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

Re:Compared to Windows

[TruenoSuave]

In my experience, Win2k isn't terrible with 128M, but its far from ideal, XP on the other hand is unusable on machines with 256 mb without significant tweaking. Same goes for Linux.

If you want to run an os on a machine from 2000, use an OS from 2000.. how hard is that to grasp?

Re:Well duh

[MoxCamel]

Well, I use Linux because it's lighter. Now you've heard it in 2004.

I also heard we're in Iraq to promote democracy. I've heard all kinds of crazy shit in 2004. :-)