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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 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.
the gui stuff should NOT eat so much memory.
it just shows that the kde/gnome/whatever guys are trying to compete with each other and windows by throwing in the latest fanciest stuff without really thinking.
let me repeat it: desktop software should NOT eat that much memory. it only shows the low quality of the code.
seems to be getting faster and faster. Jump to 3.2 was pretty big when it comes to performance. And Qt4 brings with it even better performance (application start-up time drops by about 20%) and mem-usage (down about 15-20%). KDE has been pretty aggressive recently when it comes to performance and optimizations. Of course KDE gets more and more eye-candy, but that stuff is completely optional.
Is Linux less demanding than Windows? yes it is. If you want to, you can run the latest whiz-bang desktop from Gnome or KDE, and the performance will be roughy similar to Windows. Or you could use some lightweight UI, like Xfce. If you decide to run som graphics-heavy UI with lots of eye-candy, it's your choice, and you should expect it to be somewhat slower than some lightweight UI would be. But you have the choice.
I for one think that the progress of features and eye-candy should not be held back by that guy who still runs Linux on his 200MHz Pentium. If he wants to, he can keep on using the UI he currently uses, or switch to some lightweight UI. Or, heaven forbid: upgrade his machine! If you have the hardware, you should have the ability to put that processing-power to use by using some kick-ass UI with lots of eye-candy.
Lesbian Nazi Hookers Abducted by UFOs and Forced Into Weight Loss Programs - -all next week on Town Talk.
My first inclination was to hate this editorial... after all, I'm happily using Fedora Core 2 on my 512MB RAM 1.6Ghz P4. No problems here, it performs fine. But the more I read the more I found myself agreeing with his basic thesis.
.wmv video files and I say err, shit... I'm not positive this will play...
He's right. It *is* a shame that Linux needs more memory and CPU power than XP, yet still feels slower. It's also more annoying, btw.. in the time I've been writing this response, Rhythmbox with the mp3 gstreamer plugin, playing an mp3 from a samba share, has dropped audio three times for a second or more. My coworkers laugh at me when they send me
Linux as a desktop os is bloated, slow and unreliable. As as Linux on the desktop advocate, I often feel like a vegetarian... sure, it's virtuous, but I'm stuck eating pasta and potatoes instead of lamb chops and meatball sandwiches.
I'm just not sure of the solution. The author of the article is a little bit glib when he says "We need to put a serious emphasis on elegant design, careful coding and making the most of RAM, not throwing in hurried features just because we can." Easy to say. Hard to do. I know the Gnome developers and the rest of the thousands of people working hard for little or no money on the OS collectively known as GNU/Linux are doing their best to pay attention to elegant design and careful coding. The problem is that as many voices as there are screaming for elegant design... there are as many voices screaming for mono, java, and other "next gen" development tools.
Just fire up top and see what's running. You may be surprised by how much RAM some applications take, but keep in mind that the number reported for X tends not to be accurate (They nmap the video card RAM so it gets reported as used RAM or something like that.)
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
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.
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.
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
what is kdeinit for?
kdeinit starts KDE applications by forking and then loading them as shared libraries. Because kdeinit itself links to the kdelibs, it allows a much more effective sharing of kdelibs (and its dependencies) between the applications and avoids unneccessary initialization.
In other words, it reduces startup time and memory usage.
Oh. You could? Oh crap. What do you mean you could do all this on your 5Mb Commodore Amiga too? Well there goes my argument then. Well, I'll get my coat.
Sorry for wasting your time.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Try XFCE4... http://www.xfce.org/
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
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
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
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.
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.
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!
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
...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
Since when? I can't think of anything that makes that a rule. Sure, CPU-intensive applications won't work on old, slow machines (what makes them "crappy" btw?), but why is it that programs which don't have any more features than their predicessors need to waste several orders of magnitude more RAM and CPU power?
What does Mozilla do that Netscape 3 didn't? What is it doing with all that CPU power? Dillo isn't fully developed yet, but it's well on track to get all the features a browser needs, all while being incredibly easy on resources.
What is it that Evolution, KMail, and Mozilla-mail and all the rest need all the massive resources for? Sylpheed does practically everything a MUA could need to do, all while using a fraction of the resources of the more popular ones.
Why is it that OpenOffice needs massive ammounts of RAM and CPU power? Abiword uses practically no resources by comparison, yet it has many of the same features. Sure, it's not done yet, but how could 25% more features mean a program that takes 1000X as long to start-up?
Nobody is complaining that they can't play-back Divx video on their 100MHz system... Everyone is complaining that many programs have massively high resource requirements FOR NO REASON AT ALL. It's not as if GNOME is now made up of full motion video, animated graphics, etc. It's doing all the same things it was doing years ago, yet it's taking more resources to do all the same things...
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