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."

Comments

Slackware

[ArmageddonLord]

This is why I stick with slackware linux. It's still the cleanest smoothest runing linux distro I've ever used.

Re:Slackware

[Sfing_ter]

I gotta say, he's correct on this. I have an old k6-2 350mhz laptop maxed out with a wopping 192mb of ram, and I'm running slack 9.1 with kde and it works fine. No lag in apps.

If I need to install on anything smaller I use BeOS, got it and the office suite for $10 at fryes, and firefox runs on BE :) Everything works fast on BE, right AJ?

It's up to you how fast you want your desktop

[xiando]

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...)

Performance Work

[DreadSpoon]

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.

Re:Linux on Older PC's

[dweezil-n0xad]

try vectorlinux

Re:Linux on Older PC's

[Zapman]

First question: What do you want to do with it?

Personally, if I needed to do such a thing, I'd run with either Gentoo or Debian (depending on how much memory you could get for it).

With Debian, you should go for the base install, then use apt-get to retrieve what you want. Keep it minimal: play with X and blackbox, fluxbox, XFCE, etc. You probably won't be able to get away with gnome/kde.

With gentoo, first set up a large swapfile, second do the install, third 'emerge ccache', fourth emerge x, and leave for a bit. I was able to get gentoo on a very similar laptop a year ago or so. Ran pretty well.

But the best suggestion I have is to google for some memory. I found 128 meg sodimms for $40... That would get you up to 192mb, which will help you a lot. The box tops out at 288mb (2x128mb, and onboard 32mb).

Re:It's the infernal "Desktop Enviornments"

[tjansen]

what is kdeinit for?

kdeinit starts KDE applications by forking and then loading them as shared libraries. Because kdeinit itself links to the kdelibs, it allows a much more effective sharing of kdelibs (and its dependencies) between the applications and avoids unneccessary initialization.

In other words, it reduces startup time and memory usage.

Re:Those are minimum reqs

[xiando]

I wrote a short thing called Desktops: KDE vs Gnome a year ago and I still belive this is true:

Hardware requirements

Desktop Required RAM Required CPU
fluxbox/idesk 32 100 MHz
XFCE4 64 200 MHz
Gnome 1.x 64 400 MHz
Gnome 2.x 256 600 MHz
KDE 3.x 384 1 GHz

These are general rules of thumb. KDE will start on a Pentium 100 with 64 MB RAM, but it will run horribly slow.

For a hot new box with lots of RAM and a fast CPU I recommend KDE 3.x or Gnome 2.x. Gnome is bloated and KDE is even more bloated. This is great, but all those fancy features demand more cpu and ram.

XFCE4 is a very nice complete fast and lightweight Desktop Environment and is probably the best choice for old, but not anicent hardware. The ROX desktop is another good light choice.

For really old hardware you should use something simple to draw icons on your desktop (like idesk) and a fast window manger like fluxbox (based on blackbox), waimea or icewm

..... enough pasted. If you for some bizarre unimaginable reason want to read more of my bullprop you can always click click click etc.

Re:Compared to Windows

[It'sYerMam]

"XFCE is great if you want the look and features of a 20-year old UNIX interface"

I beg to differ.
It doesn't have as good window manager themes as GNOME, perhaps, but it has Keramik, which is widely advocated as "The best" KDE theme. It uses GTK, so all of the GTK themes for GNOME are availabe to XFCE.
The idea of XFCE is that it is relatively lightweight yet still fast - and I believe they have realised this goal. It is not as lightweight as, perhaps WindowMaker or BlackBox, but after trying those I thought "UGLY!" and left.

It's true - I like my computer to look good, although this doesn't serve much of a purpose, it's nice to see smooth curves and gentle highlights.

why windows NT4+ feels faster

[jean-guy69]

NT3.51 GUI was crawling. in order to enhance GUI responsiveness microsoft made a major change between NT 3.51 and NT 4, they moved lot of stuff to kernel space: GDI, USER, entire Win32 subsystem..

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:
http://www.windowsitlibrary.com/Content/356/01/2.h tml
http://www.windowsitlibrary.com/Content/356/01/3.h tml

Re:Mainly the startup times...

[spectecjr]

At this point, you are hopefully at the right conclusion - MS Word is already mostly loaded when you clicked on it to run. Almost all MS apps preload large sections of the core functionality in a standard install to improve responsiveness once the system is up and running. Alas this approach is also taken by a load of other apps on Windows with the net result that even though the desktop in Windows XP pops up faster on boot than previous iterations of the Windows OS, it can often be a couple of minutes before the hard drive stops popping and thrashing and the system becomes quiescent (and usable).

Oh really?

Here's an experiment for you.

Download Process Explorer from www.sysinternals.com.

Load Open Office.

See all of those highlighted DLLs in the process tree? They're DLLs that the Windows application loader had to relocate because some idiot who doesn't know how to develop software for Windows decided that "hey, it can't be that hard", and didn't bother to learn how the operating system works.

This can increase your load time by a factor of 20. (Not to mention that they have many more DLLs than they should conceivably need - they went overboard on refactoring everything).

Now, the rest of the experiment. Do the same thing with MS Word.

Oh look! NONE of the DLLs are highlighted at all. NONE of them required relocation. NONE of them required the application loader to spend a lot of time repatching the image to a new address in memory. What's more is that you can now use BIND to improve load speeds even more - by a factor of 5 for each DLL.

Mozilla recently started making changes to do the same things in their builds. Guess what? Now, with Mozilla, you don't need to use QuickLaunch any more. And it's not because Mozilla is "pre-loaded" - it's because they finally woke up and decided that hey, Windows might just not work like Linux, and they should perhaps fix their app to work well on the platform they're targetting.

Conclusion:
Those who don't grok Windows are doomed to poor performance.
Those who are arrogant enough to believe that most Windows developers are jumped up VB programmers will write code that runs like shit on the Windows platform.

Re:That's why

[some_other_nerd]

Back when I was stuck with WINdoze, I almost never used explorer.exe, I used iShell and 2xExplorer. It took a ton of registry hacking, but it is possible to change the desktop environment with windows.

Re:Library bloat

[Moderation abuser]

"I realize that some of the memory in use is shared with other applications"

I ran a test on our systems here, the average for a Gnome application is around 85% shared, so only about 15% of the RAM is actually new memory, that doesn't stop Gnome having a large memory footprint overall though. I imagine it would be similar for KDE.

Re:Actually, it's obvious why they're getting bigg

[misleb]

Try XFCE4... http://www.xfce.org/

Re:Actually, it's obvious why they're getting bigg

[molarmass192]

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.

Re:Actually, it's obvious why they're getting bigg

[molarmass192]

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!

Re:That's why

[LarsWestergren]

I've never understood what Linux people are talking about when they say that Linux 'runs faster' than Windows. I've never experienced that in my life, and i consider myself to be pretty computer literate (enough to know if i've got some crazy circumstance going on that makes that the case, anyway).

For most of its existance, the people working on the Linux kernel has focused on making it a reliable server OS. An old computer running Apache or some other webserver (for instance) under Linux could serve a lot more visitors faster and with less stress than a beefier Windows machine, which is why sysadmins and others who are more used to the server side of computing thought that Linux was faster. However, the kernel was not as well suited for multimedia or interactive programs. Some audio players for instance had a "stuttering" problem on some machines - they were not given enough CPU time to play the sound smoothly. The only way to get around it was to start it the multimedia program as root and set the program to a higher priority, but that was not very good from a security perspective.

With the 2.6 kernel we finally got kernel preemption, I believe this should make interactive programs feel more responsive (incidentally, Windows have gotten much better as a server OS as well in the meantime). Instead of waiting nicely for the kernel to give the program its next slice of processing time so it can serve the user request, the process can preemt other tasks to instantly get its turn when the user clicks a button. (I'm sure there are thousands of Slashdotters who have studied Operating System Concepts who can explain it better than I.)

The kernel preemption not perfect yet, I think I have read on some mailing lists that some people are experiencing a degradation of performance, especially on older hardware, but this should probably be ironed out soon.

Note also that Windows uses a lot of "cheats" (or clever programming, depending on who you ask) to make the system appear fast, for instance showing the login screen for Windows 2000 and its successors BEFORE the system has finished loading and all daemons have started running. If you are fast you can log in, but you can't really start any programs or do anything, because the hard drive and the processor are working furiously. However, you get the perception that Windows loads much faster than Linux, which shows the prompt only when it is ready to serve the user. And also we have the thing with IE and lots of other MS software being loaded in the background wether you ask or not, and only hiding the icons instead of unloading them when the user tries to "close" them thereby sacrificing memory to gain percieved speed for the user.

Re:That's why

[perlchild]

I've never understood what Linux people are talking about when they say that Linux 'runs faster' than Windows.

I remember about hmm back before Linux 2, the speed difference was in the handling of interrupts(Windows back then also had ridiculously small memory space and virtual space limits). That's over 8-9 years ago WindowMaker/AfterStep were actually more in vogue than the KDE/Gnome offerings then, who were practically "upstart projects", Sun's OpenWindows ported to linux was also popular back then. Then Linux 2 came up, it was faster, stable, then Windows basically caught up, then Linux 2.2 came up, and added many features, and optimised some things, but the difference wasn't as noticeable, then 2.4 came up, and it was a speed demon, except for X(which to keep up with the windows improvements, needed video hardware acceleration support). Now with 2.6, and hardware accelerated graphics on a powerful machine, Linux is still a little faster, but to see the difference, you really need to do what most people only do with Linux: remove running programs you don't use. In some cases, the difference is pretty dramatic. Of course, it never really shows in competitive benchmarks(which usually use bare-metal machines, not pre-junked seven themes, iconbar/taskbar needs two rows just to fit installations). That Linux is less vulnerable to software accretion, because of better package managers, may also be a factor, but with lots of people reformatting every six months, in both camps, clueful people almost never see just how bad it gets...

Windows 2000 is probably still the fastest desktop for use(Windows XP is optimised more for boot time), provided you have an uncluttered system, and relatively recent/fast hardware(which is one of the reasons Microsoft was pushing manufacturers not to OEM 2000 with machines for a while when XP came out, it made XP look bad). As for linux desktops being slower than this, It's quite possible, depending on hardware(as an experiment, you might want to try windows 2000 and XP(in client mode) in a vmware windows, compare its graphics performance to linux clients) So far my testing shows Linux reacts better(speed wise) to the virtualized hardware, because the Windows speed boost come with directly hooking into the hardware, but when they go through the vmware shim, the fact that the linux kernel is smaller/leaner makes it edge out recent windows(Win98se is faster in the vm(smaller), but predictably, less stable). (Linux in a VM is actually faster in desktop performance than native kde-cygwin performance on that box, for that matter) This on an Athlon 1800+ with 756MB RAM host.

The fact that it's easier for Linux to switch to a lighter/less cluttered windows manager than for Windows(LiteStep is good though :) ) means that it's also easier for someone who finds his system slow to increase performance, while increasing ram almost universally helps, having less bytes to move around can make a system fly...

I refurbish old boxes

[Cloud K]

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).

Re:speedup tips

[krmt]

Gnome 2.6 has a whole section on speeding up performance in the help manual. Just open the app up (the one with the life preserver icon) and find the system administration document (I think it's under the "desktop" category) and it'll be in there.

Remember kids, the only thing that separates the experts from the idiots is that the experts actually RTFM.