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Is the Linux Desktop Getting Heavier and Slower?

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the atkins-diet dept.

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."

3 of 1,555 comments (clear)

  1. That's if you're using graphical apps... by DroopyStonx · · Score: 1, Redundant

    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.

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  2. Speed Difference by Malyven · · Score: 1, Redundant

    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.

  3. Re:That's why by OwlWhacker · · Score: 0, Redundant

    I have Mandrake 10 on a 1.2Ghz box, 256Mb of RAM, and it's flying.

    I find Mandrake 10 is much faster than 9.2. You won't get that kind of thing from Windows!

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