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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.
In light of the Windowes System Requirements, is this really that big?
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.
This is why I stick with slackware linux. It's still the cleanest smoothest runing linux distro I've ever used.
I can attest to this article.
My machine dual boots Win XP and Mandrake 9.1.
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'm sure there are somethings I could to to tweak KDE or Gnome, but at least as far as Mandrake is concerned, out of the box, they drag ass!
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.
am fed up with Linux bloatware, I'm going back to the command line. ASCII art rendering of jpegs is all I need, hell you can print a load out and staple them together and have a flick book movie. -Or is it all that Ephemerides software that comes as standard?
If I promise to be a good boy can I have some better karma?
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.
Massive networking attempt for friends
I use FC2 on my desktop at work and I'm often irritated by the long startup times for many apps. Although the machine there isn't anything special (P4 2.8Ghz, 384MB Intel onboard video, 40GB HD) it's a bit much to wait around 15-20 seconds for OpenOffice to load (yes, I do increase the memory settings), or 8 seconds for Ethereal (gui). Once things are cached it's not too bad, but still nowhere close to say MS Word's sub-second load time on the same hardware. I was under the impression that FC2 prelinked newly installed apps too, which should help to avoid these long load times.
;-)
It doesn't seem confined to Linux either; I use w2k as my main desktop at home (also have an FC2 desktop and Gentoo on my server/router) and opensource apps seem to have the same long load times. I won't compare Firefox to Explorer for obvious reasons, but the delay is noticable. I use Agent (a closed source usenet client) and it loads in 2-3 seconds for me, in contrast to Thunderbird email client which easily takes 3 times as long. This is strange since Agent has much more data to load (subscribed to 15 newsgroups, some very busy and so have thousands of messages - including bodies on disk).
Once apps are loaded in Linux or Windows, they perform well; It's just a shame that the initial startup times are the first experience you have of an app, and if you're drumming your fingers, it's not creating a good first impression.
That said, I still prefer Linux
Code, Hardware, stuff like that.
Yes! That is why I am not embarrassed to use Mac OS X and its Aqua interface. The problem really is an embarrassment of riches in the linux desktop environment. Like a rice rocket, you got slap on every piece of bling-bling your desktop you can find and the distros are catering to the trend. It won't be long before someone makes a "Type R" desktop.
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
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 used to run XWindows on 8 megs of RAM. (circa 1994)
I think the complaint that Linux desktops are getting too fat is spot-on. Then again, does anyone really run GUI applications on their important Linux servers?
I remember cramming SuSE 5.3 on a 386 with 4MB of RAM (No, I'm not kidding).
I totally agree with the poster about GNOME/KDE, though. I haven't run KDE since the 1.x versions. I currently use blackbox and I've found it to be very lightweight and, most importantly, it doesn't get in my way. It manages my windows - that's it!
I've tried XFCE, fvwm, windowmaker and many many more. I've settled on BB for now.
Sure seems like I should be getting more bang for my CPU buck though. What's been taking up all the space in software these days?
I think any GUI is going to get "heavier" over time, as more features and functioanlity are added.
But what appeals to me is the option of not having to use a GUI. Being a long time user of U*NX and U*NX like operatiing systems, that is the biggest appeal to me.
what is more concerning to me is the lost of functions that some applications/programs are migrating to, for the whole "ease of use" thingy.
If you want all the bells and 'pretties' you pay for it in resources.
If you want to compare to the 'old days of UNIX' we didn't go for all the extras that were not really *needed* , so yes, we were much more efficient...
But in today's consumer market, 'pretties' is what sells..
And keep in mind this isn't a 'Linux thing' it's the same story regardless of what you choose to use, if you start layering on a bunch of GUI stuff..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Really, what is kdeinit for? Why do I need a gnome-settings-daemon? Can't the settings be written to a file like every other program on the planet? Does your file manager need to run 24/7?
While I admit that I've been evaluating Gnome 2.6 the past few days, and I've tried out XFCE, my consistent favorite is WindowMaker.
half the supposed benefit of Linux is the ability to bring old boxen back to life, because they can't support bloat from Windows anymore.
I have an old eMachine 500mhz machine that is chugging along fine with Fedora, and I'd like to have it running forever since it's still a useful processor, after all.
If a Linux distro becomes as bloated and heavy as running Windows... well, there goes one of the cooler benefits of Linux...
I think the important point here is missed: At least under Linux you _have_ a choice.
Trainee BOFH -- Just give me your username & password
At least in Linux one has the option to switch between lighter environments such as XFCE, fluxbox, etc. when more power is required. And then you can switch back to KDE/Gnome to take your ever so 1337 screenshots.
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...)
9/11: Never forget it was a false-flag operation
See, this just comes across all wrong to me. I use neither, as both are too bloated for my tastes. But of the two, it's KDE and not GNOME that the slower and bloatier. I'm curious as to how anyone can see it the other way around. Certainly on all the hardware I've tried, KDE is measurably slower. As a completely unscientific test:
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
Fr'instance, I have a Thinkpad 600 with 64 MB of RAM. The thing is just sitting in a box right now because I've been unable to find a distribution that will run gracefully on this machine.
And when you think about it, 64 MB is a still a helluva lot of memory to be incapable of running a reasonably current OS. I'm sure (and I sure hope!) that somebody could recommend a Linux distribution that's suitable for a machine like mine. But it says something that I spent at least a couple of hours looking at various obscure distributions, and couldn't find one that did the trick.
I'm generally "Interesting," "Insightful," and even "Funny" here. What the hell happens to me at parties?
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.
I am amazed that people do not realize that it becomes difficult to run NEW 2004 software on old 1999 hardware.
Perhaps the best post on this from the OSNEWS discussion on this editorial:
- - - - -
Anecdotal evidence --> meaningless conclusion
By Andrew (IP: ---.fbx.proxad.net)
Posted on 2004-06-10 09:46:37
Summary of the arguments presented in this thread:
- My X yearx old computer with Y MB RAM is slow with the latest Z Linux distribution.
where 3 < X < 6,
and 64 < Y < 256,
and Z is an element of the set of full-fledged Linux distributions like Fedora, Mandrake, SuSE, you name it.
The meaningless conclusion is: "Linux is getting very fat".
How the author jumps from his anecdotal evidence to his meaningless conclusion is clearly fuel for a long thread, seeing as this thread is growing fast...
Currently I run crux, this is a nice alternative to the bloated distros out there. It's a "build what you want" (aside from the 'base' and 'opt' packages). Personally I gave up on RedHate about 2 years ago, it's way too bloated and slow. I run crux with xfce4, it's light and fast, on my 500mhz laptop that does make a difference, especially when you are trying to get something done while compiling firefox :).
Seriosly, you need more space to build a fluid, friendly OS / windowmanager, but you don't need bloat.
I like having a nice core set of tools, I don't need three gui calculators and 5 CD playing utilities. There is a lot of bloat, and it's not doing anyone much good.
http://monkeyserver.com --- weeeeee
I'd love to use something like KDE or Gnome, but every time I give it a try, it's just so bulky and slow, comparatively.
Trolls lurk everywhere. Mod them down.
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.
Quote: Things are faster than ever thanks to the CPU optimized builds! ...and a babbling brook of clear spring water greets me everytime I turn on my system. It talks to me in a beautiful dulcet tone. It even works as a bank machine...with free money no less! Wow!
Move to Vancouver, hippie.
This wasn't just plain terrible, this was fancy terrible. This was terrible with raisins in it. - Dorothy Parker
(My only beef is that for some reason fvwm is no longer shipped with Fedora. I have no idea why. As far as lightweight window managers go, it's probably the most popular, and it's a single tiny RPM.)
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?
I have used KDE, Gnome, fluxbox, XFCE and IceWM at different stages of my Linux use, and in the end it seems that IceWM is my favourite, fast environment for getting work done. I mean, KDE and Gnome are both bloatware, fluxbox is a bit too minimal, XFCE is a bit to awkward, IceWM is just right. Also, don't forget to install iDesk if you want desktop icons on a minimalist system.
Meh.
My wife is using KDE on a pentium 233 and she's able to use it just fine. Aside from complaints that the GLMatrix screensaver is super slow on her computer. She has no problems.
Everything will get much, much faster when Sun moves all Linux desktop applications to Java.
dinner: it's what's for beer
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.
Windowmaker provides a very pleasant environment and it's a lot smaller and lighter than the Gnome or KDE desktops. And while you can't theme it to hell and back... it's got a nice, consistent and user-friendly configuration tool, including support for its lightweight themes.
OpenStep (GNUStep) is a decent toolkit, and it should be possible to use GNUStep and write applications that will compile under Cocoa on Mac OS X as well...
Why these aren't more commonly used, I don't know. They don't have that Windows-style panache, I guess.
Things are getting "fatter" because it seems to be that many popular Linux desktop environments are in some way trying to compete with or mimick the "feel" of the Windows desktop. There are still many ways to avoid memory intensive and cpu-sapping desktop environments - WindowMaker, fluxbox, fvwm, and other window managers still offer enough for most people to "get stuff done" without hogging resources like it's going out of style.
But really, though, this was to be expected. I use GNOME 2 as my desktop environment and I'm fully aware of the price I'm paying in system resources. You can't expect a windowing environment that uses SVG, pretty effects, and pleasing visuals to be thrifty with computing power.
"It was hell!" recalls former child.
When I was running RH9, I obtained a TK script to monitor my CPU temperature, adjust the fan speeds, and display the current temperature. The display is tiny. In RH9, it took 57MB! I think that it should take less than 1MB.
In order to save some memory on my system, I started rewritting the script into C, using GTK2 (a good excuse to learn this library). After implementing most of the functionality, I found that it took about 17MB. I wonder how much memory it would use if I ported it to motif (or athena widgets).
Things are getting better. I just ran the original script on my now FC-2 system, and found that it uses 8MB.
I realize that some of the memory in use is shared with other applications. I am starting to wonder if we have lost sight of memory usage.
Where law ends, tyranny begins -- William Pitt
KDE 3.2.2 rips along just fine on Slackware 9.1 and FreeBSD 4.9 - Red Hat has always been slow IMHO, can't speak for Suse or Mandrake. I have an old beater 500 Mhz box with 128 MB of Ram in it at home running Slack and KDE is fine.
The heat from below can burn your eyes out
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.
Hardware requirements
Desktop Required RAM Required CPUfluxbox/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
9/11: Never forget it was a false-flag operation
I used to run Linux + X11 on a 8Mb 386DX-25 desktop. Worked fine and fast running Window Managers like IceWM and AmiWM.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
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
They aren't that inefficient generally. Sounds like you ran into a bug of some sort. I play Neverwinter Nights in one X session (in Windows and Linux both, I suppose, you can use a game as your 'window manager') while multitasking with KDE in another X session (try doing that in windows!). It runs fine and doesn't have really any slow down if I ran NWN just by itself.
No one in the Linux community is concerned with software tuning these days. Look at what Apple did to Mac OS X. I don't see anyone doing that with Linux.Look at Windows. I don't see anyone doing that either. Certainly no major distributions.
My flavor is Blackbox and/or Fluxbox, but you're spot-on about "my computer is a tool" thinking versus "my computer is a toy" thinking.
I wonder if it would be possible to do a lot of the "toy" stuff so many people like (or use by default) without the high memory/cpu requirements? If it's just a matter of having the stuff to explore and play with, you'd think something like xfce or enlightenment would take off. But the toy concept seems to go hand-in-hand with eye candy, so we need to load the alpha blending code, the anti-aliasing font libraries, the scalable vector graphics rendering engine, the bitmap skins, all that junk into core, then we need the cpu to juggle the fading in and out of tooltips, animated menus, and big chunky kparts modules, parsing xml for every little thing, all on top of the work the user's actually trying to do.
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.
First, let's not confuse the OS with the window manager/desktop environment, although I know typical Windows and Mac users have difficulty understanding this. Fluxbox, Xfce, Windowmaker, and others still offer stellar performance on older hardware.
Regarding KDE and GNOME, I have noticed that KDE's performance has improved on the same hardware over the last few releases while GNOME's performance has degraded.
I spend most of my time on Gentoo with KDE, but I use a variety of window managers, from time to time. My system is very nice so I have not noticed any problems. I did recently retire a Pentium 200 Linux server, not because it couldn't do the job but because I no longer needed it. I don't run a GUI on my servers, though.
We all have 2GHz Intel machines with 256Mb RAM here, and XP definitely doesn't run comfortable, unless you have the patience of Buddha.
A student approaches his master and asks him: Master, how come my 3GHz Hyperthreaded four processor system with 2Gb of RAM feels so slow, yet I never hear you complain about your old 386? Doesn't it run slower?
And the Master responds: A hare will think the grass is dead, while a turtle might see it grow. A penguin on the other hand, doesn't even know what grass is.
The student was immediately enlightened, went home and programmed a web server on his Commodore 64.
Hell, who isn't getting heavier and slower. Maybe if this 'Linux' guy would follow my doctor's advice and get away from the computer, maybe get some exercise, he'd stop getting heavier and slower.
- Tash
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:h tml
h tml
http://www.windowsitlibrary.com/Content/356/01/2.
http://www.windowsitlibrary.com/Content/356/01/3.
I've setup a button bar at the bottom of my screen with my most commonly used apps. It took me some time before I got all the mime-types and associated programs setup the way I wanted, but it went pretty smoothly (and then I used unison to keep the settings in sync on all my machines). I'm quite happy with it, and much more productive. It also lets you type arbitrary shell code to run a file through right there. IE: Select a bunch of files and then type !for $a in "$@"; do foo; done, so I get the best of both worlds. btw: I setup root-tail to watch my .xsession-errors file so I can see any results on my background.
Couple this with fluxbox's tabbed windows, keyboard shortcuts, and multiple workspaces and I'm quite happy.
On my main desktops, I run windowmaker with ROX-Filer, and they are lean and fast. I tried KDE and Gnome, just to see what they are up to when I did a recent desktop install. After a week of being nonproductive in these environments, I went back to windowmaker + ROX.
What I don't understand is WHY these things are getting so bloated. I can do everything I need and more with a lightweight environment like ROX. I see 0 advantage, or even ease of use of KDE or Gnome over what ROX + Windowmaker give me.
what the hell is anyone doing about it!
Seriously, if KDE is so big and fat, then why isn't it being stripped down? If the libraries and recycleable components are taking up too much RAM, why isn't anybody pairing them down to "lean and mean" pieces.
Is it because this development isn't sexy? If so, I'll say that's BS. When the Firefox RC came out the other day, the first thing I wanted to know was if:
A) the installer was smaller
B) the RAM footprint was below the 18-30MB that it usually runs at
(and if they fixed leakage... why is it when I close all my tabs I don't get back to 18MB anymore?)
That kind of stuff is cool. Making an iTunes ripoff just because it's "new to Linux" isn't.
Have a look at cobind
It uses xfce, and only gtk apps.
So software developers are taking advantage of faster CPUs and the dirt cheap price of RAM. How is this bad? I want my computer to do more over time, not to minimize featuresets just so hobbyists can screw around with full installs of the latest distros on an old Sparc 10 taken from an office trash heap.
People who want to Linux on crappy old hardware need to use crappy old distros or run BlackBox. That's life. Obsolesence is just the way of computing, and that isn't going to change just because a few morons refuse to give up on that old Pentium 233 and buy an Athlon.
1) Is your X server using an accelerated driver, or the framebuffer device, or even the generic vesa driver?
2) If you are using an accelerated driver, which one? Some provide more acceleration than others.
3) Are you using anti-aliased font rendering? If so, did you check to see whether your driver supports hardware acceleration of the RENDER extension?
4) Did your friend disable unnecessary background processes, or did he just do a "full" install so he didn't miss out on any goodies.
Finally, users don't want fast machines that do nothing, they want machines that perform some useful task. For years, the calls were for "usable desktop applications", tools such as xpaint, xfig, midnight commander and Lyx + latex being judged as being "unsuitable". Well, now we've got the kind of fully-featured applications that were being called for, but in order to create them _in reasonable amounts of time_, and with a reasonably high level of reliability, reusable component architectures (e.g. GTK, DCOP, Qt, etc) need to be used.
As the motto goes - "Good, fast, cheap - pick any two" (where "good" in this case means "efficient", "fast" means "available now rather than in 10 years time" and "cheap" still means low cost). The mass market appears to have decided that it likes "Cheap" and "Fast" - just like with PC hardware, in fact.
If you think there's a market for "Good" and "Fast", go right ahead and try to make some money doing it.
--
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 have a 1.2Ghz, 256Mb laptop running NetBSD and GNOME 2.6 which is blazingly fast. Looking at top, it's using around 150Mb to run a GNOME login, Firebird, Rxvt and the NEdit editor.
In comparison, my 1.6Ghz, 512Mb desktop machine running Linux and GNOME 2.6 is noticably slower. The memory footprint with a similar list of apps running (Mozilla instead of Firebird) is around 400Mb.
Linux used to be great on lower spec hardware than Windows, but since 2.4 it has become bloated and slow. Glibc is also an incredibly bloated implementation of a C library if compared to those that ship with BSD's. The kernel bloat could be a result of the extra complexity ti run on mid-range, multi processor machines. Glibc's excuse is somewhat less easy to pin down.
Chris
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
I wonder what's the performance gain when using Intel compiler instead of gcc.
As others have pointed out, KDE and GNOME are heavier because most users have demanded extra heavyweight features. KDE has gotten lighter and more featureful between 3.1 and 3.2 (and I understand GNOME has had similar trimming). Mandrake 10.0 with KDE 3.2 runs better on my laptop than Mandrake 9.1 and KDE 3.1. Application startup time is better and resource usage is down.
For those of you who don't want all the extra goodies provided by KDE or GNOME, at least some distributions (Mandrake and Redhat that I use myself) provide a handy desktop switching tool that lets you easily switch to a lightweight (with correspondingly fewer features) window manager.
I make good use of KDE features, especially with Konqueror. I am endlessly frustrated by the user hostility of Microsoft Windows (and others) when I can't split the file manager into multiple panes for easy manipulation of files across directories and other networked computers within the same window.
That by itself is a killer feature that I am loathe to have unavailable.
I disagree that the desktop is getting worse for both KDE/Gnome. . . I think that the memory issues are a little more complicated than that.
My real gripes with memory management are four-fold.
On a seperate note, I've noticed that KDE overall has gotten faster and more efficient, not slower in the last 3 releases. I've seen the opposite in Gnome.
Gnome unfortunately has never been memory efficient for me and seems to have a ton of memory leaks (I love the look of it and I'm rooting for the team - maybe except for the mono guys - , but it feels really cobbled together to me and I can't stand when it bogs down because of memory leaks here and there). I also don't see mono as the fix for that -- better memory management for the individual components would suffice.
Also 192 MB of RAM is much higher than the usable minimum for Mandrake 10.0 + KDE. I use 128 MB of RAM with a newish KDE (two minor releases behind - so the newer once should be even faster) and it is quite comfortable (it is better than both the current GNOME and the later versions of GNOME/KDE). I've used gentoo on the same machine in the past and it was even faster. The only thing that I do is use "aterm" instead of the bloated terminal shells (gnome terminal and kterminal are both ridiculously bloated and offer almost nothing over aterm) -- it makes a big difference.
Try XFCE4... http://www.xfce.org/
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
The reason is that modern languages enable the programmer to easily reuse lots of library code without actually checking how much baggage said code brings aside.
What effect could Java have on Openoffice? OO is C++.
why not turn this discussion in some kde/gnome speedup tips ?
here are a few:
- on KDE, a different style really matters. 'matters' not as in 'use -fomit-frame-stuff', but as in 'it really matters'. stop using keramik/plastik and use light V3, or QT windows. you will notice it very quickly, both in speed and in memory usage (very significant)
- watch out with konq's process caching. keep an eye on the memory usage of cached processes, and if you see they are too leaky, disable konq proces caching. konq starts up quickly without caching anyway
- tired of people saying 'its the nvidia drivers' for every performance problem ? i have to confirm this. I'm not talking about FPS in games or so, just basic GUI performance. for example, try the RenderAccel setting (also try disabling it, there are some problems that seem to occur only in some situations)
offcourse, all of this is not an excuse, but at least it can offer some relief. i am no fedora user, but i wonder if some simple research on fedora could point out where the (perceived and real) slowness is coming from... i remember seeing success stories like "colorful KDE3 performance on low-end hardware", and i run KDE3 at home on a 233mhz 128mb ram at home (debian). But i also saw a (very) slow mandrake installation.. it must be possible to find out the cause.
what tools could be used to investigate ? like xrestop, strace, profilers (but i have no idea how to profile a whole desktop and not a single application)
ow, and some problems i'd like to know more about:
- openoffice painting slowness. i can type quicker than openoffice can paint in some situations, in other situations its very quick. it doesn't even seem related to document size
- gtk double buffering slowness... it started since gtk2, i don't know if it improved much (i don't notice it anymore on my new-faster pc, but i can see it in other setups)
- some KDE apps (like kopete and kontact) have slow dropdown menu's, others have quick ones. very strange, i tought dropdown menus are just basic QT stuff
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.
Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws-Plato
The point isn't that Linux does necessarily use less resources... it is that it can use less resources... out of the box. Just because some people choose a distribution that is bloated by default doesn't mean Linux is bloated or getting bloated. The Linux kernel is still relatively small. Whatever you decide to use beyond the kernel is up to you.
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
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
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!
Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws-Plato
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
RTFA.
The point of the article is that mainstream desktop distros are not any better off than windows xp in terms of requirements. Therefore, they cannot be used to replace windows 98 instalations on corperate desktops and as a consequence linux is losing a major oppertunity. That is the only point the author was trying to make.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
Depending on what I am doing I use different window managers. I have always loved the gnome environment. So I use it to browse the internet, and do other trivial tasks. I use XFCE and IceWM on slower machines.
/usr/local/games/ut/ut -- /usr/X11R6/bin/X"
If I am playing a CPU intensive games like Unreal, then I use the game itself as the window manager. So I basically have nothing but X and the game running.
alias startut "xinit
/^([Ss]ame [Bb]at (time, |channel.)){2}$/
Most of the memory footprint in Mandrake Linux or and distrobution stems from all the daemons they have running on startup, the X window system, and a bloated kernel. I found by comiling the X window system to use Kdrive (had to add this line in startx to get the mouse wheel to work defaultserverargs="-mouse /dev/input/mice,5")
, and recompile the kernel to use only the options that are necissary, (ie disable extra logging, all extra drivers and compile kernel for size, disable all schedulers except dead line, use premptive), and I still use my standard KDE install and it seems to work well and takes up around 35- 50 Megs of Ram (Mandrake 10.0). The daemons I have reduced down to iptables, network, xfs, portmap, sshd, ntpd, hpoj, and cups... because those are the only ones I use for various things. I also got rid of using dm on startup and just added 3 lines to my .bashrc to startup X without dm.
if [ "`ps -A |grep X |awk {'print $4'}`" != X ]; then
startx
fi
dm seems to almost double the amount of used memory.
I thought like everyone else here that the problem was the window manager. It is not.. it is all the other crap running in the backgroud, as well as the monolithic kernels, X windows (really bloted), and 20 daemons enabled by default. If you strip all of that you can run on low amounts of ram with no swap. My desktop machine only has 128megs and it almost never has to swap out, with several apps open at a time. Linux is about building your own ;).
-Ron
Christ, why are you running KDE on a K6? XP would bring that box to it's knees too.
No it wouldn't. My father ran a test XP system back out when it was still Whistler on a 400MHz or so Pentium II system with 256MB of RAM. It ran absolutely fine.
XP, for the most part, will work fine on older systems provided you have at least 192MB of RAM. Any less than that and you'll be forced to swap to run any pretty much any application. As long as you have plenty of RAM, you should have no problem running Windows XP, even on older hardware.
If you could get a useable experience running Windows 98 or Windows 2000 on your system, you should (with enough RAM) be able to get a usable experience with Windows XP.
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
It is true that GNOME/KDE is more similar to Windows systems that most newbies are used to, but they are also more complex than WM, and also less solid and consistent (yes, the core tools can be quite stable, but beginners still get into trouble in some small parts that don't work as well). Also, since they look similar to Windows, any differences, and especially lack of features in certain parts, become more annoying. With WM plus MC, since everything is so different, beginners are rather delighted to see some of the nice features of them, such as virtual desktops and Ctrl-S in MC, and every feature mentioned just works. When they are getting mostly comfortable with the system, I encourage them to use vi/emacs instead of newer, more Windows-like but less solid and feature-filled things, just for the same reason.
My notion of "newbies" includes my classmates in a university and my parents in their 50s. They can pick up new things pretty quickly, but if anything doesn't work as advertised, or works inconsistently (I don't mean applications with different widget sets, which is ugly but acceptable to most --- my papa can use Protel 3.xx for DOS quite comfortably even though he uses Windows most of the time --- but rather things that works sometimes but doesn't work in other circumstances), even relatively experienced users like me will get annoyed, let alone beginners.
Example for the efficiency of the XFS filesystem under Linux:
/dev/null gives a total transfer rate of 16.5 MB/s on the same machine! (against approx. 4 MB/s under WinXP) Three concurrent process still give me a total rate of 9.3 MB/s.
let WinXP do two simultaneous network transfers: the _total_ transfer rate dropped (in my case) to 4 MB/s whereas it was 10 MB/s for one transfer at a time.
Under Linux/XFS I had running a 10 MB/s incoming network transfer and _concurrently_ a burst read from the same disk! I always had the impression that Windows is extremely bad at concurrent massive disk accesses. XFS is built for that. The performance is insane.
I just tested it:
cat'ing two 1 GB files simultaneously to
Copying a 1 GB file on the same partition gives 15.3 MB/s (65 secs), resulting in a total disk data throughput of 30 MB/s!
On the contrary, modifying access rights etc. is extremely fast on Windows since all such information is stored in the MFT. But for the average end user the access rights scheme implemented in Windows is nonetheless much too capable and therefore IMHO rather useless.
When my sister decided that see needed a laptop for her university, I rejoed: her desktop would
have been hijacked to my parents' room and I would
install there Linux to be able to do
video-conferencing with them.
I selected Suse 9.0 for the task, bought the
local retail version in the (vane) hope that
they could read the fine manuals, and I started
installation during the Easter holidays when I
went there.
During the installation, there was an option
about the graphical environment:
*) No graphics
*) Light version (No KDE)
*) Uber Ultra Eye Cady Fat Colesterol Kde
Or something similar, I do not remeber in the
detail, but I could select a less heavy DE than
kde or gnome.
So, I stand back, and look the machine:
amd 2400+, 256MB, nvidia 440Mx, and I say,
it's ok, it can do it.
And it did.
Now, if it was a PIII 733, 128MB, riva TNT 16MB,
I do believe I would have chosen the middle option
(windowmaker maybe?).
It would have maybe been less user friendly, but
for the few tasks my parents have to perform
(e-mail, web, gnomemeeting) would have been ok.
So, if you are installing on an old hardware
a new distribution that it takes pains to give
you a "wonderful" gui experience, is really so
strange to find that it goes slower than
a previous version without special effects,
tooltips, whatever?
So, next time Suse 9.0 (or now 9.1) is installed
on an old machine, is it fair to ask the
machine to behave correctly with a load that
exceed its capacities? Or would not have been more
logical selecting the offered choice of a light
environment?
Just my thoughts.
Best Regards
Zed: Nothing is ever easy
We can't expect KDE, GNOME, or OO to suddenly trim down to where we can run them on old PCs. Someone else will need to "scratch an itch" to accomplish this task. If we are thinking of third-world countries, I would think that there are certainly enough programmers in those areas (considering the outsourcing boom) to accomplish this mission.
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).
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
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.
And little time devoted to optimizing. That's what it looks like to me, whether it's Gnome,KDE, or OOo. Mozilla was painfully slow while they were in the adding features more, but once they took the time to sit down and start identifying the bloat, it got better (still not perfect). Look at Nautilus as another example. The first iteration had lots of nifty features, but it was slow. Alan Cox got frustrated with this, profiled the code, and then sent the Nautilus team the profiler output and suggestions to speed it up. To me, this sounds like something that the project team should have already done. Why did it take a widely known hacker like Alan to make them take notice?
Maybe there should be some Code-Bloat Nazis that are independant of the various major projects . They would analyze the software for speed, memory footprint, etc. and then report back to the developers where this is room for improvement.
the good ground has been paved over by suicidal maniacs
Desktop Linux will never happen until dependancies can be quickly and easily resolved (even if it means each app that would run comes with its own copy of every library it needs and keeps it in its local folder -- Windows style) and there's no building from source.
./configure;make;make install type things. Too complicated for regular people, although not too bad for people like us.
Windows works the way it does because the Kernel is virtually unchanged during updates...the external API and syscalls don't change. (XP SP2 changes a few of them to be more secure, that is however, the last time I can remember an API change in the middle of a revision.)
Linux desktop already works for basic stuff -- but to be a truely multipurpose desktop, we can't have desktop users futz around with dependancies, compling from source
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).
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!
Dude, that's a Pentium II 400, not a K6-2 300. Look at the stats and you'll see the the P2 400 takes out the K6-2 300 in all rankings. You comparing a Kia to a BMW. I had a K6-2 300 and it was slow but it was also half the cost of a P2 at the time.
Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws-Plato
>Is the Linux Desktop Getting Heavier and Slower? Tux looks like he's starting to put on a few too.
Debian based Knoppix 3.4 works well hd installed on more resource limited machines, is nicely set up, and it has xfce, WM, et al set up as well.
OO still takes forver to load, but works fine.
Note: MS Office is much faster (loading) than OO, and Knoppix has a nice working Wine install, and captive NTFS (RW) support.
I run it on my k6/3 400 (upgraded) Presario 1250, 288m ram laptop. Knoppix is FAR faster than any other distro I tried.
For my "main" box I run MDK10 and KDE.
You seem like a very angry fellow. Do you get this upset about other trivial things, too? If so, you might want to look into taking a vacation, or finding time to relax.
Seriously, though, your anger at my admittedly vague post is disproportionate, especially since I clarified myself in responses I made before you posted.
The parent poster is perfectly correct. As everyone else's distro works harder and harder to out-bloat Windows, Slackware continues the original Linux ideal of a bloat-free, yet feature-rich, OS distro.
Part of MS's advantage is that it's run by a single set of libraries that get loaded in the OS at the start. They may not be good libraries, but they're ONE SET of libraries. Linux has plenty of good ones, but you need millions of them; every programmer of each individual app wants to reinvent the wheel or use something obscure, so memory use goes straight to the bad place. Users are forced to be smart about what they run, and Slackware definitely helps with that more than larger distros, which takes everything and the kitchen sink, and dumps it in the user's all-too-willing lap. "Sure, I'd like to install (?:G|K)Louse-Picker .0009a! Who knows, I might need it someday! Oh. I guess I need to install 300 dependencies...well Linux is always faster than M$, so I guess installing all those on my 300MHz 128MB Dell won't hurt it a bit!"
I don't feel much sympathy for all the RedHat refugees. If you want Windows, just get Windows. I know you won't be as hip then, but trust me, your personal computing experience will be better. Or buy a Mac; then you'll be even cooler than if you used Linux on a PC, if a little bit poverty-stricken.
There's no sig like this sig anywhere near this sig, so this must be the sig.
nothing.can.stop.me.now
Far more likely is that you were running more services in the background than you were on NetBSD.
I've read most of the comments here at my default +5, and I have to say, I don't see how so many trolls and blatant lies got modded so high.
I know what you're thinking. You're thinking "oh, he's just another Linux elitist who's going to condenscedingly tell me what to do." And you would be wrong.
I'm not going to tell you what to do. I'm going to tell you what *I* do, and see if I can make any sense of the garbage that's getting posted here.
I use Debian GNU/Linux (isn't it obvious from the sig?). Stable. Not unstable, not even testing. With a 2.4 kernel on P4's with a minimum of 512MB of RAM. And they all fly.
I program. I write software for Navy weapon sims. I write software for my company on the side. I play NeverWinter Nights on my machine with an ATI Radeon 9700 Pro, while scanning photos, reading email and administrating the servers for my company and personal use. All of this flies, and [Microsoft] Windows doesn't even compare. And yes, I use Windows (ever heard of NMCI?). MacOSX? Don't make me laugh; I've used it, I've programmed in it, I used to administer a whole lab of it. It's slow and buggy. GNU/Linux runs fast and smoothly on the exact same hardware. GNU/Linux doesn't crash (unless I'm doing some obscure kernel hacking), and it doesn't "stutter" when I'm playing MP3's while image editing a 500MB file in GIMP.
GNU/Linux allows me to do more and more things at the same time. GNU/Linux makes things possible that I never would have imagined possible on Microsoft Windows or Apple Mac OS X.
But you know what? None of this matters. The only thing that matters to me is that GNU/Linux is Free as in Freedom.
I don't know why you guys are having so many problems with GNU/Linux. All I can say is that I've had worse with Windows an MacOSX, and even if I hadn't, I would _still_ use GNU/Linux, because it's Free. Fortunately, in my not so humble experience, GNU/Linux is better in every sense of the word.
Nathan's blog
Been using XFCE for ages now, on a 5-year old 500MHz celeron, and it feels faster than my 2.6GHz win2k desktop. Plus I love the flexible Os-level hotkey setup (CTRL+ALT+X gives me a terminal, CTRL+ALT+M gives mozilla,...)
The extra 'goodies' plugin packages are great too.
http://xfce.org
Very friendly software works just fine on older hardware. I know that Debian testing, with KDE 3.2 works just fine on 450 MHz and 128MB RAM. I'd even go so far as to call it snappy. I've used Mepis on machines as low as 233 MHz. Sure, OO was slow on that, but any reasonable company can use it's old "server" to provide that via terminal services to machines of this class.
More importantly for business is the that XP is just the beginning of what Microsoft pushes. Not only does a company have to buy new hardware to run it, it also has to purchase "servers", CALs and other eXPensive junk. Free software has and still makes better use of hardware and has a lower TCO, regardless of what Fedora does.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
...I want file associations to just work. I'm not a heavy multimedia user. I'm running Pentium Classic with 90 MB, 180 MHz, 24-32 bit display, & Sound Blaster 16, because it's stable & it all just works. Basically, I need to be able to create documents & view them according to modern standards [HTML 4.01 & CSS]. You can't do that with Windows because the browser won't be updated anytime soon.
As for Enlightenment & other window managers, I don't use them because I don't know how to configure various software packages just to watch various multimedia files. I can't underscore this enough. I kind of gave up watching video clips on this box, but it turns out that KDE or Opera offered me the choice of watching a certain clip. It asked me if I wanted to use a certain package to watch it. I was surprised because I wasn't even aware that it could be so easy. You're probably wondering why I would check in 1st place if I don't expect it to work. I checked in hopes that something accidentally got set properly & it'll just work; well, it is going to work, because I'm upgrading KDE with the relevant packages right now.
If you already know which software is used for which media files, then I encourage you to use a lighter environment, but as for me, I really need to get a system that is preconfigured. I've tried Blackbox, twm, swm, lwm, fvwm, & probably others. Because of the apparent lack of documentation, I just can't seem to work Blackbox & twm. I honestly don't know how people can recommend Blackbox & twm in good conscience. As for Enlightenment, I don't understand why people use that when there is KDE & Gnome. When I tried this, last millenium, it seemed to be part of KDE & Gnome. Now that KDE doesn't seem need it anymore, I don't bother with it.
I don't use Gnome because the documentation is difficult to read. It seems geared to describing tasks that I have no interest in, while KDE's documentation is towards telling me what such 'n such app is for & what I get to do. "You have to do..." vs. "You get to do...". I would argue that KDE's documentation is a delight to read in & of itself, whether or not you want to accomplish the relevant tasks. A list of chores vs. fun & productive stuff.
testing out my trending skills
Recently upgraded from FC1 to FC2, which was a change from gnome 2.4 and kernel 2.4 to gnome 2.6 and kernel 2.6. I've noticed nothing but speed improvements... the system is more responsive and faster to boot.
I'd have to say that I am not only more productive on a computer because it's easier to learn new tools, but that the gui itself is one of the main tools I use. I use the desktop not only to switch between apps, but as a clipbook/news reader/clock/media player, and only do so because it it is convienent enough to not interfere with "work" I have to do on the same machine. Those are tools I couldn't take advantage of in a CLI-only space.
As a new linux user, I find it horrifically interesting that there aren't any(?) DE's that allow one to work without a shell. Constantly, one has to open command shells to perform trivial tasks. When adding that to learning a semi-functional DE, I understand why so many people are linux-shy. I must give props to Kuake for taking some of the sting out of this, but it seems it should be in every distro's default DE, since they require a terminal so much.
This may lead to a bit of hatred from both sides, but the complete integration of basic UI (classic), graphic features (skins) and a command line (adress bar, command prompt) in XP is one interesting solution. Additionally, the XP installation takes a more friendly approach to what a user's GUI should look like for them: By default all the graphic bells and whistles are "on" and can be turned off by those experienced and inclined to do so. I think this is an important advancement over a typical linux distro's philosophy, which has a lot of features (sub-pixel blending, etc.) "off" by default. Users inclined to seek these features are those least interested in using them.
Despite all the windows-bashing here, perhaps people should appreciate what they have done well (as well as bash their wicked ways). A great solution would be a new linux based GUI that offers 100% of shell functionality (and no prettiness), rather than "live on top" of an existing CLI, and then develop optional graphic touches as a layer above that. This would scale as well, or better, the current MS offering. Graphic flourishes could be added later in a consistent and pleasant manner.
Looks good for your age..
It all depends on what you are doing. When I upload the 100 pictures of yesterday's wedding from my digital camera, I need to extract the 20 or so good ones from the 80 bad ones. They are named "img_1932.jpg" through "img_2032.jpg", by the way.
With a command line interface, I can view each picture, one at a time. I can find and delete the really bad ones, but it is a slow process. And, when I get to the end of the 100 pictures, I recall that I have around 12 pictures of Bob. I don't need that many, so I should pick the best 2, and delete the rest. The pictures of Bob are evenly distributed through the 100 pictures in total. So, it takes another pass through the 100 pics to even find the 12 ones with Bob, and then I need to compare them to see which ones I like the best. This would probably require me to write down the file names and my comments on a scrap of paper as I go through them.
With a GUI, I view the entire directory at a glance, using the thumbnails. Then I multi-select the ones with Bob them, and copy-drag them to a folder named "Bob" (he is vain, and wants them all). Then I drill down into a few to get a better look. I can see all the thumbs at once, so it is easy for me to decide which ones to keep and which to delete. Then I drag one from the image viewer app onto my mail program to e-mail it to someone. Likewise, I can drag some onto my HTML editor to add them to a web page I am creating.
Command lines are great for many things (and I do normally use the CLI), but they are really bad at visual or graphical tasks.
Also, CLIs are great for frequently used commands. Once you get old enough to start fogettting things, you find that you can't remember the command you want. With a GUI, you can troll through the menus (and hopefully the menus are well designed, so you don't need to look under "Window" for the command to adjust the colour). With a CLI, you try to guess what the command is, or use "apropros" and try to guess a good keyword to search with. (As an exercise in futulity, try to use "apropros" to find the program that displays images).
I hate it when I make a joke and I get modded "+5 insightful". Mod the stupid comments "funny", not "insightful", pleas
Something's wrong with the Linux system...
I'm running Gnome 2.6, ThunderBird, Firebird and Gaim:
About 160M, which is more or less what you report with *BSD.
When I first started setting up linux as a server and as a desktop (rather than just fiddling with it), we had the brand new 1.2 kernel series, and X11R4.
./setiathome -nice 19 /usr/bin/gnome-session /usr/local/pgsql/bin/postmaster /usr/X11R6/bin/X
Back then, we built a 486/133 machine with a whopping 16M of RAM, and an uber-l33t Vesa Local Bus video card (3dfx #9, if I remember correctly).
Loading up a dozen text shells, a copy of netscape with several windows open, xpaint, emacs(!), and a few dozen copies of xeyes... it REFUSED to swap!
We were finally able to get it to swap by loading GNU Chess and having it play itself (which forks a second copy and talks over sockets).
Our first server was "tested" with 4 Megs of RAM and a copy of DOOM under both DOS and Linux. The linux version performed better.
Now, given that the 1.2 kernel could perform remarkably well with X windows and netscape, for what should be considered a "normal" workload... why is it that virtually every distro I can find today feels like a salt-crust grill with molassas syrup and eats up enough ram just sitting there idle to choke Bill Gates's horse?
From my whitebox linux desktop at work, here are the top 10 Bloated Sacs running right now...
VSZ RSS START COMMAND
18020 15216 Mar10
18384 2560 Mar08
18504 1020 Mar23
19476 668 16:26 sort -n -k 5
22692 6736 Mar08 gnome-panel
36088 5096 Mar08 nautilus
36736 14344 Mar08 gnome-terminal
69616 38132 13:28 thunderbird-bin
76276 47712 13:34 firefox-bin
116172 40324 Mar04
Note that this is 40+14+5+6+3 = 68M of RAM just to allow me to have a prompt. Yes, I know I could stop using gnome, but that only trims the outside fat.. the marbled fat inside X11R6 and the mozilla twins are harder to get at.
Do I get MORE done now with all this cr@p running than I did 10 years ago? Nope. Do you?
My main desktop machines are
- A thinkpad 600 with 192Mb of RAM
- A VIA C3@533Mhz with 512Mb of RAM
Both are running Fedora 2 both are most definitely usable. There are only a few changes I've made to get that to happen - firstly I rebuild Gnome with gcc -Os, secondly I don't start up the 500 fascinating daemons I seem to get by default now days.
OpenOffice chugs on the TP600, but the VIA is very happy.
It's not quite the same as a dual opteron with scsi where "startx" produces the entire running desktop in 2 seconds.
I've also been benching the systems. The 2.6 kernel is snappier than 2.4, and Gnome 2.6 is using less RAM than 2.4. The biggest bottleneck is disk seeking - Gnome loads a lot of scatter little files when starting up and disk heads are still constrained by little problems like momentum.
With XFce I can go down to about 48Mb and have a snappy desktop. Open Office isn't very funny at 48Mb but XFce but abiword is usable.
Dillo is a good choice for a light browser, obviously it doesn't have the features of a Gecko based browser (or for that matter KHTML) but for basic web surfing it's quite effective. The main suites of programs are always going to grow larger, to make up for it on a slow machine, run a small UI with minimalist programs to make up for it.
Sure, performance sucks, but not as bad as OSX.
It's a Unix system so you can do more with it than you could with Windows.
You are obsessed with the GPL...
Am I wrong?
For performance improvements, switch to FreeBSD, and use a different window manager that isn't so horribly bloated, and doesn't have such a terrible interface. I personally recomend Blackbox, but there are tons of others to choose from that do quite a good job as well.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
I may be late jumping into this and it may well be redundant at this point but whatever...
I have an Athlon 2500XP with 512mb's of RAM.
I do not run linux, I run FreeBSD. I use a custom compiled kernel that is about as stripped down as possible.
Gnome 2.6 is just not that fast. Traversing my file system through Nautilus is slow.
Kde 3.2.x is also not that fast. Traversing the file system is pretty quick but the applications themselves are not.
Everyone seems to be talking about progress, but what I want to know is, what progress are we talking about? GASP they have added a side tab! GASP they have added thumbnails! The basic framework for these applications is the same! The file manager's mostly have pretty similar looks. What features could have been added to cause the need for an extra 2ghz of processing power to rival the speed of our old graphical *nix systems?
Oh yeah... that's right, little to nothing!
If you really mess around on a well customised desktop you had on some old hardware (kde 1.x anyone?) and look at the speed, then compaare that to your brand spanking new 2.5ghz system (kde 3.2.x) you should notice that you have just added 2ghz to your system gained a few useless features and have no speed increase.
Also, in the article the comment about Gnome-Terminal is dead on. Can anyone rightfully explain why Gnome-Terminal is as slow as it is?
Must be all the INSANE features it has! Like... oh yeah it doesn't really have any INSANE features, it's just slow as hell on brand new hardware.
./revolution
Are you joking? I dont care how many different computers youve administered in whatever high brow organisations you can't deny the fact that the user interface in linux isnt as responsive as windows..and that applies to ALL of them even the lightweight ones.
Even in fvwm dragging a window is sluggish (and it doesnt even display the contents whilst dragging)
I have discovered a truly remarkable sig which this post is too small to contain.
Sigh. What he's saying is simple.
Windows drags smoothly because it updates LESS FREQUENTLY with NO STUTTER. It spends more time per update, and therefore it is slower. However, the brain latches onto the stutter in XFree86, so you PERCIEVE its updates as taking more time.
Whether this is true or not I don't know; I haven't seen the benchmarks. But I have heard it before.
On a dual-boot Fedora/XP 2600 Athlon I administer the difference is staggering.
Boot time (from GRUB menu to login screen):
Windows XP/Lunar: ~20 seconds
Fedora/XFree86/gdm: ~1.5 minutes
I don't know what Microsoft do, but they've tuned their boot process something wicked.
Granted, a stock Fedora install runs a whole lot more services (apache, sendmail), but I'm sure it can be much faster.
Many services don't need to run in series. For example, the random number generator can be started while ethernet discovery is taking place, or sendmail can start up while X is probing the monitor. Similar reasons why a 'make -j4' runs so much faster than 'make'; the two bottlenecks when compiling (or loading an OS), cpu and disk, just aren't being used the whole time, one is usually waiting on the other at any given time.
Time to experiment with the & parameter...
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
Most people don't distinguish between the apps and the desktop. People think of the computer as an appliance which does various tasks, not as an app on top of a desktop on top of a WM on top of a windowing system on top of a C lib on top of a kernel. The GNOME and KDE teams are trying to improve the overall user experience.
This bullshit where GNOME is adding P2P and blogging, and KDE thinks it has to have 20,000 sidebar buttons and configuration panels on everything is completely ridiculous and unnecessary. All that stuff is supposed to be taken care of by the app writers.
It is being taken care of by the app writers. Who do you think wrote the p2p and blogging apps? They didn't just pop out of thin air. You sound as if you think it's a bad thing that such apps are available.
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
I haven't had my GUI or IE on Windows take my whole machine down since around 1999.
This can be quite misleading. If some other process is already using GTK on your system--like, say, the Gimp--then running your program does not really uses much more memory, because most of that memory "used" by your program (mapped to its process) is in the shared object which is already loaded anyway. (Provided your program is dynamically linked with GTK.) This is why adding memory used by processes can (and usually does) give more than there really is memory on the system, including swap. For example, run this from the shell:
It was supposed to be all in one big line, but it's ugly, so let's turn it into a script:
On my system, a Debian desktop with two weeks of uptime, it prints:
This machine has only 256MB of RAM and is using only 67MB of swap--this is hardly 1.5GB which is supposedly "used" by all of those processes.
Sincerely,
Pan Tarhei Hosé, PhD.
"Homo sum et cogito ergo odi profanum vulgus et libido."
They will both use the same kernel, but will have different default install settings and one will have more focus on supporting the desktop.
This clear split will aid in the developement and adoption of Linux by focusing Linux developement on two clearly defined audiences.
- Desktop users don't need all of the server features. In theory you could say that software such as MySQL, Apache, sendmail, and so forth don't even need to be included in the desktop version.
- Server users aren't using a distro that is bogged down by the desktop gui and apps.
Desktop developers should be working on making it perform as fast as possible. I know that I am pretty frustrated with my Linux desktop experiences due to the speed issue.Lastly, the desktop user version needs to be very easy to install. This is an area that Linux developers need to take seriously (such as skipping the disk partioning step by having completed by the installer invisiably to the user, unless they select to do it otherwise).