to start up that engine, but otherwise it's a very fast window manager that still looks good.
It should not be a surprise that when Linux developers try to play "catch up" with Windows' plethora of features, they eventually run into the same pitfalls of instability and bloat. Linux seems to me to be facing a dilemma:
No one complains that Unix utilities like cat and grep are bloated; imagine a similar philosophy but with utilities designed to operate on "rich text" (God how I hate that term) documents, spreadsheets, etc.
What really bothers me is that the world lets M$ (and to a much lesser extent, Apple) define what "ease of use" is. And if "ease of use" means every feature you could ever want all in the same monolithic program, then of course we'll have miserable stability and huge bloat. The way I see it, the alternatives are massive bloat, or rejection by the unwashed masses. Given the choice I would rather be rejected by the masses.
If stupidity got us into this mess, then why can't it get us out? - Will Rogers
No KDE/GNOME,just fluxbox,emelfm[filemanager],Nedit on slack9.1 is _all_ i need if and when am into GUI mode.
The solution to your "problem" is obvious. Configure your PC to run to your satisfaction with the software that is available. There is a universe of it out there - - look at Freshmeat.net. You can't expect the software developers of the world to cater to you and your 64 megs of RAM, or whatever it is you're running. At my company, software vendors have pushed us to upgrade hardware any number of times. If you want the features they're offering, you put another stick of memory in. If the cost is too dear, then keep what you're running and look for a more lightweight solution - - if you can find one. It's the way of the world. Why fight it? Nothing says you can't continue to work from a command line if that's what floats your boat.
It's only funny until someone gets hurt. Then, it's hilarious.
Very friendly software works just fine on older hardware. I know that Debian testing, with KDE 3.2 works just fine on 450 MHz and 128MB RAM. I'd even go so far as to call it snappy. I've used Mepis on machines as low as 233 MHz. Sure, OO was slow on that, but any reasonable company can use it's old "server" to provide that via terminal services to machines of this class.
More importantly for business is the that XP is just the beginning of what Microsoft pushes. Not only does a company have to buy new hardware to run it, it also has to purchase "servers", CALs and other eXPensive junk. Free software has and still makes better use of hardware and has a lower TCO, regardless of what Fedora does.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Did you read the linked journal entry? Obviously not, or you'd see that the latest Linux distro I used was Gentoo.
I don't remember the last time the X autoconfiguration failed on redhat.
Good for you, it failed for me under Gentoo. Or, rather, it "succeeded" and created the same incorrect configuration file that didn't work. Which is really stupid, considering that the entire system is Plug and Play, has the correct nVidia driver, and is using a freaking HID compliant mouse and keyboard.
What's even more annoying is that the mouse used to work a month or so ago. It only recently stopped working under Linux and nothing I can do to the stupid configuration file will convince it to work. I finally gave up when X hard-crashed and I wound up corrupting the system when I rebooted. (Note: even though Windows 98 understands how to use the ATX power-off interrupt, Linux does not. Your system will spontaneously power down, and your file systems will not be synced. Way to go, Linux, way to go.)
As someone who doesn't use linux, or a recent distro, I think you are wholly unqualified to make such a comment.
You missed the "gentoo" part, huh? Yeah, I'm sure that after I "emerge sync" and "emerge -u world" that I'm still using an ancient distro.
Or, it could be fully up to date and not work anyway. Configuring X should not be such a task. Hell, I shouldn't have to configure something as simple as a keyboard and mouse. Windows has autodected them since what, Windows 95 OSR2?
Configuring which display driver to use, that I can see. Configuring the resolution to use, that I can see. Configuring the refresh rate range? That should be autodetectable through the plug and play monitor I use. Configuring the keyboard and mouse? Um, no. That I should never have to do.
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
...I want file associations to just work. I'm not a heavy multimedia user. I'm running Pentium Classic with 90 MB, 180 MHz, 24-32 bit display, & Sound Blaster 16, because it's stable & it all just works. Basically, I need to be able to create documents & view them according to modern standards [HTML 4.01 & CSS]. You can't do that with Windows because the browser won't be updated anytime soon.
As for Enlightenment & other window managers, I don't use them because I don't know how to configure various software packages just to watch various multimedia files. I can't underscore this enough. I kind of gave up watching video clips on this box, but it turns out that KDE or Opera offered me the choice of watching a certain clip. It asked me if I wanted to use a certain package to watch it. I was surprised because I wasn't even aware that it could be so easy. You're probably wondering why I would check in 1st place if I don't expect it to work. I checked in hopes that something accidentally got set properly & it'll just work; well, it is going to work, because I'm upgrading KDE with the relevant packages right now.
If you already know which software is used for which media files, then I encourage you to use a lighter environment, but as for me, I really need to get a system that is preconfigured. I've tried Blackbox, twm, swm, lwm, fvwm, & probably others. Because of the apparent lack of documentation, I just can't seem to work Blackbox & twm. I honestly don't know how people can recommend Blackbox & twm in good conscience. As for Enlightenment, I don't understand why people use that when there is KDE & Gnome. When I tried this, last millenium, it seemed to be part of KDE & Gnome. Now that KDE doesn't seem need it anymore, I don't bother with it.
I don't use Gnome because the documentation is difficult to read. It seems geared to describing tasks that I have no interest in, while KDE's documentation is towards telling me what such 'n such app is for & what I get to do. "You have to do..." vs. "You get to do...". I would argue that KDE's documentation is a delight to read in & of itself, whether or not you want to accomplish the relevant tasks. A list of chores vs. fun & productive stuff.
testing out my trending skills
It may sound trollish but I was forced to run a modern distro on a P75 some six months ago when the power supply of my desktop computer died in smoke and sparkles. As I also had a P75 router with 64 Mb of RAM, I pulled out the hard drive from the desktop computer, inserted it in the old one, booted up, reconfigured some devices and I was back online in no time. And I was running Mandrake 9.0 with a fully fledged GNOME 2.4.x desktop compiled from sources using the wonderful jhbuild script. It took some time to boot, but after logging in and loading the programs in memory, it was pretty usable. Galeon 1.3.x (using Mozilla 1.4.x I think) was slooow, but usable nonetheless.
On top of that, I had to write a CV back in those days and I just had to install OpenOffice 1.0.3 on the lowly box. It took forever, but ended succesfully. However it was a pain in the ass to use, menus drawn very slowly and characters would appear on screen two or three seconds after typing them on the keyboard...
However I am confident that using software like XFCE (desktop + window manager), Rox-Filer (file manager), Balsa (e-mail), AbiWord (documents), Gnumeric (spreadsheets) and others in the same league it's possible to revive old hardware with modern Linux software. The only problem would be that there not such thing as a really usable and very light browser for Linux.
--
I started with nothing and still have most of it left.
i've been using this one for a couple of years and it works great:
;-)
http://www.plig.org/xwinman/archive/mosquito/
it's actually smaller than twm i think, but it's slightly easier to use than ratpoison
Even if you aren't using it or don't really need it. Even if there is an X that has a direct-to-framebuffer mode (is there?), there's still all that code designed to push it over a network. Of course, NOONE I know is actually USING a GUI remotely, and while it's nice to know you can, I still think the fact that it is there by default is a serious flaw in Linux GUI's that will always put it at a performance/size disadvantage over MS and MAC GUIs (at least the older MAC, haven't seen a new one since OS-X, so I don't know what that does...).
Consequently, I still use SVGALIB/console windows, even for viewing images and web surfing for info (using lynx). Don't like a mouse anyway, as I have 10 working fingers and know how to touchtype, not just a couple. Also, I happen to like the feature of "typeahead" which you don't get in a GUI.../p>
Being an avid KDE user generally, I think the problem has more to do with the memory footprint of the big two window managers as well as some bloat on the part of the most commonly used applications. I use a four year old Pentium III 500MHZ laptop running KDE 3.2 with no problems, but I do have 320 megs of RAM. Programs like OO.o, Mozilla, and a lot of the other stuff that the average Linux desktop user uses take up a lot of resources. It will be interesting to see how stuff like the QT port of OO.o develop. By sharing embedded libraries into the WM programs like that can run faster. I think this is ultimately one of the biggest programs with Linux is the fact that there are GTK and QT factions and development for one will mean performance in the opposing WM is weaker. The other thing worth noting about the memory footprint is a lot of end users start services they don't really want or need at boot resulting in slower boot times and more strain on the CPU and available memory. I think if desktop oriented distros took a more minimalist approach towards services started at boot in the default installation that might improve the problem. Ultimately though, we know damn well Mozilla, OO.o running on top of Gnome or KDE on a machine with less than 128 megs of RAM is going to be too little memory. A solution for some users might be if you're a KDE user for example, try out Konqueror, try Kmail, try Koffice and only use Mozilla, OO.o or whatever else if you are having some sort of a compatibility problem.
Recently upgraded from FC1 to FC2, which was a change from gnome 2.4 and kernel 2.4 to gnome 2.6 and kernel 2.6. I've noticed nothing but speed improvements... the system is more responsive and faster to boot.
Fedora Core two != all modern Linux Distros. The author's dispair over his Fedora is strange.
It's surprising to see what kind of hardware will run the most modern of Linux. Knoppix is a grueling test that runs entirely in RAM using on the fly decompression of binaries on a CD. Yet, I've run full KDE sessions on really ancient hardware. PIIs even P1s with 128MB of RAM will work. I've got Debian Sarge, with all the latest KDE goodies on a 450MHz K6/2 and it works great. Fedora Core 1 runs fine on these kinds of machines too, though it is a bit heavy. I run Mepis on a PII 233 with 128 MB and it works OK.
You don't have to drop all the way down to fluxbox just to use older hardware. It's true that I can use Dillo and Fluxbox and KDE 2 to run my 24 MB 75MHz laptop and have way better performance than the Windoze 95 it came with. It's also true that the same laptop would never run XP. What the author of the article overlooked was older software that's still available. The packages in Debian Woody still work better than XP and do all the things the average user needs. KDE 2, Balsa, Gnome Card, these things still work just fine and are well maintained. It's more fair to compare that generation of software to XP anyway, they are the same age.
Companies have plenty of examples of alternates to the big honking distro. Largo Florida made the switch to free software long ago. Their basic approach of using servers and terminals is still valid today and makes excellent use of old hardware.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Linux has one downfall, and that is that it is getting too big for itself. People bitch about 5 CD's but they don't stop to think that that includes a full office suite, all the mp3 programs you could possibly want, more productivity wasting solitare games than your boss would allow, etc. HOWEVER, the thing i don't like, is that you want to use this nice new shiney video card, and well... unless you know how to write drivers for it, you're fucked. And that's not it either, i remember when you could run linux on a 386... COMFORTABLY! Granted it was caldera 1.0 beta, but still... This is why i still use FreeBSD, same shit, no bloat. Hell, linux is almost helpless now without a GUI because most the config programs have been developed that way.
I have 151MB of 256MB of RAM available on my 1Ghz laptop. I'm running Slackware with both KDE and GNOME, 10 Konqueror browsers with a couple tabs each, one konsole with several tabs and/or screen, konqueror filemanager, gkrellm, and gedit. It appears that I'm using a lot of swap, around 150MB, but since the system has been up in this state for about 7 days and has a lot of webpages stored in RAM that almost seems reasonable. Anyway, I don't see a problem here. It has plenty of available RAM and CPU to handle everything I want to run on it.
Who buys a system with less than 256MB of RAM today? And how much do you pay for these systems? And why do you buy them if you know you'll be running a UNIX-like OS where extra RAM can be very useful for things like running many long-running apps or launching a new browser/tab whenever you want to visit a new website.
I'm only using one of my 4 virtual desktops. So the system is under rather light load at the moment. But if I had to suffer with 128MB of RAM I'm sure I could do it without using much swap. But then I might only be able to run KDE or GNOME and a few applications.
I'd have to say that I am not only more productive on a computer because it's easier to learn new tools, but that the gui itself is one of the main tools I use. I use the desktop not only to switch between apps, but as a clipbook/news reader/clock/media player, and only do so because it it is convienent enough to not interfere with "work" I have to do on the same machine. Those are tools I couldn't take advantage of in a CLI-only space.
As a new linux user, I find it horrifically interesting that there aren't any(?) DE's that allow one to work without a shell. Constantly, one has to open command shells to perform trivial tasks. When adding that to learning a semi-functional DE, I understand why so many people are linux-shy. I must give props to Kuake for taking some of the sting out of this, but it seems it should be in every distro's default DE, since they require a terminal so much.
This may lead to a bit of hatred from both sides, but the complete integration of basic UI (classic), graphic features (skins) and a command line (adress bar, command prompt) in XP is one interesting solution. Additionally, the XP installation takes a more friendly approach to what a user's GUI should look like for them: By default all the graphic bells and whistles are "on" and can be turned off by those experienced and inclined to do so. I think this is an important advancement over a typical linux distro's philosophy, which has a lot of features (sub-pixel blending, etc.) "off" by default. Users inclined to seek these features are those least interested in using them.
Despite all the windows-bashing here, perhaps people should appreciate what they have done well (as well as bash their wicked ways). A great solution would be a new linux based GUI that offers 100% of shell functionality (and no prettiness), rather than "live on top" of an existing CLI, and then develop optional graphic touches as a layer above that. This would scale as well, or better, the current MS offering. Graphic flourishes could be added later in a consistent and pleasant manner.
Looks good for your age..
Yeah, my 128 meg, P2 Toshiba Sattalite XCDVD is fucking crawling when I use Gnome or KDE... Turn off the GD bells and whistle VIA GUI and not some obscure .ini written by a basement butter-troll coder.
It all depends on what you are doing. When I upload the 100 pictures of yesterday's wedding from my digital camera, I need to extract the 20 or so good ones from the 80 bad ones. They are named "img_1932.jpg" through "img_2032.jpg", by the way.
With a command line interface, I can view each picture, one at a time. I can find and delete the really bad ones, but it is a slow process. And, when I get to the end of the 100 pictures, I recall that I have around 12 pictures of Bob. I don't need that many, so I should pick the best 2, and delete the rest. The pictures of Bob are evenly distributed through the 100 pictures in total. So, it takes another pass through the 100 pics to even find the 12 ones with Bob, and then I need to compare them to see which ones I like the best. This would probably require me to write down the file names and my comments on a scrap of paper as I go through them.
With a GUI, I view the entire directory at a glance, using the thumbnails. Then I multi-select the ones with Bob them, and copy-drag them to a folder named "Bob" (he is vain, and wants them all). Then I drill down into a few to get a better look. I can see all the thumbs at once, so it is easy for me to decide which ones to keep and which to delete. Then I drag one from the image viewer app onto my mail program to e-mail it to someone. Likewise, I can drag some onto my HTML editor to add them to a web page I am creating.
Command lines are great for many things (and I do normally use the CLI), but they are really bad at visual or graphical tasks.
Also, CLIs are great for frequently used commands. Once you get old enough to start fogettting things, you find that you can't remember the command you want. With a GUI, you can troll through the menus (and hopefully the menus are well designed, so you don't need to look under "Window" for the command to adjust the colour). With a CLI, you try to guess what the command is, or use "apropros" and try to guess a good keyword to search with. (As an exercise in futulity, try to use "apropros" to find the program that displays images).
I hate it when I make a joke and I get modded "+5 insightful". Mod the stupid comments "funny", not "insightful", pleas
I've never had trouble understanding any of the English on osnews.com. But other then that, yea I agree.
I hadn't heard of Kahakai, so I checked it out. According to their website, it is dead.
When extracting, GNOME-Terminal uses around 70% of the CPU just to draw the text, leaving only 30% for the extraction itself. That's pitifully poor. Metacity is hellishly slow over networked X, and, curiously, these two offending apps were both written by the same guy (Havoc Pennington).
Rather pointed accusation. Do the Gnome developers inspect each others code or are lead app developers free to do what they want?
an ill wind that blows no good
Err... No.
I have an Intel Pentium 233MMX system w/192Megs of RAM at home running Windows 2000 Pro, and it's just fine and dandy. The only Linux distro I'd think about installing on that same machine would be Slackware, and even then it'd be stripped down to Fluxbox for the WM (but I do that with all of my Linux desktop machines).
Fact is, some Linux distros are getting very top-heavy when it comes to the window managers and graphical apps. No way would I subject any of my machines to Fedora, Mandrake, or SuSE. Too much poorly written fluff to slow down the system.
Linux isn't even close to being acceptable for day-to-day use on the desktop for the masses, and unless some serious changes (optimizing code, trimming code, improving desktop apps and window managers) gets better, it'll never get there.
Something's wrong with the Linux system...
I'm running Gnome 2.6, ThunderBird, Firebird and Gaim:
About 160M, which is more or less what you report with *BSD.
I am setting here with a pretty bloated system running XP Pro and it is chewing 84 MB. In what unspeakable manner have you abused your XP install? The two biggest hogs on an XP box are Internet Explorer and Outlook (full version)...Office XP components chew lots of ram, too, but I do not use them at all or IE for that matter except Outlook (no choice). The desktop really does not use that much ram. Turn off the crap and you can get a desktop down to under 60 MB.
[RIAA] says its concern is artists. That's true, in just the sense that a cattle rancher is concerned about its cattle.
Did you read the linked journal entry? Obviously not, or you'd see that the latest Linux distro I used was Gentoo.
.iso. If you want a glitzy installer try SUSE or Redhat/Fedora. Gentoo 1.4 had no problems with my mouse/kb and kvm switch.
No I did not read your journal. Gentoo is not what I would recommend to someone looking for a "desktop" system. Their install guide while well written has a number of significant errors, and is not clear on a number of steps.
Good for you, it failed for me under Gentoo. Or, rather, it "succeeded" and created the same incorrect configuration file that didn't work. Which is really stupid, considering that the entire system is Plug and Play, has the correct nVidia driver, and is using a freaking HID compliant mouse and keyboard.
Well like I said, I wouldn't suggest Gentoo. I had a friend try it, when he saw the prompt he wondered if he downloaded the wrong
You missed the "gentoo" part, huh? Yeah, I'm sure that after I "emerge sync" and "emerge -u world" that I'm still using an ancient distro.
That really depends on what was in your "USE" variable. If you had gnome, gtk2 you would have gotten a gnome/gtk2 interface. Same if you had KDE, QT in there.
The only mouse configuration I've ever had to do is setting up imwheel and xmodmap so I can access the extra buttons on my mx700.
It's obvious you had a bad experience, I'm sorry to hear that, but I stand firm that it does not accurately reflect the state of linux distributions today. I was pleasantly surprised at how well games run under wine, and with the exception of a few MMO games, I have no reason to boot into windows xp at all.
Oderint dum metuant
What IS it with these people who think that the world should move no faster than their home town, population 357 (since old man Williams passed away last Thursday from a goiter complication), where all the kids are above average? If they want to live in such a place, then LET THEM GO THERE, GROW OLD, AND DIE QUIETLY. For the rest of us, things like the internal combustion engine and incandescent light bulb are just too important. I'm willing to pay the price!
It's only funny until someone gets hurt. Then, it's hilarious.
Slackware is good stuff.
All of my desktops at work are Slackware 9.1, while my coworkers run some form of Fedora. All of my hardware works fantastic, they constantly have problems with CD players/burners, video, apps, you name it.
At home I have an old Compaq 486 system with a Pentium 83 chip, 52Megs of RAM, and it's my dial-up/firewall/NAT/router/DNS server for the rest of my machines. I also have plenty of other tired hardware that runs great on Slackware, as well as somewhat modern hardware.
Slackware keeps it simple, which results in an OS that's a pleasure to administer as well as use every day.
Why not use the Win Key, instead of these fingers stretching key combination ? Why not just use that very Win key just for the Window manager, and keep the other ones (Ctrl, Alt, Meta, Compose, Whatever) for regular applications, since regular applications usually depend on these anyway ?
When I first started setting up linux as a server and as a desktop (rather than just fiddling with it), we had the brand new 1.2 kernel series, and X11R4.
./setiathome -nice 19 /usr/bin/gnome-session /usr/local/pgsql/bin/postmaster /usr/X11R6/bin/X
Back then, we built a 486/133 machine with a whopping 16M of RAM, and an uber-l33t Vesa Local Bus video card (3dfx #9, if I remember correctly).
Loading up a dozen text shells, a copy of netscape with several windows open, xpaint, emacs(!), and a few dozen copies of xeyes... it REFUSED to swap!
We were finally able to get it to swap by loading GNU Chess and having it play itself (which forks a second copy and talks over sockets).
Our first server was "tested" with 4 Megs of RAM and a copy of DOOM under both DOS and Linux. The linux version performed better.
Now, given that the 1.2 kernel could perform remarkably well with X windows and netscape, for what should be considered a "normal" workload... why is it that virtually every distro I can find today feels like a salt-crust grill with molassas syrup and eats up enough ram just sitting there idle to choke Bill Gates's horse?
From my whitebox linux desktop at work, here are the top 10 Bloated Sacs running right now...
VSZ RSS START COMMAND
18020 15216 Mar10
18384 2560 Mar08
18504 1020 Mar23
19476 668 16:26 sort -n -k 5
22692 6736 Mar08 gnome-panel
36088 5096 Mar08 nautilus
36736 14344 Mar08 gnome-terminal
69616 38132 13:28 thunderbird-bin
76276 47712 13:34 firefox-bin
116172 40324 Mar04
Note that this is 40+14+5+6+3 = 68M of RAM just to allow me to have a prompt. Yes, I know I could stop using gnome, but that only trims the outside fat.. the marbled fat inside X11R6 and the mozilla twins are harder to get at.
Do I get MORE done now with all this cr@p running than I did 10 years ago? Nope. Do you?
As I remember, KDE 1.2 was pretty slow on a PI 200 MMX and 32 MB RAM.
Windows 95 was way more effiecent at the time.
As I remember Win 95 was on par with Windowmaker.
I hadn't tried Windows XP until recentley, but when I did I was very disappointed with its speed.
Sure, It booted up fast but it wasn't any snappier than KDE 3.2 and sometimes there was a very long wait until the apps loaded.
You're saying things like the Start menu, Task bar, System Tray, and Desktop are useless right?
I'm not saying they're useless, just that it is an interruption to me if I have
to leave the keyboard to start a program that I need. Also, they take up screen
space that is at a premium on my laptop screen.
How about global hot keys, do you get those?
Absolutely. It is trivial to set up hot keys, global or no, in FVWM.
You have to find an open terminal window, switch to it, and type a command with whatever arguments it needs to open in the background.
With a reasonable use of workspaces and, if you desire, hotkeys, there is no
searching at all and backgrounding adds a single character to the command line.
Personally, I think that most people use a GUI because they don't have time to memorize the location of every executable they need to use
You set your PATH so that you don't have to memorize locations. All you have to
know is the app name.
You seem to have taken all this very personally. Perhaps you could enlighten
me as to what I said that was so offensive.
*sigh* back to work...
Those who have done tests have found that kernel preemption reduces average latencies rather than worst case latencies (e.g. when your audio drops out or window stutters you are seeing worst case latencies) at the cost of hurting throughput a tiny bit (so things actually take longer because they are interrupted more). In general, the low latency patches had a bigger effect than preemption which is why many of the distros do not ship with a kernel with preemption on by default. However it is useful as a debugging aid and may well be a stepping stone to something else.
I suspect you will find more of the cheats that Window's uses making their way into Linux desktop distros because the user perception is improved. Currently I'm willing to trade a bit of RAM for a faster startup but it's how to do that so I do not notice that you are doing so is the real trick.
Same here. With 512MB I have GAIM, FireFox, Konq, OpenOffice.org, JuK and a few other little apps running and my swap isn't even being touched.
Things look all right to me. 512MB of RAM never hurt anyone though!
My main desktop machines are
- A thinkpad 600 with 192Mb of RAM
- A VIA C3@533Mhz with 512Mb of RAM
Both are running Fedora 2 both are most definitely usable. There are only a few changes I've made to get that to happen - firstly I rebuild Gnome with gcc -Os, secondly I don't start up the 500 fascinating daemons I seem to get by default now days.
OpenOffice chugs on the TP600, but the VIA is very happy.
It's not quite the same as a dual opteron with scsi where "startx" produces the entire running desktop in 2 seconds.
I've also been benching the systems. The 2.6 kernel is snappier than 2.4, and Gnome 2.6 is using less RAM than 2.4. The biggest bottleneck is disk seeking - Gnome loads a lot of scatter little files when starting up and disk heads are still constrained by little problems like momentum.
With XFce I can go down to about 48Mb and have a snappy desktop. Open Office isn't very funny at 48Mb but XFce but abiword is usable.
I am running right now:
Apache2 with two intranet sites w/PHP & Perl
MySQL
IIS 5 (a test ASP based site demands it...yuck)
Firefox with several tabs open
Outlook for exchange (my biggest memory hog)
A time tracker app (don't ask)
Yz Dock
Yz Toolbar
Climate Prediction Net
A weather monitor
SpyBot SD memory resident (Tea timer)
and NAV corporate (managed...which is a dog)
And I am using a grand total of:
369 MB
BTW...even on a 2 GHZ CELERON, it flies and I have plenty left to edit a Word doc or Excell or whatever.
[RIAA] says its concern is artists. That's true, in just the sense that a cattle rancher is concerned about its cattle.
Geoshell is a GPL shell-replacement program for Windows.
After all, it's not like we're trying to run the latest 2.6 kernel on an amiga vic 20 or anything like that (though I'm sure somebody out there is trying.) Most boxes nowadays have plenty of memory so that even a nominally bloated app shouldn't be too much of a problem.
The most recent version of e16 came out on 30 May 2004. It now uses imlib2 and freetype2 instead of fnlib and imlib.
enlightenment sf page.
Frankly, this is nothing but a load thereof. Having been using GNU/Linux exclusively for five years now (on the same box, a 450MHz Celeron, which I've added RAM to exactly once), I can definitively state that this is, frankly, wrong.
KDE 3.2 runs faster than 3.1, which ran faster than 3.0, which ran faster than 2.x ... all on the same box. Ditto for the latest OpenOffice.org, Firefox, the GIMP, and pretty much every app I'd use.
And here I thought /. was above FUD like this.
MSIE: The world's most standards-complaint web browser.
This isn't about being "as bad" as Windows. This is about dropping off the cliff beyond that.
Windows never had a bloat problem. It had many stability problems, bugginess, and so on, but bloat was never a problem. I remember people running Win95 on a 16MHz 386 with 4 megs of RAM. It was slow, but it ran.
I'm trying to adapt to Linux, but it's painfully slow. I've got a 300MHz K6-2 with 192MB RAM
That wouldn't be your problem right there, would it? Even Win98 would run slow on such an old POS box. Considering that you can get a 2GHz computer these days for less than $500 (with a monitor, no less), I fail to see your point. Old computers just aren't that useful as a full-featured desktop machine, despite what slashbots say.
In any case, my computer is a 700MHz Duron with 256 megs of RAM and a shitty videocard. XP runs like a slideshow, Mandrake 10 with KDE runs reasonably fast. Again, what's your point?
I think that's on my to-do list of things to learn. I want to find out how to turn off the services and daemons that are running. I haven't done any custom compiling, either, so that's something I should probably find out about.
We may experience some slight turbulence and then...explode. -Capt. Mal Reynolds
Have you tried Xfce? It's more spartan than KDE/Gnome, but better than any other lightweight WM's that I've tried. And it ran fast on my old K6 with 64M RAM (KDE2 was like a snail in molasses on that box).
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
We may experience some slight turbulence and then...explode. -Capt. Mal Reynolds
My point is that most modern Linux distributions are not designed for slow, old machines. If you need a fast desktop, you can use something like iceWM or XFCE. Even then, XFree86 will chew up most of your memory. You wouldn't try to run XP on that box, so don't expect KDE 3.2 to work.
What happened to the good old days when programmers would sit for hours, or even days on end, simply to reduce a few instructions? I understand that coding is getting much more complicated, and programs becoming much bigger, but still, programmers need to try and reduce the size of their code. Think of it like paper. If you have a single piece of paper, it weighs almost nothing, but if you pick up a stack of paper, you can suddenly feel that the combined weight is a lot. Sure, if you just leave a small section of code how it is, and don't optimize it, no one is going to notice the few more nanoseconds it takes to execute, but when you add that together, over thousands, or possibly millions of lines of code, it starts to add up.
Dillo is a good choice for a light browser, obviously it doesn't have the features of a Gecko based browser (or for that matter KHTML) but for basic web surfing it's quite effective. The main suites of programs are always going to grow larger, to make up for it on a slow machine, run a small UI with minimalist programs to make up for it.
I'm not sure what you're running but I'm on Linux 2.6 and GNOME 2.6 and with the following apps running with their respective windows on the desktop.
My total memory usage, including all the sub systems like the mail server and web server that I'm always running, comes to a grand total of 240MB.
It's not lightweight. But with default desktop computers shipping with 256MB and "power desktop" configurations shipping with 512MB, it's not that unusual a memory usage.
Sure, performance sucks, but not as bad as OSX.
It's a Unix system so you can do more with it than you could with Windows.
You are obsessed with the GPL...
Am I wrong?
For performance improvements, switch to FreeBSD, and use a different window manager that isn't so horribly bloated, and doesn't have such a terrible interface. I personally recomend Blackbox, but there are tons of others to choose from that do quite a good job as well.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Use the money you saved NOT PAYING FOR LINUX to buy some extra ram and quite whining.
With 2GB RAM on a 533mhz bus, a pair of striped SATA 160gb hard drives, and a 256mb ATI Radeon 9800XT Pro to drive my 1600x1200 ViewSonic 2000 LCD display.
What's so heavy about KDE 3.2? Run's fine for me!!
I may be late jumping into this and it may well be redundant at this point but whatever...
I have an Athlon 2500XP with 512mb's of RAM.
I do not run linux, I run FreeBSD. I use a custom compiled kernel that is about as stripped down as possible.
Gnome 2.6 is just not that fast. Traversing my file system through Nautilus is slow.
Kde 3.2.x is also not that fast. Traversing the file system is pretty quick but the applications themselves are not.
Everyone seems to be talking about progress, but what I want to know is, what progress are we talking about? GASP they have added a side tab! GASP they have added thumbnails! The basic framework for these applications is the same! The file manager's mostly have pretty similar looks. What features could have been added to cause the need for an extra 2ghz of processing power to rival the speed of our old graphical *nix systems?
Oh yeah... that's right, little to nothing!
If you really mess around on a well customised desktop you had on some old hardware (kde 1.x anyone?) and look at the speed, then compaare that to your brand spanking new 2.5ghz system (kde 3.2.x) you should notice that you have just added 2ghz to your system gained a few useless features and have no speed increase.
Also, in the article the comment about Gnome-Terminal is dead on. Can anyone rightfully explain why Gnome-Terminal is as slow as it is?
Must be all the INSANE features it has! Like... oh yeah it doesn't really have any INSANE features, it's just slow as hell on brand new hardware.
./revolution
Are you joking? I dont care how many different computers youve administered in whatever high brow organisations you can't deny the fact that the user interface in linux isnt as responsive as windows..and that applies to ALL of them even the lightweight ones.
Even in fvwm dragging a window is sluggish (and it doesnt even display the contents whilst dragging)
I have discovered a truly remarkable sig which this post is too small to contain.
No mod points right now. Could someone mod this up so we can finally get a fast version of win OOo ?
Bitter and proud of it.
One big advantage is registered applications for file types. You don't have to remember the exact name of the executable for every single type. GUI applications can also leverage the registry to determine how to handle a file.
Another advantage is a usable taskbar. I don't want to have to view every window to pick the one I want to view next.
Someone else on this thread mentioned the advantage of selecting multiple files in a dialog and dragging them to another folder. This operation is faster in my experience than trying to remember the names of a dozen files or copying/pasting from ls.
I also like a variety of launchers for commonly used applications. I use a wide enough variety of apps that I often forget the exact names, so the command line is not always that efficient.
I'm glad some other people out there are concerned about this as well as I am. This is the great thing about Open Source... if there's bloat we can start cutting it down nicely. However, it would be nice if we could get all those modifications into the distrobutions.
I don't have to remind people what the C64 could do with 64K of memory. Sure we need more than 64K of memory, but Linux runs far far far from optimal efficiency.
"he drew his sword Ringil that glittered like ice... and he wounded Morgoth with seven wounds..."
What's going on here? Might my good luck be related to the fact that I always, always, always install a vanilla kernel after installing a distro? I noticed a significant increase in responsiveness when I kicked FC2's default kernel to the curb in favour of a freshly-built one.
Someday, you're going to die. Get over it.
Thats not true. I have used it on a 200mhz computer. It was just as fast as the NT4 that came with it. I would say faster. I am currently using linux on it (with no gui but that is a different story). Turn off the theme manager. It will fly. Now waiting for it to install better have a good book to read...
Ultimately, this is what happens when something as involved as an operating system is written by amateurs and hobbyists, who have no grasp of what the user base REALLY want out of a system, and are only concerned with 'beating the big boys at their own game'
IMHO
I'd also like to add that if you don't believe it is possible to have the supposedly amazing amount of features modern apps do and still be fast with a small footprint. Let me cite Opera (I know, not OSS) as a good example.
./revolution
300MHz K6-2 with 192MB RAM
why are you running KDE on a K6? XP would bring that box to its knees too.
This is basically my sister's computer. She uses it for email, internet, and word processing. Windows XP (with the services/theming turned off she doesn't need) is plenty quick enough. It does get slow during disk-intensive activities, but that's the fault of the slow harddisk inside, not XP.
On a dual-boot Fedora/XP 2600 Athlon I administer the difference is staggering.
Boot time (from GRUB menu to login screen):
Windows XP/Lunar: ~20 seconds
Fedora/XFree86/gdm: ~1.5 minutes
I don't know what Microsoft do, but they've tuned their boot process something wicked.
Granted, a stock Fedora install runs a whole lot more services (apache, sendmail), but I'm sure it can be much faster.
Many services don't need to run in series. For example, the random number generator can be started while ethernet discovery is taking place, or sendmail can start up while X is probing the monitor. Similar reasons why a 'make -j4' runs so much faster than 'make'; the two bottlenecks when compiling (or loading an OS), cpu and disk, just aren't being used the whole time, one is usually waiting on the other at any given time.
Time to experiment with the & parameter...
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
As a senior computer science major, I've seen a lot of freshmen at my school come in as Computer Science majors and change to Information Systems Management (which teaches programming without as much math, software engineering, etc.) because they couldn't handle the math. Although you don't have to be great at math to be a good programmer, thinking like a mathematician helps prepare one for writing efficient data structures and algorithms. I took a programming contest class as one of my electives. Writing a program to solve a particular problem is usually pretty easy. Making that solution run in the time allotted was incredibly difficult. Writing efficient code takes time. But it's time well spent.
Yadda yadda yadda, you like Linux, lotsa folks do, it's fast, stable, etc. Linux is the kernel--the subject is the desktop. So the real question is, what WM are you using?
That's true. I am using a good old 1.2.5 right now.
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 Galeon/1.2.5 (X11; Linux i586; U;) Gecko/20020623 Debian/1.2.5-0.woody.1
It's old. It's small. It's ugly. It's responsive. It's fast.
Sincerely,
Pan Tarhei Hosé, PhD.
"Homo sum et cogito ergo odi profanum vulgus et libido."
You've hit the ol' nail on the head there, Slashdot will always have people who bitch and moan about something.
However: The thing is that a large chunk of comments and articles these days on Slashdot are about 'Linux becoming mainstream', 'This year is Linux's year', 'Why the f*ck isn't the entire world using Linux dammit?', 'Windows suxxors'
So, the retort to the increasing realisation that each year that Linux is supposed to be 'the' desktop environment that slips by with it still floundering is: 'Make Linux usable for the average desktop user'.
How do you do that?
Make it have an easy to use interface that is attractive and does everything the 'average' user wants...
No, Windows has this... bitch and moan as much as you like about MS, but their interface works pretty darn well... people seem to be able to pick it up pretty well.
"But, but look at those system specs you need"
OK, so do better.
Guess what?! Linux is finally getting desktops that work in a similar fashion, and they TAKE UP RESOURCES!
You don't get things for nothing people... you're starting to see that maybe MS isn't quite as stupid and incompetant as you've always believed... that maybe it's not quite as bloated as you first believed... Hell, you've had the open source community slugging away at this for... how many years now? and they haven't really done any better... so give them a break and rather than trying to convince everyone that Windows really is shit, create something that comparable.
OK I have run redhat-based distro's with less than ...
.xinitrc that runs startkde or one of the light windowmanagers -- but does not run the normal gnome-session or xsession that redhat uses as a default because they will still try to load some gnome tools even though gnome is not used and should not be present...
256mb of ram and it doable --even running kde
I never could get GNOME working at acceptable speeds on any pc with any ram config...but then I hate GNOME...
Here are some clues for running kde on FC2 without
pain...
1. When you do the install -- do not use the
graphical installer -- load the installer with the
linux-text or the --text-only switch...the older
ncurses-based installer still works and does not
impose the heavy-ram burden...
2. Never do a normal "desktop" install
when asked always choose either "server" or "custom" -- this can help eliminate unnecessary cruft in the install...
3. For some reason a large swap partition always
slows down a system -- but I would not run any linux swapless -- for most of my systems regardless of physical ram -- set swap partition size between 80 and 150mb -- everything will still
work fine...
4. Near the end of the install when prompted boot
to text mode -- not the automatic graphical bootup
procedure...
5. Always install at least 1 light windowmanager
other than kde -- like icewm or windowmaker or fluxbox -- this is useful for testing later on...
6. After install is finished -- leave GTK packages
installed but ruthlessly rip out any and all GNOME
packages-- rpm -qa | grep gnome -- then rpm -e --nodeps gnome*
7. After install make a
I've been booting with PLD on a 533 MHz Alpha, and it goes from boot hdd1 to login in less than a minute. I suspect that it has more to do with my kernel--2.6.3, but even then, I compiled most everything right into the kernel, so it should take tons of RAM, but it doesn't. It takes a little longer to get X up (but XFce is really quite fast and good), and I'm using the Rox-Filer for my file manager, because of Nautilus's bloat. I don't have any ugly twm crap, or crippled interfaces, and it seems plenty fast to me.
I would love to see some investigation into app loading times and the overhead given by glibc. We've now got prelinking which makes a tremendous difference in app loading speed. Is that the end of it or is there more that can be done?
I find it a bit sad that MS Word running in wine loads up almost as fast as Abiword and truly puts the load time of OOo to shame.
Why hasn't anybody addressed the trend towards rendering 2-D windows as textures in a full-time 3-D environment? You honestly think that this will be polite to resource usage? It's coming around the corner with Longhorn; will X fight to keep up?
Oh come on...this is really clutching at straws. A Win install takes up a lot of room and runs slowly = bad because it is bloated. A Linux desktop install takes up a lot of room and runs slowly = good because of the choice it gives you, even though the Win install is actually faster.
Lets look at MS Office v OpenOffice. By your definition you cannot consider MS Office bloat as you have the choice not to use it. But it loads and runs considerably faster than OpenOffice, even though it offers more. So from a technical perspective, which is the better product?
I've looked at several of the smaller window managers, and they seem way too spartan. They're barely better than a straight Xserver. Can't you get wallpaper, desktop icons, a Start menu, and taskbar without the thing sucking resources like a sponge? That right click program menu is a waste of time because you have to minimize the apps you're running to right click for that menu.
I have been using fluxbox/blackbox for years on slackware. I am not a hardware geek by any means of the word and hence forth am usually about 4 years behind the "standard" cpu speed. I have never had any issues with either of these desktops. If you have a scroll mouse you can scroll between desktops, hence the minimizing issue is irrelevant. There is a task bar, not a start bar per say. The right click menu and the middle click menu are wonderful.
Desktop images are no issue, the menu is fully customizable by text. Perhaps I would fall into the category of a CLI snob, but really, I think that you perhaps did not give the variety of desktops at hand a fair shake.
Yes there is a slight learning curve, as with any new piece of software, espicially one as emcompassing as a desktop GUI. However, I load my my xwindows session, I have aterm, xmms and whatever else I want, already loaded, right there in no time flat.
If we don't make light of everything, we are just stumbling in the dark - Blank
With more and more distros installing GNOME and KDE by default whether the (l)user likes it or not, and making most of the GUI system admin / config tools available from the GNOME/KDE menus, it is no surprise that the Mandrake 9.1 I installed last year ran slower than Windoze XP on the same machine WRT user interface and response time.
Also with distros like rathead / fedora, there is no way to get a very light system installed, since you have to install a huge number of packages to satisfy the dependencies of other packages which depend on other packages etc.
This has gotten to the point where it's become sickening over the past few years, and I finally dumped rathead / fedora / mandrake and moved back to good old Debian with icewm, nothing else. Complete install less than 400MB including X, compilers, browser, java SDK and everything else you need.
i like debian cuz i get to choose. and the the more i learn about it, the more choices i seem to have. ok, the free speech part is cool, the free beer part is what got me hooked. i'm not religious about the debian systems i have installed, but jeeze they just work like their spose too. i can dual boot my desktop between debian/sid and winme. i boot into winme to use my scanner or to align my print heads after a cartridge change. guess where i figure the bloat is?
Serenity now, insanity later.
I think a lot of th 'weight' in these distro today is their attempt to offer options to the less technical user-base. So, I think that we are seeing that it takes a lot of code and a lot of horsepower to create operating systems for the lowest common denominator.
The1Genius - Littera Scripta Manet
now that anything useful in linux is becoming BLOATWARE, what tools and applications can we see that can be used by the MAJORITY of the companies in the world. I refer to packages with file formats that others will also be able to use, read, view...
one linux 'guru' suggested that anything that is windows based can be ran with WINE, but the resources for acceptible performance would exceed that of an XP box running OfficeXP...(we won't even mention the list of hardware limitations...)
lets see
-no support without the same total cost of the MS solution
-bloatware needing more hardware to run
-not compatible with the MS suites formats, so customers and contacts are not able to communicate with you
-extreme training needed for users
-increased cost for support staff
-no consistancy for the interfaces
-no industry specific solutions, this would mean custom software, meaning huge freaking cost to keep the company productive...
Linux has a nice place as a low cost server, but it is years away from being a product that the majority of industries can use as a desktop solution. So jump off the ignorance bandwagon, wake up from the FUD induced trance, stop listening/reading FUD, and learn a few things about the whole IT world and how companies PLAN for productivity increases without wasted time, increased cost, and the mandated supplier SUPPORT!
karma, hah...
You're doing something _very_ fundamentally flawed here. Unless you got a very reduced RAM, there's no way *anything* could run slowly on a 2.8GHz Xeon, even moreso KDE, which is not CPU-intensive.
I'm typing this on a 128MB RAM 1.7GHz Celeron and it simply is overkill.
Try another distro, as the one you're using is barfing on you.
They run pretty well, at least better than NT, when all you have to do is surf the web with IE. But as soon as more than one application opens, everything sloooows down pretty quickly, presumably as a function of the small physical memory.
So I guess that, even with the explorer shell, Windows can make due with the minimun.
My last laptop was a 486sx/25. I got it with 4 MB RAM, 170 MB disk. I loaded Slackware on it, via floppy - the minium set. Then, I'd load a package, for example GNU Emacs, and I'd strip it down to what I actually use. Of the 20 MB of electric language modes, I only used C and perl, so everything else went. That was 19 MB of it, and I never missed it. When all was said and done, I had all the tools I wanted, and 70 MB free for my stuff. C compiler, perl, editors, web server, SQL database. It could compile its own kernels.
Yes, I ran X windows in 4 MB RAM. It was a bit sluggish, but was usable. I believe I used FVWM or some derivitive. 640x480 with 16 greys.
I used PLIP to connect to a desktop - and got a little over 22 KB/sec. I did backups with tar and gzip to a file on the desktop.
Some time later, I added RAM to it, bringing it to 16 MB. I ran X all the time.
The hard disk died, and I stopped using it.
In the early 80's, we'd run 35 users on a VAX with 4 MB RAM. These systems typically had 600 MB disk, total. They were sluggish, but held up. 4.2 BSD introduced the faster file system, which seemed to mostly make up for the additional overhead - which might have been sendmail.
What I want now, however, is a distribution without shared libraries. More to the point, I want packages like FireFox to come compiled statically. Why did Linux follow Windows into DLL hell? Who made that decision? I have a 160 GB disk drive. I don't care if shared libraries save me a few MB disk. Shared libraries aren't saving me RAM.
-- Stephen.
This can be quite misleading. If some other process is already using GTK on your system--like, say, the Gimp--then running your program does not really uses much more memory, because most of that memory "used" by your program (mapped to its process) is in the shared object which is already loaded anyway. (Provided your program is dynamically linked with GTK.) This is why adding memory used by processes can (and usually does) give more than there really is memory on the system, including swap. For example, run this from the shell:
It was supposed to be all in one big line, but it's ugly, so let's turn it into a script:
On my system, a Debian desktop with two weeks of uptime, it prints:
This machine has only 256MB of RAM and is using only 67MB of swap--this is hardly 1.5GB which is supposedly "used" by all of those processes.
Sincerely,
Pan Tarhei Hosé, PhD.
"Homo sum et cogito ergo odi profanum vulgus et libido."
On Fedora Core 2 I use XFce 4. After logging in and opening gnome-system-monitor, only 35.0 MB RAM is used. This is with the samba and xfs services running.
Gnome is installed purely for the apps and in case I do something to stop XFce 4 from working (and I want a GUI to fix it). The GNOME desktop & nautilus are just too slow & memory hungry for my liking (on a P3 450 MHz with 576 MB RAM). I haven't really tried KDE to see if it is better or worse.
Linux users should check to see if there are any unused services running on their boxes - Fedora comes with heaps turned on and I never need most of them. After an install this is one of the first things I do.
I never said it wouldn't run, I said it would take up a lot of the CPU cycles. So yeah, if you let it sit there and do nothing, it's not a problem. I had W2K on that AMD box several years ago and it was not what anybody would call "responsive". In fact after I had used it with Linux as a file server for a while, I put Win98, not W2K, on it to make it usable for the person I gave it to.
Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws-Plato
As a software developer I've noticed a few things about common linux DEs. Many applications are written in languages which tend to be easier to program with but are slower and require more memory at execution. There are other obvious advantages to using some of these tools including platform independance, improved security and relibility (less opertunities to over run buffers etc.) If people want to continue to use these languages, they are going to have to push to make them as efficient (CPU AND RAM) as possible so they can compete with Windows (in which almost all apps are written in C/C++).
It's great that Linux isn't tied to X86 Like Windows, but if we want to complete seriously for the mainstream desktop we are going to have to do somethings.....
Spend more improving compilers for x86.
Hack in optimizations to key areas (Its okay to rewrite stuff in assembly! Just don't be careless, but not very many things need that level of optimization anyway).
When creating a DE try to make an entire suite of applications which share dynamic libraries (no unneed overlapping).
If an application is loaded from another DE make sure only the libraries that are absolutely required are loaded into memory (for bad example see KDE).
IF YOU NEED ONE SMALL PIECE OF FUNCTIONALITY DON'T USE SOME GIGANTIC LIBRARY JUST TO FULLFIL THIS ONE SMALL NEED.
Grrrrr... don't bother me, I'm thinking.
They will both use the same kernel, but will have different default install settings and one will have more focus on supporting the desktop.
This clear split will aid in the developement and adoption of Linux by focusing Linux developement on two clearly defined audiences.
- Desktop users don't need all of the server features. In theory you could say that software such as MySQL, Apache, sendmail, and so forth don't even need to be included in the desktop version.
- Server users aren't using a distro that is bogged down by the desktop gui and apps.
Desktop developers should be working on making it perform as fast as possible. I know that I am pretty frustrated with my Linux desktop experiences due to the speed issue.Lastly, the desktop user version needs to be very easy to install. This is an area that Linux developers need to take seriously (such as skipping the disk partioning step by having completed by the installer invisiably to the user, unless they select to do it otherwise).
Show me one good system written in C++. The guy who wrote that language is such an asshole. I can show you one good program written in C. It's called Unix. I can show you another: it's called Berkeley Sockets. I can go on, and so can you. Now show me one program the creator of C++ wrote and for which he is famous. Get the picture?
So if these desktops are getting bulky - who actually is surprised?
My professor explained it thus (parapharsed of course), "Think of the desktop as the top of your office desk. A desktop if a place you work. You sometimes have pictures of families there, files you can grab, pencils etc. What you don't need right away... you hide away in drawers. Put files in folders. Now you can go in everyones office in the world, and almost every desktop will be different. People use their desktops how they wish... putting what they want on it, normally not caring what others think.
All a computer desktop allows you to do is store and access things the way you wish."
I use Gnome/KDE with FC2... upgraded from FC1 and despite what the article says... my system now runs faster. Would I use one of those... I need to be a geek desktops to figure out... NOPE! Can I compile a kernel edit config files by hand, and administer all system functions. Yes it's what I do. But my desktop... since it's not strictly for work and definitely not for all play... must be pleasing yet functional since I have to look at it the majority of the day. Complete efficiency is boring and undesireable... pretty without functionality is useless... but Gnome and KDE strike a happy balance.
At long last we ALL can actually setup our desktops the way we want.
Yeah, that *really* tells you what DLLs and whatnot it's using.
Frickin' idiot.
Hmm
I wonder if its Xinet vs BSD posix Inet?
I can see with my own eyes the speed of FreeBSD running the same apps over SuSE and RH9.
Why is Linux slowing down? Not to sound trollish but I dont know.
Gentoo is fast from what I have seen with gnu Inet so perhaps Xinet is the culprit?
http://saveie6.com/
... is why it's slower. What does Windows do faster? Is the problem in X, GNOME/KDE, or the Linux kernel itself? If we can find it, the hackers can fix it.
At the moment, I'm guessing that what we need is a more efficient X (moving up to OpenGL-based, a la Mac OS X, or just an improved API?), and a more efficient Gtk+/Qt. We have the RAM, let's cache stuff.
I dunno, I actually find Gnome 2.6 more responsive than Windows XP. I have a reasonably beefy computer, so maybe it's just the fact that Gnome is more consistent than Windows rather than purely faster.
Window dragging in Gnome is a pleasure, and that's without the help of nVidia drivers and their 2D acceleration in XP.
I'd believe the original poster's performace claims. Don't write someone off just because they seem to have an obsession with something.
So, because Whistler ran fine on 400Mhz P2 with 256MB of RAM, it means that it would run well on 300MHz K6-2 (a slower CPU) and 192MB of RAM? The system you tested it on was considerably faster and it had more RAM than the other machine had!
FWIW I run KDE3.2.2 on an ancient laptop which has 300Mhz P2, 320MB of RAM, dog-slow vid-card and slow as hell HD, and I can use it just fine. Sure, it's not a speed-demon, but it's usable.
Lesbian Nazi Hookers Abducted by UFOs and Forced Into Weight Loss Programs - -all next week on Town Talk.
Windows (as in Microsoft) is generally faster with regards to desktop operations.
Not when it only has a 2.6 GHz processor, and the Linux box has a 600 MHz. The slowness of Windows XP make me want to go hime to my fast Linux box all the time.
Heavier? What are you talking about? FVWM hasn't gotten any heavier in a long time now... Oh... You're talking about that Gnome/KDE shit? Never mind, then.
No it wouldn't. My father ran a test XP system back out when it was still Whistler on a 400MHz or so Pentium II system with 256MB of RAM. It ran absolutely fine.
Oh, so I need a slower machine. Because XP definitely doesn't run "absolutely fine" on a 2600 MHz machine with 768 MB RAM, in fact it is slower than Linux + fvwm is on a 600 MHz machine, recently (three weeks ago) upgraded from 128 to 256 MB RAM, to be able to have more than 15 tabs open in Mozilla.
This article is horribly (mis)named. People can't keep the parts of a system straight; "Linux" gets blamed for everything.
In fact, the article doesn't say a word about the kernel, the GNU tools, or any such thing. It doesn't even talk about X Windows!
The only things it does mention are separate from the core system entirely. Gnome and KDE are becoming bloated, but this does not reflect on the other projects that go into a system.
All of which leaves me wondering why Linux as a whole is blamed for the Gnome and KDE developers' laziness with memory.
PS:
Yes, fine: The article is about Linux distros and their usability, but still, a distinction must be drawn between the desktop and the other components. Direct your complaints at those responsible, not innocent bystanders!
I know that as a poster over 1000 very few will read this, but I have to strongly say that this guy is FUD'ing things up here.
I am running SuSE 9.1 Pro on a 700Mhz laptop with 384 MB RAM. Granted that is a decent amount of RAM, but not extreme, but when it comes to loading programs to memory from a HD, it simply doesn't matter, and GUI apps are larger, so they take longer, blaming linux for this is stupid.
Once open, spawing new windows for mozilla is painless, even Open Office is fast once loaded, even under heavy load. Under heavy load I cannot notice a difference on a 700 MHz processor.
The big difference with Linux is if I open up everything until it does slow down, then close them, the system will speed up again. Try that on a windows box. The only solution is a reboot. Any system can use up its resources, it is what happens when the apps are closed that make a difference and lets face it, there is no comparison when it comes to memory management.
I also RUN SuSE 9.1 on my server, and it uses 128 MB of RAM. When installing and during the intial config I used graphical with no problem. Now that it is set up I run it level 3, and of course there is no problem there. The key is the flexibility of a "bloated" distro. Currently my server is using 30 MB of RAM and has been running a week ( I know only a week, but that is when I finally installed SuSE after switching from FC), and it is happily taking care of my home network.
In summary, I am running 3 systems on SuSE 9.1, none of them is newer than 3 years old, and all of them run as fast as new XP on new systems I use at work, and with less problems by 3 orders of magnitude. I loathe XP based on my experience with it at work. The only good thing is that SSH doesn't seem to crash XP.
My laptop is a P2-300 with 288MB of RAM, and XP is perfectly usable. The commit charge hardly ever goes over 200MB. Of course I'm not doing any major crunching: my major apps are Firefox and XEmacs.
Are you adequate?
I took a look at the screenshots. It would almost be enough for me, but I absolutely need a taskbar to use a desktop environment. I didn't see any taskbar for rox there, or mentioned in FAQ. Is any taskbar available for rox?
--Coder
Maybe it's too obvious, but what's wrong with giving the man an older distro? I'm not too familiar with the evolution of Mandrake, but I can assume that Mandrake 8, or even 9, would already run a little smoother. Go back to the KDE 3.0 or even 2.x / GNOME 2.0 time and the 'performance' would be even better.
Sure, you'd miss out on numerous fixes and improvements, and maybe the interface will be less fluid for newcomers. But as a parallel: I know Windows-users who keep re-installing their Pentium -II 350 MHz with Windows 98 in stead of WinXP, just because it performs better.
Why could one not adopt this strategy with Linux? Most newcomers as described in the article don't need bleeding-edge 2.6 kernels or flashy KDE 3.2 high-color icons.
No electrons were harmed sending this message. Wait,
Replying to my own post. I didn't look closely enough. There is a 'tasklist' applet.
Now to find debian packages...
--Coder
glibc also does a lot more than the BSDs libcs, which are generally rather poor in terms of features, portability and so on.
Could you point me in the direction of the "lot more" that glibc does over NetBSD's libc? The only things I can find are a couple of esoteric functions that aren't part of the ANSI C library or POSIX standards. Given that most open source software is written for Linux, then I would expect considerable portability problems when attempting to compile that code on NetBSD if, as you claim, glibc offered so many more features. The fact is that complex applications like OpenOffice and Mozilla compile with few changes, motsly related to grey areas in POSIX threads implementations.
As for glibc being more portable than NetBSD's libc, that's completely untrue. Glibc is used by Linux and the imcomplete GNU Hurd. The libc in use on the BSD's has been ported to more platforms than Linux, and is widely used in academia because of its legibility and emphasis on correctness over over engineered, buggy optimisations.
Chris
If I'm turning on my computer at an airport or a bus, there's no way I'm going to go get coffee.
I don't know the technical details of how windows does it, so it might already work like this, but: "correctly" implemented, it would show the login screen and then continue working while I'm typing my name and password. Multitasking, don'tcha know?
whoa man, this mean we are going to get e17 nearly this year? :)
I was expecting Redhat 8.0 to be more snappy with this hardware. Perhaps if I was to swich to fvwm or something with less overhead it would help. Coming from a Windows 2000 (now XP) and OSX side which we use plenty of in our department, I was expecting a BeOS like responsiveness to the OS. Seems to me by using Bluecurve, Red Hat has bogged itself down with trying to look more pretty, which helps sell more Linux for the desktops in the long run. Any recommendations aside from slapping on more RAM to speed things up? Are there an optimizations I can make on the software side to make Red Hat 8.0 more responsive?
In my experience memory usage of Linux running a desktop is now greater than Windows. Gone are the days when it was as much as 10 times smaller (remember runing FVWM?).
What's this "remember"? I'm running fvwm now, and quite happy with it. I honestly don't see the appeal of big bulky desktop systems like GNOME or KDE--a 1600x1200 screen, four terminals, and a root window menu are plenty sufficient. Out of honest curiosity, what do people find useful about GNOME/KDE, or is it just a "the-default-is-good-enough" thing?
Add one more "Running Mac OS on Intel/AMD, basically PC architecture" :)
It really makes a huge difference if you can fit more RAM into your machine. KDE and friends occupy a lot of it, and when you're running a few apps, then your CPU cycles are consumed paging memory to/from swap
If you can't get more memory, try using Firefox on IceWM, or Xfce (xfce.org). Both these window managers have a smaller footprint, which translates into _really_ noticable performance improvements.
Are you new to Mandrake? Have you found the PLF? If not, trot on over to Easy Urpmi, and update your urpmi sources to include the PLF. You'll find lots of useful things that Mandrake can't include in their official distribution. I use Mandrake 9.2, which doesn't even include mplayer! After updating your sources, you can type:
urpmi mplayer
and it'll be installed (or use the mandrake control centre bizzo).
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
Tell you what, let's have a contest then we'll see who's right, OK?
It doesn't cost very much to have a decent machine. I see my local supermarket advertising 2.5GHz *laptops* for around 1000 euros.
A modern window manager just aint gonna work on a 500MHz machine with 64MB RAM, whether its Linux or Windows based.
That's all it does. An X client (like, say, rxvt) says to the X server, "I need to open a new window, put it over here someplace" and the X server says "Great!" and draws a square, blank area, and then lets the window manager know about the new window, and the window manager draws the widgets like the close button and stuff (well, whatever the window manager supports).
A desktop package like GNOME does not contain a window manager. It has a session manager, plus some dedicated X clients that draw things like the GNOME panel. You may have noticed some talk about GNOME-compliant window managers when you were installing X, or well, maybe not, I've never done a Red Hat install. GNOME-compliant window managers, like Enlightenment, Oroborus, sawfish, and a bunch of others, are aware that they're running under GNOME, and talk to the GNOME core libraries to allow you to control them in certain ways from the central GNOME configuration screens.
However, you should NEVER, NEVER, NEVER be running GNOME on a server system. You should probably not be running X even. (Although my squid server does have X, but that's because I originally planned another use for it; sometime soon, I'm going to pull that graphics card out, stick it in another machine, and remove the X server.)
Anyway - To get back to my original point. You don't need to run GNOME to run a window manager. In fact, running GNOME effectively limits your choice of window managers to ones that support GNOME (GNOME will run with non-compliant window managers in place, but it will moan and whine endlessly). All you really need is to boot to xdm or wdm (my favourite display manager) at startup, instead of gdm, and then put the following line at the end of a file called .xsession in your home directory:
exec <executable-name-of-window-manager>
So, for example, my .xsession ends with exec wmaker to start Window Maker. You can in fact exec any program at the end of this file; that program should have an easy way to exit. My root .xsession ends with exec rxvt. That's because root only uses X normally in single-user mode, when I'm trying to debug something that's gone badly wrong with my setup, and I want to make sure that even if Window Maker dies, I can get root a window.
However, note this - running GNOME or KDE gives you an easy GUI to select your window manager. wdm does give you the ability to select as well, kind-of, but not as precisely as the desktop systems do. xdm gives you no pretty GUI at all, you've got to do it all yourself in your .xsession file.
my old sig used to be funny, but then slashcode ate it and now it's not funny anymore
But on my old Amiga, one of the main uses of the blitter chip was transparency. You could paste in images on top, and the blitter would handle the bitplane issues.
Of course, it didn't work with anything that used more than 8-bit colour, but surely a modern (i.e. 1998 :) VGA card could handle 24-bit colour blittering?
my old sig used to be funny, but then slashcode ate it and now it's not funny anymore
Right now, I'm typing this message on a Toshiba T2150CDT with 24MB of RAM and a 500MB HD, running debian unstable, i.e. the latest and greatest thing. :)
This is a laptop from 1995, and it works fine. Okay, no GNOME/KDE, I don't even run xfce. Just wdm and wmaker. And ELinks for the web, no mozilla.
But what's the specs on your Thinkpad? It's probably not as ancient as my laptop.
my old sig used to be funny, but then slashcode ate it and now it's not funny anymore
symbol versioning, TLS, non-sucky threading support, RTLD_NEXT, dlinfo() etc etc
The KDE and Gnome desktops have gotten heftier but criticisms seem misdirected at Linux. It seems to me that the blame should fall on the developers of the unweildy desktops and applications. The are other lightweight GUI's that will do only what many users need without all the bloat. Current distros still run quite well on older hardware if the user eschews the KDE, Gnome and unneed services.
What makes you think the Task Manager is going to tell you the whole story?
symbol versioning, TLS, non-sucky threading support, RTLD_NEXT, dlinfo() etc etc
NetBSD supports symbol versioning, which is a feature of the linker rather than the C library. If by TLS, you mean Transport Layer Security, then that's also supported by NetBSD and is again not a feature of the C library. Non sucky threading support? How about POSIX threads based on NetBSD's highly efficient scheduler activations implementation? Support for RTLD_NEXT and friends was added almost a year ago, which leaves dlinfo.
Chris
Furthermore, you have not answered the fact that trail logs have check-ins where people put their names. Many people sign these - in fact, most. If you claim to be speaking for the majority who do not want to be tracked on the trail, wouldn't most people ignore trail logs?
Yup, you're not smart and you're not a hiker.
In Windows world, all applications use Win32, and most of them MFC, COM, OLE and the rest of the kit, and now maybe .NET. Of course, we can say otherwise for new applications from Macromedia and Adobe, but... that's not the point. When the user clicks the "Microsoft Word" icon, all the framework (Win32, OLE, COM, yes) is already loaded by Explorer at boot time, and that's why it's so fast to load. Other application that use their own frameworks like OpenOffice, Mozilla, Photoshop, Java and Flash, well, take a few seconds to load.
Now, on to Linux... ok, let's examine a typical session. The desktop loads, say KDE. All the Qt and KDE libs load. A few seconds and ~30 megs later, we have the framework loaded. Now the user loads Gimp or Evolution, so GTK and some parts of Gnome have to load. A few seconds and ~30 megs later, we have that framework loaded, again. Mozilla and XPCOM, bang, another ~30 megs, OpenOffice, bang, Java, bang, Mono, bang, Wine, bang. We're fast approaching the 200 megs barrier and all we have done is spent time loading frameworks.
It's good to have choices, but sometimes, too much choice is not a good idea anymore. Especially when one has to load up everything in one session...
No, TLS is short for Thread Local Storage, and in most UNIX-like operating systems the dynamic linker *is* a feature of the linker. The glibc symvers implementation is more advanced than any of the BSDs/Solaris last time I checked. Anyway, those were only some examples, I suggest you go read the glibc sources if you would like to find some more.
er, that should have read "is a feature of the C library" of course :) egg -> face