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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.
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.
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.
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.
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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 think the important point here is missed: At least under Linux you _have_ a choice.
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Windows 2000/XP is very quick with 128MB. Like some users have reported, less than 256MB and the latest Linux distros are pretty un-responsive as a desktop. Blame the newer KDE/GNOME.
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.
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.
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.
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?
A lot of it is illusory. When dragging windows around, for example, XFree86 seems slow because it renders the whole process poorly. Things jitter and blink and just look horrible. In Windows and MacOS X things look nice and smooth. However, if you actually measure these things, XFree86 is faster. The same can be said for a lot of things. 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).
And why do you think that MS Word pops up instantly? Think about it - it's a large program split over multiple files, all of which have to be accessed before the program can be run.
Now consider how long it takes to open a New window in OpenOffice.org once it is loaded.
Finished thinking? Good.
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).
Real start up times for apps are difficult to gauge even when they aren't preloaded. OpenOffice.org is a slow starter although it is leaps-and-bounds better in version 1.1 than it used to be when it was first released and I hope that the improvements in start time continue . That said, on days when I'm writing a lot of documentation, it gets loaded in the morning once and gets used all day without complaint. If I accidently shut it down, most of the files used are still in the linux file cache and restarting it is a matter of a couple of seconds of turn over.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Anything I post is strictly my own thoughts and doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the opinions of IBM.
The problem here seems to be that you're trying to run the latest and greatest on old hardware. Why not try a distribution from a few years ago?
> 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 did the KDE/Gnome thing for a while, until one day when I was dorking around with some opengl stuff and playing with some test apps.. I think at the point I noticed the problems with KDE or Gnome the most was when I was testing a physics library that's out there.
Under Gnome or KDE (default config, though under Gnome I did kill off as many services as I could) I would quite literally get 3-5 fps on a test app that was dropping blocks out of the air and bouncing them around. It was unusable. On a lark, I swapped to twm for a few minutes to see if the issue was my machine or the window manager.. instant 50 fps boost running the same program. I've now sworn away using KDE or Gnome, and settled on one of the "lightweight" managers out there.
I'm sorry, but if the desktop software is that inefficient then there's no way linux is ever going to improve its status.
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.
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.
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.
True, but then again they didn't do it for Windows either. Regular users don't care to dig that deeply into their system, they expect it will simply work. If it doesn't work at least as well as Windows out-of-the-box, well then there is another Windows user.
teeker
The jittery window dragging... that may be true for kde and gnome, i don't know. I do know that running Enlightenment (no kde or gnome) i get smooth moves. This is on a crappy rage mobility video card from 3 years ago, with something like 8 megs of shared video memory, and a modile duron 800MHz, with 128M RAM. So maybe it's the window manager acting as a bottleneck for redrawing. But as you said, that is why it is good to have separate layers that can be independantly improved.
Another thing, if something "seems slow" to the user, then for all intensive purposes you might as well say "it is slow". If it gets the task done faster, but leaves the system unusable for 2 seconds, who cares? thats 2 seconds that you are forced into "serial mode" instead of a "parallel mode" of work.
You make a good point, I just don't think it can be a general statement.
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.
Just so you know, 2 years ago when XP came out ( was it 2 or 3? ) a 1.5ghz was god damned fast and people were buying 600mhz systems because they were good enough to run the latest windows os. Now compare redhat 8 or mandrake 7.2 to windows xp and im sure it will seem on par with windows for the time. Thats the key difference in my mind between linux and windows. Linux: You can get the newest WM feature tonight. If you wanted you could install Gnome Dashboard. Windows: I gotta wait until 2007 for the newest system to come out. Its not anyone's fault that Linux is where MS will be in a few years.
>A lot of it is illusory.
Isn't that the point of a windows-based system?
>XFree86 seems slow because it renders the whole process poorly
So how isn't it slow? How does a display system just "appears" slow to the user, but it actually isn't?
>if you actually measure these things, XFree86 is faster.
And what measurement is that?
If it appears slow, why isn't it slow?
The surprise isn't how often we make bad choices; the surprise is how seldom they defeat us.
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'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
Slower/faster cannot be measured by clock speed alone. If it feels slower, it is slower. The reason is that there is more going on than just the movement of a window. There is a person moving that window. That person is likely thinking and may even be reading something on that window while they are moving it. If it is flashing and ugly, just the distraction from a thought train in progress may in fact "slow" that person's process down. It might even derail a thought and cause something to be missed that was vital. A concentration on speed instead of the holistic process of the common computer user (as opposed to the specialist) is part of the reason Linux is behind on the desktop.
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
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.
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
Running old distributions is not a great idea. Remember all those security notices that you ignored? Well, they didn't go away. Old (unupdated) Linux distributions make great targets for script kiddies.
TZ
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.
... 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).
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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.
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!
As a previous poster said, if a GUI system "feels" slow, it is slow. If the system "gives the impression" of being fast, it is fast.
The only evaluation criteria of a GUI is user perception, not "number of widgets per second" or "number of window moves per second". User perception is notoriously hard to measure, however, so people tend to revert to the "number of X per second" style measurements. Such measurements are useless, unless they can be tied to user perception (such as "more widgets per second makes the system feel more responsive").
Since when? I can't think of anything that makes that a rule. Sure, CPU-intensive applications won't work on old, slow machines (what makes them "crappy" btw?), but why is it that programs which don't have any more features than their predicessors need to waste several orders of magnitude more RAM and CPU power?
What does Mozilla do that Netscape 3 didn't? What is it doing with all that CPU power? Dillo isn't fully developed yet, but it's well on track to get all the features a browser needs, all while being incredibly easy on resources.
What is it that Evolution, KMail, and Mozilla-mail and all the rest need all the massive resources for? Sylpheed does practically everything a MUA could need to do, all while using a fraction of the resources of the more popular ones.
Why is it that OpenOffice needs massive ammounts of RAM and CPU power? Abiword uses practically no resources by comparison, yet it has many of the same features. Sure, it's not done yet, but how could 25% more features mean a program that takes 1000X as long to start-up?
Nobody is complaining that they can't play-back Divx video on their 100MHz system... Everyone is complaining that many programs have massively high resource requirements FOR NO REASON AT ALL. It's not as if GNOME is now made up of full motion video, animated graphics, etc. It's doing all the same things it was doing years ago, yet it's taking more resources to do all the same things...
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant