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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."
Everything will get much, much faster when Sun moves all Linux desktop applications to Java.
dinner: it's what's for beer
"What would you do with a million dollars?"
"Four terminal windows at the same time."
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.