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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."
Anyone who hooks up through Slashdot Personals -- you **MUST** post about it! Karma be damned!
/. a while back when she showed up on my fans list. We're just close friends now but it was really neat to e-date someone who was into computers and geeky stuff nearly as much as I am.
Slashot has personals now? Wow, it's been a while since I've been here. Actually, i did meet someone on
Good judgment comes from experience, and a lot of that comes from bad judgment.
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.