Bounties for Gnome Optimization

Eugenia writes "Novell and OSNews are sponsoring the memory reduction project led by Novell's Ben Mauer by providing bounties to developers to help to clean up bloat in GNOME and related programs."

Comments

i must be crazy

[soimless]

I use gnome 2.4 with about 100MB of ram

Re:i must be crazy

[Miffe]

Nah, I use gnome 2.8 with 128MB of ram

Re:i must be crazy

[mickyflynn]

I remember before 1.0, on 256MB of RAM with Enlightenment and the goodies like the ripple effect and stuff going on...first on a 400Mhz AMDk6II, which was hot shit at the time, then on dual Celeron 366Mhz. the lastest GNOME on this 1.2Ghz Duron with 1GB of RAM is nothing to be pleased with. Windows 2000 Pro does a snappy job, however.

Re:i must be crazy

[Anonymous Coward]

If you think your RAM total is 100MB, you probably are crazy :) Base 2, remember? ;)

But yeah, GNOME is really inefficient, imho. I blame it on C and CORBA: in KDE, which is based on C++ and DCOP, it's obvious that components are integrated, and that code is shared in an object-oriented fashion. By comparison, GNOME feels like a few apps sharing a framebuffer and a widget renderer.

It's a shame, I really want to see GNOME take off, but I think the underlying technology choices really hold them back.

Re:i must be crazy

[Tribbin]

RAM-disk?

Gnome Optimization

[Decaffeinated Jedi]

I tried to optimize my gnome once with a suit of +2 leather armor and a new red hat, but he still ended up getting slain by a bunch of kobolds.

Re:Gnome Optimization

[game kid]

Maybe he refused to make friends with the penguin and the nautilus in the party.

Re:Gnome Optimization

[Lihtan]

My gnomes all turned into cement golums. They all seem to happy out on the front lawn though.

Re:Gnome Optimization

[TrixX]

That's because you used a Red Hat. You could have had better luck if you had bought him a Fedora.

Re:Gnome Optimization

[OAB_X]

As we all know, the red hat is not a fedora.

Re:Gnome Optimization

[po8]

I don't know. I think the real problem was the not giving him the right languages. Made it hard to deal with Kobold...

Re:Gnome Optimization

[ScrewMaster]

You're lucky it wasn't a bunch of Diebolds. That would have been really scary.

Re:Gnome Optimization

[DAldredge]

Are they one of the companies that bans most accounts before they have to pay out to those accounts?

"March 3, 2005

We have had lots of requests to un-suspend accounts after we run our security checks. Please remember that suspensions made by our system cannot be appealed.

Account reviews are now taking place and we will begin making payments tomorrow as promised! Thank you for your continued support!"

Re:Gnome Optimization

[MyIS]

See, next time you'll try to buy mail for your little paladin.

(Score:-1 Obscure)

Re:Gnome Optimization

[OAB_X]

I dont know, but ill let you know in 9 days, besides, I rocognized a legit site on the list of ones it rotates through (www.swirve.com).

This can work both ways

[AdityaG]

Money is sometimes a very good incentive, but sometimes things you work for money don't seem as much fun. It's hard to explian but it's true. When you get paid to build a system, it's not as much fun as when you build your own system. Myabe its the whole intrinsic vs. extrinsic motivation thing. My two cents.

Re:This can work both ways

[Drantin]

It's also a different feeling when working for a contest/bounty and a day job... This is a Good Thing (tm).

Re:This can work both ways

[ggvaidya]

The way I see it, the money will just make sure that it gets on top of Slashdot :) and thus a lot of geeks, some with free time, will see it and go, "hey, that sounds interesting - and there's even something in it for me if I do it right!"

People who wouldn't have otherwise thought of trying to clean up Gnome will give it a shot. Go, Novell!

Re:This can work both ways

[Doc Ruby]

There's no reason why a team of people couldn't work together daily, in a traditional "day job", to produce software to submit to these bounties. In fact, given that the risk of the code not making into acceptance by deadline is now borne by the coders, a team that's working on several bounties at once (perhaps in different projects) a better way to spread the risk. This model lets a team work on what they want, when they want, for whom they want, with whom they want. Without all the baggage that's bundled with a day job at the buyer of the code, including the mixed bag of projects assigned to team members.

Re:This can work both ways

[witcomb]

Two cents? No wonder you don't see it as an incentive you have to give more than that.

Re:This can work both ways

[Rahga]

Here's a reason: Most people with the experience needed to do this work easily make well over the ammount these bounties offer (~$200 for something that is very non-trivial) in less than a day or two at their day job. The bounties are simply added incentive to fix messy problems, very rarely will you see somebody take them on unless they already wanted to scratch that itch.

Re:This can work both ways

[Doc Ruby]

I agree. The bounties are too low for the sole motivation of a good programmer. Opening the market like this could produce an efficiency in code reuse that we'd all welcome - programmers "doing it already" (for some other payment) would be incented to send it to the distributor which can send it to more consumers, justifying their investments in the bounties. Or it could send the programming work to either worse programmers, resulting in worse code, or to poorer programmers, deflating the cost of coding - at least temporarily, while the supply/demand curve changes. The real governing question, that can't be answered by economics, is whether the project communications (design/management) are effective with this casual/remote a relationship between the specifier and the coder.

Re:This can work both ways

[ergo98]

Money is sometimes a very good incentive, but sometimes things you work for money don't seem as much fun.

When monetary rewards are offered in these sorts of events, it's often the sense of competition rather than the actual purse that draws people in. e.g. You want to win basically because you believe that other people are really motivated by the money, so a win would be that much more legitimate. Of course most of them are playing out the same logic in their heads. Look at the xprize as a good example - for most of the projects the actual win money was a token amount, and a couple of the projects were funded by very deep pockets, yet it created a fierce tournament.

This is the reason why many people get such enjoyment out of card games or bets where small stakes are up for grabs. Real money, even a token amount, seemingly makes it more "real" of a contest.

Re:This can work both ways

[MoogMan]

Well, with a lot of work, you don't have a choice what you are coding. You code what you are given, and you get paid. This, on the other hand, is different. You choose what you want to code and get paid for it. Or you can leave it.

But you are kindof right - money is not a motivational factor in business terms.

Re:This can work both ways

[JohnnyBigodes]

I think when doing something, most "geeks" (term used loosely) either charge whatever their time is worth (lots, usually) or simply don't charge at all, meaning they do it for the fun of it.

Re:This can work both ways

[Curtman]

I think these bounty type ideas could work very well in a university setting, where teams would register with Novell or whoever, and compete against teams from other schools for prizes. If the schools were to receive the money, and the students involved would get a small break on tuition or something, this would be a great way to bring new/fresh developers into the community, and the schools would do most of the work of getting people involved. Also it would be a great way for Novell, RedHat, and others to spot new talent, and for students to have their talents recognized.

Obviously it would be very difficult to come up with a fair system to score points, but I think the model would work much better than offering bounties to people who are already familiar with open source. Perhaps a panel of judges could be assembled with representatives from the major distro's, and larger companies who are using Linux on the desktop.

Could something like this work?

Eye Candy

[Nino]

Take out all the GUI eye candy and that will speed up about 50% on older systems.

Re:Eye Candy

[thryllkill]

Which gnome do you use? I use 2.8 and it is a pretty basic desktop setup, no real eye candy. Unless you consider transparent terminal windows damn sexy.

Re:Eye Candy

[PoprocksCk]

Yeah I agree. I would certainly not call GNOME as a whole bloated these days. Since 2.6 or so they've begun to clean things up quite a bit, especially with Nautilus. It's actually usable now...

And as for the people complaining about memory usage... if you're running "top" with 512 MB of RAM and go "omg, 431520k used! It's GNOME's fault!" -- well then I don't know what to say to you. That is simply how Linux allocates its memory -- it uses almost all of it at any given time and distributes it between applications.

Re:Eye Candy

[Tribbin]

You are right about the upper part. But, did he say anything about memory usage?

Re:Eye Candy

[Aldric]

Huh... I'm running SuSE 9.2 with KDE 3.4 RC1 and it's only using 209MB of memory out of 512MB at the moment. It can't just be "that's the way Linux is".

Re:Eye Candy

[Mr Z]

It all depends on how you interpret the output of the various tools. For instance, if you run 'free', you'll get something that looks like this:

. . . . . . .total. . . .used. . . .free. . .shared. . buffers. . .cached
Mem:. . . . 255236. . .246452. . . .8784. . . . . 0. . . .8028. . . 66036
-/+ buffers/cache:. . .172388. . . 82848
Swap:. . . .999896. . .107880. . .892016

If you look closely, 246MB of my 256MB is "used," but of that, 74MB are disk buffers. Only 172MB are used by applications at the moment.

So, by one measure, all but 8MB are in use, and by another measure, all but 82MB are in use.

--Joe

Its about time

[laffer1]

This is great news. I switched from KDE about a year ago because of the newer gnome interface. (2.4+?) I run gnome on FreeBSD 5-stable and found that my biggest complaint is the memory usage. I have a dual xeon 2.0 gig with 1 gig of ram and gnome + xorg eat up at least 200-300mb of the ram. Maybe while they are at it they can fix some other problems with gnome like the fact the default stack size needs to be increased in many non linux systems when porting it!!!!!

Re:Its about time

[Espectr0]

Kde has improved dramatically in speed , memory reduction and html rendering in konqueror in the last year.

You may want to give it back a try.

We use kde in our offices, which are pentium 2, 400mhz and as little as 128mb (!) of ram.

On my development box, i have a dual 400mhz P2 with 320mb in ram, and i can run eclipse with tomcat

Re:Its about time

[MPHellwig]

Windows itself 40-50 MB? That is only possible if you got 64 MB ram and windows 95/98, otherwise it will be much more.
Typical windows will at least eat half of your ram regardless if you got 265MB or 4 GB.

Re:Its about time

[Earered]

I was able to use gnome 2.8 on a Celeron 433 with 64Mo of RAM. Though you either need to tweak your configurationhttp://www.gnome.org/learn/admin-guid e/2.6/ch09.html/
or to use a dedicated distribution like Beatrix http://www.watsky.net//
which include gnome and use dirty trick with the kernel to improve performance.

Re:Its about time

[Mike McTernan]

Why is open source software always so memory-hungry?

I really don't know the answer, but would expect that is is partly due to different apps and code blocks being written by lots of different people in some amount of isolation. This could lead to a limited view of the project/distribution and as such the various inefficencies in the system may get missed.

Re:Its about time

[MPHellwig]

Indeed your right, my fault was that half of the memory is reserved for windows (the OS) and the rest can be used for applications but that doesn't need to be allocated.

Re:Its about time

[XO]

Everyone's tried to make use of the bazillions of different libraries available, that have all become extremely bloated over time, so that we're to the point where as is explained in one of the linked articles, "Yes, we are loading 300 kb of data from an xml file at bootup time to control the volume of the computer", and other wonderful things. Also the developers computers tend to have a lot more resources available perhaps than do many of the people who are just users.

I had been reporting memory leak problems with gaim since like v0.8something, and was repeatedly told along the lines of "i dont have any problems, and there haven't been any memory leaks found in several versions", and was summarily dismissed. Surely enough, in a recent versions changelog, "* large memory leaks plugged" or some such. Until the problem bites the authors of the project, no one cares.

Also, the absolute insane complexity of many of the things (layer upon layer upon layer upon layer upon layer of abstraction for no good reason at all except to have a high-level interface to a high level interface to a high level interface to a medium level interface to a low level interface)

Re:Its about time

[roystgnr]

It uses a proprietary widget toolkit

Qt is dual licensed under the GPL. It's no longer any more proprietary than gcc.

Re:Its about time

[m50d]

I run kde successfully in 62mb of ram

Re:Its about time

[Yokaze]

You say gnome+xorg: Is that the number from top or ps, which includes the memory from mmapped I/O devices, like, say, a 128Mb graphics card?

Re:Its about time

[Yokaze]

Or Gnome for that matter.

Re:Its about time

[abigor]

It's not proprietary. Get your facts straight, please.

Also, KDE 4 will be very interesting: it's undergoing a complete HIG review, and there will be a lot of deep changes. Luckily, the features and solid architecture are already there for the new interface to take advantage of - unlike Gnome.

Re:Its about time

[iamwahoo2]

Qt is GPL. That is all that matters. It is every bit as free as GTK or Gnome.

Re:Its about time

[einhverfr]

First, you are correct in saying that it is not necessarily an open source issue. For example, many of the really mature OSS applications use very little memory. Look at OSS server software, for example.

But....

If the question is re-phrased to "Why is the *nix desktop so memory-intensive?" the answer should be clear. The UNIX desktop is designed around a modular windowing system which favors flexibility over performance. As you start expanding this idea into a full desktop, you get a large number of pieces which offer different function. This is by necessity a memory-intensive approach. Add all that eye-candy and it takes up even more.

But look at what this flexibility buys you: So you have that new system with 1GB RAM and a few really old 80486's? You can install really old distros on those old 80486's and use them as thin clients to the new system. You can access the same apps anywhere, even on computer systems that cannot run them at all.

Also lets look at another issue too. Applications like Mozilla got very bloated as they became featureful and then were slowly reduced in size so that they would run better on older systems. The same is happening on GNOME. So does GNOME need to be optimized? yes. But it will happen.

Re:Its about time

[jwitch]

i'm interested in knowing where you obtained a 62mb chip of ram from?

Re:Its about time

[Knnniggit]

Easy. Just buy a 64MB chip and break it in half like a graham cracker.

Re:Its about time

[mormota]

Maybe it was a 64 MB module, but the videocard allocated two megabytes?!?

Re:Its about time

[drsquare]

I'm not so sure about that, I have 512MB of RAM, Athlon 2000, and it takes 10 seconds at least for KDE to start up. This just for a very small part of the OS which doesn't really do an awful lot other than put borders and titlebars on Windows.

As for Konqueror, well I think Firefox has taken the open-source browser crown. Saying that, I use Konqueror for browsing images on the local filesystem. As a general file-manager it's not really up to it, and it's not really up to it as an Internet browser. I think the misguided idea to merge the Internet and file-manager was a bad one. You don't see people trying to merge word processors and e-mail programs.

Re:Its about time

[Bert64]

It could if you ran the software from NFS and used your 250mb disk entirely for swap, ofcourse it would be horrendously slow.

Re:Its about time

[strider44]

"Why is a linux box so memory intensive?" apt-get install * That's my problem.

Re:Its about time

[Eil]

I can vouch for this, the KDE desktop and all of its apps are nice and snappy on my aging Athlon 750. To put this in perspective, Firefox--a widely acclaimed "small footprint" browser--feels like bloatware in comparison. I use it over Konqueror only because I can use the Adblock and Googlebar plugins with it.

Re:Its about time

[XO]

Because it was something almost completely unrelated to the ability to control volume that was causing the 300kb of XML to be loaded into memory.

The initial part of that though is commenting about the tons of intermingled libraries that don't ahve a damn THING to do with whatever is going on - it's like Dependency Hell, or DLL Hell, but for the code dependencies.

The second part was supposed to be somewhat more seperated from the first part.

But , basically, it comes down to this:

I want to use function C from library A just because it has it! Oh, that causes the entire library A to be loaded initialised, load all of the things it needs, so on so forth, when all I really want is a function to *insert some relatively easy task here*, but instead, I just triggered the demand loading of 22MB of code and 48MB of data by asking for something from library A! yay!

Re:Its about time

[Pseudonym]

I run it in 640kb which, after all, should be enough for anybody.

Re:Its about time

[Poeir]

There's a configuration option to control the volume of your computer? Sweet! Now I can take my desktop anywhere.

Re:Its about time

[drsquare]

That's not really what I'm on about, one program opening another to perform a particular function, like slrn or mutt opening up vim to edit a message. I mean Outlook and Word are still two different program.

There isn't a file manager I'm personally satisfied with. All the different functionality seems to be spread out across different programs. Yeah I know, it's open source, I can do it myself. But I'm not a programmer, I don't have the knack, it doesn't come to me. And even if I were a programmer, file managers are just one thing I'm not satisfied with, there's all sorts of other things I don't like, hundreds, I can't dedicate my free time to fixing every single thing I don't like. Even just one would take years to perfect. Many projects have many many people working on them, and have done for years, and they're still flawed, what chance do I have?

Re:Its about time

[Bob Uhl]

You don't see people trying to merge word processors and e-mail programs.

Well, actually you do...

My big problem with KDE (now that the qt licensing issues have been resolved) is that it uses C++ rather than C.

Re:Its about time

[shellbeach]

There isn't a file manager I'm personally satisfied with.

Have you had a look at ROX? It's small, fast, and has some nice shell integration (eg. you can navigate directories/files as you would in bash, with tab completion, etc; you can run shell commands in a minibuffer; a command to open a terminal at the directory you're browsing ...) - it even provides a desktop and will automatically mount and unmount devices, if that floats your boat (you don't need to have it enabled)

Personally, I use IceWM for windowmanagement (it's fast, more themeable than *box variants and provides a nice taskbar) coupled with ROX. I noticed the other day that this combo is what VectorLinux provides as an alternative to KDE, so obviously I'm not the only one using the two.

Re:Its about time

[Mr Z]

Incidentally, that's how Sun used to do it with their dick^H^H^H^Hdiskless workstations. Everything would run via NFS, and if the working sets were too large, you might attach a small disk to hold swap, /tmp, and maybe a read-only copy of the OS.

What's sad is I have actually NFS mounted a directory over a 14.4Kbps modem link, because I was running on a 386 with 4MB of RAM and no HD.

I was writing SVGAlib hacks while at work at the computer hotline in college. We had network-booted machines w/ no HDs. I'd boot from a floppy, running a modified "rescue disk." I was telnet'd in one window (so I could run vi/gcc/etc. directly on the remote computer), and logged in locally in the other so I could run the resulting app...

That would've been in, oh, 1994 or 1995. :-) And yes, it was damn slow, even though the executables I ran were relatively tiny. (I had SVGAlib and libc locally, so I was only bringing my tiny 10K or less a.out over the wire.)

--Joe

Re:Its about time

[Mr Z]

Just remember, as volume decreases, temperature increases. If you decrease the volume too quickly (ie. non-adiabatically), the temperature will increase dramatically due to the increased entropy.

--Joe

Re:Its about time

[be-fan]

I don't think you really understand what KDE does. KWin is the part that draws borders and titlebars on windows. It also consists of an entire application framework to make writing applications easier to write. KDE is an enormous amount of code, implementing a lot of functionality.

Re:Its about time

[iamwahoo2]

Trolltech has spoken out openly against SCO/Canopy and have regretted that SCO sits on their board. However, there is not a lot that they can do about that. Trolltech makes great software and releasing it as GPL helps to ensure the growth of "free" software more than something that is LGPL by forcing derived works to also be GPL. The name "lesser" GPL is used by gnu.org to convey the meaning that "It does less to protect the users freedom" (from their website).

Re:Its about time

[swillden]

You can make GPL'd programs with Qt, certainly, but no one can use the code unless they're using one of the blessed OS's.

Currently, Qt/X11, Qt/Mac and Qt/Embedded are all GPL'd. Only Qt/Windows is not under the GPL. They have, however, announced that when Qt version 4 is released (Q205), all versions of Qt will be under the GPL.

So this FUD, too, shall pass. And I do think it qualifies as FUD, because while some GTK/GNOME programs do run well on Windows, it's hardly ever a decision-maker for people planning to write a cross-platform app. And it certainly has no real effect on someone's choice to use KDE.

Re:Its about time

[m50d]

It's like running in treacle, but it's doable, even without much stripping down (I left services and things at their defaults). Be prepared to wait a while for things to load, and make sure you don't try and use more than one app at once.

Re:Its about time

[m50d]

It is for what I'm using it for. I only need one app at a time (and more do run, especially if they're small, it's just other people tend not to like the performance), and can leave it for a few mins if it's churning.

This is a realy good idea

[Masq666]

This is a realy good idea, something like this should be done not only to GNOME but also to other window managers such as KDE. Even non linux based systems could need some work when it comes to memory leakage and optimization. This does'nt only help people with little RAM but helps everyone.. Hope everyone are willing to help.

Re:This is a realy good idea

[Dan Ost]

Please don't call KDE a window manager.
Both KDE and Gnome use window managers, but neither of them are window managers
(the fact that you can change which window manager is used by KDE and Gnome
is a good indication that they, themselves, are not window managers).

xwinman.org gives an excellent introduction to both window managers and
desktop environments. Give it a look.

Re:This is a realy good idea

[Masq666]

Thanks for pointing this out for me, i'll take a look at xwinman.org. But my point was that not only GNOME needs optimizations, not trying to flame here but i think it's to little focus on optimization in the software industy now a days(Commercal and Open Source). Hardware is cheap, but in some parts of the world they still use old computers.

Re:This is a realy good idea

[evanbd]

xwinman.org gives an excellent introduction to both window managers and desktop environments. Give it a look.

FYI, anything that is talking about the recent release of KDE 2.0 is just a tad dated. The concept is neat, but somehow I doubt the site is at all maintained.

Re:This is a realy good idea

[ScrewMaster]

It's not not just older computers. One of the reasons to switch away from Windows to Linux or BSD or some other more stable alternative is to run multiple applications reliably. I mean, Windows multitasks but not particularly well. You may have a fast machine with plenty of memory, but multitask a few major applications and that 1 Gb of RAM doesn't look so big anymore. Memory and resource efficiency is always a worthy goal but it takes time and effort to achieve, and for commercial software getting to market quickly is a bigger priority. On the other hand, since the open source world is generally less driven by market concerns and more by the needs of the development process itself there is less excuse for inefficient, bloated code. The folks and KDE and Gnome are certainly cognizant of this, and hopefully they will devote some resources to optimization. It's not particularly glamorous work, from a developer's standpoint (about as much fun as auditing code for possible security flaws) but ultimately results in substantially better products. I can't tell you how many times I've done the fine-toothed-comb routine on code and found easy ways to speed things up, or just realized that there was a better way to do it.

The Windows world has, unfortunately, trained us to see system resources as effectively infinite. Hey, system too slow? Swapping too much? Just buy a faster CPU or more RAM. No problem. Who cares if your code takes five times as much memory as a more efficient (but harder to write) algorithm would. It works, doesn't it? Microsoft has always marketed its software to users with the latest, greatest hardware and has never exhibited any qualms about adding "features" (desirable or otherwise) that require user to replace their equipment. The problem for the Open Source crowd, however, is that widespread adoption of alternative environments will be slowed or killed if those environments can't offer similar features, functions and, yes, resource-hungry eye candy. But there's always room for improvement.

Re:This is a realy good idea

[Bohemoth2]

It still doesn't explain the difference between an enviroment and a window manager. It just says an eviroment is sort of like a WM but with added functions. What does one do that the other doesnt?

And what does X do? I doubt that it can tranfer the screen image pixel by pixel. So it must be incharge
of graphial elements too right?

Next Bounties

[buckhead_buddy]

And the next set of bounties will be offered for cleaning up bugs introduced by rapidly encouraging people motivated only by money to make changes to Gnome without fully considering the ramifications of these memory reductions. :-)

Re:Next Bounties

[Rahga]

Well, those patches would no only have to pass scruitiny by those offering the bounties, but more importantly, the package maintainers as well. I'm not concerned.

Feasable Career?

[dingo]

I wonder if there will ever be enough bounty's on offer to make a career out of it.

I can just see all the coder bounty hunters with their boba fett helmets on.

Re:Feasable Career?

[skraps]

I wonder if there will ever be enough bounty's on offer to make a career out of it.

Not at $100 or $200 a pop, notta chance. I think these are mostly to encourage the existing gnome hackers to attack some less-than-glamorous problems they would rather not do normally. I doubt we'll ever see a wild wild west bounty hunter who just roams around between vastly different projects. If the improvements were that easy to make, someone already on the team would just make them instead of giving up money. If they aren't that easy, like these, then you wouldn't be able to solve enough of them to pay your rent.

Re:Feasable Career?

[vkewstv]

I wouldn't have enough money to live from those bounties even if I'd fix all these assigned bugs in a month.

Cheap work power for Novell.

Re:Feasable Career?

[xenocide2]

Sure, there are guys who wander the wild west of California. They're called independent contractors.

Re:Feasable Career?

[drsquare]

I don't know if anyone's willing to throw that much money at something that's supposed to be 'free', i.e. done for pleasure in your own time. And at $200 a time, you'd have to do like one a week to make a proper living out of it. Are there that many projects worthy of putting bounties on that could be completed by a single person in a week?

But on the bright side, there'd be no income tax or anything, as you'd be effectively unemployed.

Re:Feasable Career?

[DarkTempes]

errr, $200 would be exactly enough to pay my months rent...
now food, that would still be a small problem.
oh and the power and water bills.

Re:Feasable Career?

[skraps]

Holy crap where do you live for $200/month?

Re:Feasable Career?

[DarkTempes]

in a decent apartment in good old baton rouge, louisiana; birthplace of serial killers and rapists

Re:Feasable Career?

[greenrd]

But on the bright side, there'd be no income tax or anything, as you'd be effectively unemployed.

No, you wouldn't. Bounties are still income for work done, so they'd still be taxable, as far as I can see.

Unless you mean "you'd be earning so little you'd be effectively unemployed" - in which case, I agree with you - you might not make enough to start paying any income tax, depending on your jurisdiction.

Re:Feasable Career?

[drsquare]

No, I mean that it would be cash in hand, i.e. you wouldn't have to declare any income.

gnome-terminal

[karmaflux]

Gnome-terminal is going to make someone ridiculously wealthy. Seriously, there's so much room for optimization that a good coder will be able to retire off that one program.

Re:gnome-terminal

[schleyfox]

aterm is GPL, right? excellent

1. Rip out gnome-terminal and piss on it
2, slide xterm or aterm into its place
3. Profit?

Re:gnome-terminal

[b374]

From TFA:

Aivars Kalvans has submitted two great patches on bugzilla. One of them cuts 250 kb of malloc'ing for each tab you open in gnome-terminal. This will save me at least 5 MB on my desktop. It is still pretty messy (it was 500 kb per tab before his patch), and much worse than konsole (which takes 50 kb per tab).

Re:gnome-terminal

[serviscope_minor]

Gnome-terminal is going to make someone ridiculously wealthy. Seriously, there's so much room for optimization that a good coder will be able to retire off that one program.

I call bullshit. I've benchmarked a few terminals, since sometimes my programs spew out tons of crap. Gnome terminal won in terms of speed (as long as you don't use antialiased fonts). rxvt was not far behind. XTerm was pitiful, especially if you have a large scollback buffer. KTerm was far behing xterm, unless XTerm has a large buffer, since it seems to slow down linearly with buffer size.

To my real suprise gnome-terminal won.

Re:gnome-terminal

[dhfoo]

Go to edit->keyboard shortcuts and tick the "disable menu shortcut key" box. Where's my bounty? Cheers

Re:gnome-terminal

[Deagol]

Screw the tabs. Give me a lean term window and I'll run screen for my multi-term needs. Tabs, what a lame idea for a terminal program.

Re:gnome-terminal

[martinde]

> KTerm was far behing xterm, unless XTerm has a large buffer, since it seems to slow down linearly with buffer size.

If by "KTerm" you mean Konsole, I will say that it was only recently that I could switch to Konsole - probably KDE 3.2.x because it used to be too slow. It's now indistinguishable compared to xterm in my opinion. Mapping multiple sessions to ALT-F1-F6 like the linux console inside of konsole makes it more functional than xterm... I've switched for good.

(Although for remote sessions I've still be using xterm. Any good tips for remote konsoles, anyone?)

Re:gnome-terminal

[drinkypoo]

I vehemently disagree, especially if it would integrate with screen. Typing ^aa to go to the beginning of a line all the time is tiresome.

Re:gnome-terminal

[_Sprocket_]

I'm not so sure. I use both Konsole and Screen regularly. Though, to tell you the truth... I'm not entirely sure why. And if I had to give up one or the other, it would definately be the tabs. But having said all that... if Screen fit all situations, one would think I'd be using only Screen.

Re:gnome-terminal

[pjrc]

I've benchmarked a few terminals, .... Gnome terminal won in terms of speed

Obviously, your benchmarks aren't anything like the tests in this thread, where rxvt-unicode is MANY times faster than gnome terminal.

Re:gnome-terminal

[Langley]

Ever thought of remapping your screen escape key-sequence?

Try this in your .screenrc:
escape ^\\\

Now Ctrl-\ can be used to invoke screen commands, and Ctrl-a works like it used to.

Re:gnome-terminal

[Abcd1234]

Indeed. In fact, in my experience, good ol' xterm is *vastly* quicker than gnome-terminal. Simple test: take a gnome-terminal, make it quite large (130x50 will do), then load up a text file in less, go to the end, and start scrolling backward, and watch gnome-terminal choke.

Re:gnome-terminal

[Storlek]

Now Ctrl-\ can be used to invoke screen commands ... and when you forget you're not running screen, you hit ^\ c to open a new screen and inadvertently cause whatever you're doing to dump core. Ctrl-] might be a better choice, since it's not mapped to "scream and die" by default.

Re:gnome-terminal

[cerberusss]

Why not run XFCE and use Konsole or Gnome-Terminal? You don't need the whole desktop environment for those programs.

Old hardware with new Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

What is your experience with new Linux on old hardware? I now believe that older Linux versions should be used; or, one of the light distros.

On a dual boot P233 with 64MB of RAM:
Win XP feels less sluggish than 2.6 with gnome.
The newer Linux stuff just requires more memory.

Re:Old hardware with new Linux

[rsheridan6]

I installed Linux on a similar machine, my mom's ancient emachines piece of crap. Gnome runs, but it's just not suitable for use on an ancient box like that. Use xfce or icewm if you want something sort of windows-esque that's not so slow, or fluxbox is even faster if you're not afraid to try a non-windows-like window manager. But forget gnome or KDE unless you get a real computer.

Re:Old hardware with new Linux

[Mystic0]

...that doesn't stop him from being accurate though.

Re:Old hardware with new Linux

[HermanAB]

IceWM or BlackBox will get you going.

Re:Old hardware with new Linux

[cynyr]

my install on my P100 with 192MB ram feels just fine, just to clarify i usually only have 2-4MB free and i'm running mysql, apache, nfs, smbd, ssd and a few other things.... i also do not have X installed :-) probably why it feels fine :-D

Novell...

[cs02rm0]

...seem to be doing great stuff for the Gnome community and Linux in general more and more.

I know they have a vested interest but this is great stuff.

bloat in gnome...

[mickyflynn]

'cause a bloated gnome is just a hobbit... which is actually cooler.

Fine, give them money, but...

[TapioNuut]

Offering money is a great way of getting people interested in many things, but do the people who are capable of creating valuable bug reports and/or patches really need these bounties?

I wonder how many crappy bug reports and patches are to be submitted because of the "easy" money being given. I do believe that the bounties will go to the right people and for the right reasons, but more the crap, the more it takes work to find the gems.

Nevertheless, it's about time to unbloat Gnome.

Re:Fine, give them money, but...

[thenextpresident]

Except you don't get the money just for coming up with something. It has to be selected, which means other people have to approve it. Which means it has to be good.

"I wonder how many crappy bug reports and patches are to be submitted because of the "easy" money being given."

0. Just because you submit a bug report doesn't mean it becomes a bounty.

Re:Fine, give them money, but...

[rbarreira]

I think the grandparent meant just this - because of the money prize, there can be a flood of people who submit crappy bug reports and patches, in order to try their luck.

This would obviously be bad, if it happened. I don't think it will be that much of a problem, though :)

Open Source Bloat

[JamesP]

Sometimes I feel Open Source stuff is even more bloated than their Closed Source counterparts...

I have a machine at work that struggles to run XFCE with only 256Mb of memory.

Windows XP runs fine with that... I know, I know, security sucks, blah, blah, but!

Open Source used to be pretty good at reducing bloat, but nowadays...

Re:Open Source Bloat

[ray-auch]

This isn't a new thing.

The bloat reputation (in some cases) goes back to the beginnning of the Free Software movement, before Open Source even started.

Proof ? - EMACS.

That's "Eight Megs And Constantly Swapping" for those still in daipers when eight megs was a stupendous amount of memory...

Re:Open Source Bloat

[Mathiasdm]

XFCE running slow with 256 Mb of memory? What are you smoking?

I run XFCE with 64 Mb RAM and it works perfectly. I won't even consider WinXP with that little RAM.

Re:Open Source Bloat

[XO]

as an aside, I'm really hating the 2 minute post timeout, as it makes it more difficult to make several comments in different threads on discussions that I particularly enjoy. oh well.

hee hee hee I hadn't heard that about EMACS, but that's because i've been a 'vi' man since Unix System III was the big bad system. (I was about.. uh.. 10 then, so out of diapers.. hah)

The key combinations required of EMACS often seem to require six fingers per hand, both hands in use, and then.. why.. on earth.. would a text editor.. have the ability to be used as an IRC client? *shakes head*

Re:Open Source Bloat

[XO]

Hmm. I run XFCE4 fairly decently in 128MB, so long as I continue using Opera 8 as a browser, and don't want to load Mozilla or Firefox.
Particularly now that the gaim memory leaks were apparently solved.

Re:Open Source Bloat

[SirBruce]

That's why another acronym for EMACS at the time was "Escape-Meta-Alt-Control-Shift" Bruce

Re:Open Source Bloat

[IamTheRealMike]

It used to be that "open source" desktops were missing a lot of functionality. As it was added to catch up with Windows/MacOS (and in some cases, exceed it) the resource requirements went up too.

It's not like the open source tooth fairy magically makes people write tighter code, after all.

It'll get better soon, as the most recent Linux desktops are getting pretty mature these days. While they still have issues with hardware/software compatibility, in the absolute modern GNOMEs are pretty good and the list of "Huge Must-Fix Problems" is vanishingly small. At that point polish and optimisation comes to the forefront.

Re:Open Source Bloat

[ckaminski]

If your editor can suffice as a windows manager, it's overengineered.

Re:Open Source Bloat

[XO]

So why is there an EMACS, and not just an Elisp?

Why would you want to extend your text editor into so many different things?

It makes no SENSE!

Novell's attitude towards Linux desktop

[unixmaster]

As you can see from Novell's actions they are totally biased towards Gnome but still they make more money out of Suse distribution which uses KDE extensively.

Feel the irony?

They should instead be desktop neutral and support KDE developers too...

Re:Novell's attitude towards Linux desktop

[unixmaster]

KDE would develop in a faster rate if corporations like Novell support it more. There are many big plans for KDE4 but without corporate support it just takes more time to implement those.

Re:Novell's attitude towards Linux desktop

[digidave]

It's not irony. It seems quite obvious that they are preparing to make Gnome the default desktop in Suse. I imagine while they're improving Gnome they're also porting all their configuration tools to work with it.

Re:Novell's attitude towards Linux desktop

[schleyfox]

I believe that QT scares them, I can definitely see where having the LGPL GTK could have an advantage over dual licenced QT. I don't know it just almost fits.
(This is not an insult at QT, which is a fine library, but just not as free for everyone as GTK)

Re:Novell's attitude towards Linux desktop

[bhalo05]

I'm the parent poster, I was not logged in. I completely agree with you, my message was in part irony. Of course they're not supporting the better desktop but the one they fit them most. It's a shame, but this is starting to look more and more like one of those frequent times where the most advanced product is not the one massively used becaused they're pushing another with better marketing and more resources.

Re:Novell's attitude towards Linux desktop

[Anonymous Coward]

The key question is, why should Novell support it? Anything built with Qt needs to either be open source or be licensed to TrollTech. This isn't a big deal for Novell's own projects but when they're pushing a Novell libraries that have to be used by outside developers, they're going to want to base it on something that doesn't put additional licensing burdens on developers (Win32 development doesn't carry licensing costs).

If GNOME didn't exist, they'd likely put their backing on GNUstep or (god help us) Motif.

Stuff like Mono, which is heavily GNOME centric and runs on Win32/Linux/MacOSX, only makes the decision easier. They can plug "write-once-run-anywhere" for Novel libraries.

Of course, things may change if TrollTech found a way to make money by relicensing Qt to LGPL (or modified GPL as in Classpath) and provided seemless Java binding that can be used with GCJ and other free Java tools.

OTOH, if corporations focused on KDE, it would likely be optimized for simplified as GNOME is (and likely dump duplicate works like KOffice in favour of OpenOffice and Konq in favour of Firefox for browsing the way Epiphany/Gnumeric/Abiword is shoved in the background for more modern GNOME distributions). The KDE community is strongly against such moves, so even with these changes they may end up going back to GNOME because GNOME's culture is very receptive to KISS elegance.

So in the end, there are several non-technical issues why corps prefer GNOME.

No big deal. Lack of corporate support hasn't stopped GNUstep development and it would stop KDE development.

Re:Novell's attitude towards Linux desktop

[10Ghz]

It might be true that Gnome gets more corporate backing that KDE does. Yet it seems to me that even with all that money and resources being thrown at Gnome, they can only keep up with KDE, not surpass it. Maybe KDE has better design, maybe their hackers are simply better, I don't know. But it seems that they do not need all those resources to compete with Gnome, whereas Gnome seems to need the resources of Novell/Ximian, Red Hat and other just to be able to compete with KDE.

I can't help but wonder what would happen if those resources were invested in KDE, instead of Gnome...

Re:Novell's attitude towards Linux desktop

[selectspec]

They bought Ximian which employs the key Gnome project managers.

Re:Novell's attitude towards Linux desktop

[bhalo05]

Of course, quality is measured by sheer numbers. That's why we all use Windows, right?

Re:Novell's attitude towards Linux desktop

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem with GNOME is it's broken framework that KDE doesn't have.

Example:

GTK+ Window, BonoboUI Window, GnomeUI Window. GNOME is currently stuffed with applications that is either written by using one of these UI creating libraries. The last two named ones should finally and forever made deprecated otherwise people keep continuing writing stuff that look, interact and behave differently than others.

Ever tried to open a BonoboUI Window application on GNOME and then one with a GTK+ Window or a GnomeUI Window ? Look close to the Windows itself and you will notice something.

Another issue is hardcoded GUI elements or an improper GLADE tool to create broken *.glade files (well not mostly broken but some elements that you can not alter with the GUI you might get different or wrong properties written).

GNOME is also a memoryhog by depending on more and more stuff and libraries. Well I can write and write and write even more stuff and could easily add countless of things.

The benefits in KDE here is that they have a constant UI system build up on *.moc files, the GUI's generated are generated out of one system. They deal with objects and nice plugins system and makes it easy for application writers to inherit these objects and plugins into other applications.

I recently had the pain to remove all the DEPRECATED shit in my application. What was valid during GNOME 2.2 and 2.4 got drastically changed and stuff that initially was ok to use got marked deprecated and I somehow was forced to change a huge leap of code in my programm only to play catchup with the nowadays new requirements. Changed my application from BonoboUI to use plain GTK+ which took me quite some work to remove all embedded BonoboUI controls and have them replaced with individual widgets that the GTKUIManager can't deal with and and and. Had to remove the old GTKEntry in favor of the new GTKComboBox where I can not tie a GList to it anymore and thus had to create a new Tree system for and so on.

We developers for GNOME 3rd party apps are permanently kept in catching up in the DEPRECATION process rather than getting forward in what we want to achieve with the tools. A clear sign that the Framework in GNOME is kinda hosed and requires a lot of work to get replaced piece for piece.

Re:Novell's attitude towards Linux desktop

[m50d]

KDE is far more popular than gnome. (by votes, and by number of distros using it as default)

Re:Novell's attitude towards Linux desktop

[m50d]

I think it's mostly pragmatism. KDE doesn't make boneheaded decisions out of zealotry or theoretical merits. And KDE people seem not to get as attached to their bad decisions as GNOME people, if they made a mistake they will fix it.

Re:Novell's attitude towards Linux desktop

[IamTheRealMike]

Huh? You clearly never read the threads where they were considering writing their own multimedia framework from scratch because GStreamer wasn't written in C++.

I don't get where all this stuff about "KDE doing more with less" is coming from. When I see GNOME I see a polished desktop that I'd actually give my friends and family and not feel embarassed. It's slick, easy to use, and pretty fast. Frameworks and APIs are just means to an end: in this case, it seems KDE lost sight of that and put so much effort into the APIs that they became more important than the desktop did. I mean, look at the most recent releases - they've been talking about cleaning up the control center for years, longer than I've been using Linux in fact, yet it never gets done.

Re:Novell's attitude towards Linux desktop

[bhalo05]

I don't get where all this stuff about "KDE doing more with less" is coming from. When I see GNOME I see a polished desktop that I'd actually give my friends and family and not feel embarassed.

It comes from many users who miss KDE integration and features in Gnome, as simple as that.

Re:Novell's attitude towards Linux desktop

[10Ghz]

Most certainly not.

yes, you could say that KDE had better design. Gnome has only recently started to be technologically where KDE has been since 2.x-days! Kparts, DCOP, KIO-slaves etc. etc. Those have been around KDE for a long time and they are widely used. It seems to me that comparable stuff in Gnome are not as widely used, or they are so recent developements that they haven't yset gained any foothold inside Gnome. regardless: they have been in KDE for a long time, and are widely used.

Yes, I maintain that the two desktops progress at a more or less similar pace. Difference is that Gnome has resources of Ximian/Novell, Red Hat, Sun and others at it's disposal, whereas KDE is predominantly a volunteer-effort. How do you explain the fact that the two progress at an equal pace, even though one of them has huge amount of resources at it's disposal, whereas other does not? If Gnome has a better design (as you claim), and huge amounts of resources being thrown at it (something not done for KDE), why doesn't Gnome walk all over KDE? The two seem to progress at an equal pace. According to your logic, Gnome should rule the desktop by now, with KDE withering in to irrelevancy. Unfortunately for you, that has not happened. Why is that? There seems to be something missing from your argument.

I also saw you complain about KDE's developement-methods in your other post. I haven't seen any of that. They seem to have steady releases, with each release being better than the last one. I haven't seen any major slowdowns or the like. I really don't see what your point is.

Re:Novell's attitude towards Linux desktop

[10Ghz]

GNOME has to maintain both Gtk+

uh, no. GTK+ is maintained by the GTK+-guys. And GTK+ was there when Gnome was born, it's not like they had to come up with yet another toolkit for their desktop.

and has had to do it with more "committee" involvement

How is that different from KDE? KDE has NO real leader, perceived or otherwise. there is no dictator who decides anything.

there is no central Gtk+ company

And you could say that there is no central KDE-company like Ximian, Red Hat or Sun. So what's your point?

If GNOME has caught up to KDE as you've implied, it either means GNOME development is faster

What happened back when the two projects were born is more or less irrelevant these days. And besides, I do not think Gnome has caught up with KDE. The two progress more or less at same speed, but that does not mean that Gnome has caught up with KDE. KDE still has (IMO) the technological edge. I would guess that Gnome is technologically about where KDE 2.2-3.0 was.

Re:Novell's attitude towards Linux desktop

[10Ghz]

You clearly never read the threads where they were considering writing their own multimedia framework from scratch because GStreamer wasn't written in C++.

AFAIK, they are still debating as to what multimedia-framework to use in 4.0. Gstreamer has alot going for it, but it's being written in C instead of C++ is a hindrance.

Frameworks and APIs are just means to an end: in this case, it seems KDE lost sight of that and put so much effort into the APIs that they became more important than the desktop did.

You mean stuff like DCOP, Kparts and KIO-slaves? I for one use them every day. I simply do not see stuff like that in Gnome. Or, if it's there, it's not being used. KDE has technology that lets the user get job done. And it lets developers make their apps better. And both users and developers take advantage of that technology. And that results in better desktop. So I really fail to see the problem in trying to come up with kick-ass API's and frameworks.

they've been talking about cleaning up the control center for years, longer than I've been using Linux in fact, yet it never gets done.

KDE is pretty conservative with changes like that. They do not want to disprupt the desktop too much (unlike Gnome-hackers, who freely do stuff like switch to spatial filemanagement in a minor release...). But rejoice: you do have alternative method of accessing the settings (at least in 3.3 and onwards)! Fire up Konqueror, type "settings:/" in the location-bar, and you can change the settings of your system. No need to use the control center. Changing the actual control-center will propably take place in 4.0.

Re:Novell's attitude towards Linux desktop

[quigonn]

Maybe KDE has better design ...
Most certainly not.

Most certainly _yes_. They've got the concept of kioslaves, they have DCOP, they have great interoperation between the applications. Ever seen the integration of KMail, aKregate, KNode and the KDE address book (forgot the name)? It's awesome. And this is the kind of features that Gnome is mostly lacking. Don't get me wrong, I personally prefer using Gnome to using KDE, but from the technical point of view, KDE is definitely leaps ahead of Gnome, and they achieved an increased productivity compared to Gnome because they're using an object-oriented language and toolkit.

Re:Novell's attitude towards Linux desktop

[Klivian]

You mean like the way GNOME started to write their own multimedia framework from scratch becouse aRts was written in C++?

Re:Novell's attitude towards Linux desktop

[zsau]

I can't help but wonder what would happen if those resources were invested in KDE, instead of Gnome...

I know you're just trolling (or at least, painting an opinion as fact) but I'll bite anyway.

If the resources invested in Gnome were invested in KDE, then KDE would be Gnome and Gnome would be KDE. Investors like the business-friendly environment of Gnome, and the easyy-to-use interface. That's what their money would make it become. The opposite is true of the free KDE developers.

Re:Novell's attitude towards Linux desktop

[Ragica]

GStreamer is a project independent of Gnome. The G in front of the name does not always automatically mean GNU or Gnome. Gnome just happens to use it; major KDE apps can use it as well.

There was some talk of putting gstreamer in KDE 4. I'm not sure of the status of this; I have also heard that KDE is going to great a multimedia engine framework that can work better with multiple engines...

Re:Novell's attitude towards Linux desktop

[Ragica]

Not to belittle TrollTech's amazing contribution, but all indications from my non-expert perspective are that things would continue quite nicely. The GPL Qt is, from all I've heard, exceptionally well organized and engineered... and has amazing documentation.

An argument might be made that things would go even faster (and they are already amazing fast) for KDE if the team got control of GPL Qt development. But things are going nicely as they are.

Philosophically the partnership between KDE and Qt seems (again, just my ignorant opinion) quite ideal however. Unlike the various Gnome corporate sponsors, who seem to me to be always mostly interested in "patching things up" in various areas, the focus of Qt to commercial demands at designing a strong design and key features has provided KDE an awesome base.

By the way TrollTech is GPL'ing the new Windows version... so once again, just like when they GPL'd the X version, there is one less argument against Qt... though that argument has always been mostly irrelevant and just a point of political pique. (And i see ignorant people on this thread still making the old non-GPL throat warbling FUD...)

Other tidbits... QTopia 2.1 is open source. Opera is the fastest browser. Apple chose KHTML over Gecko. SuSe rocks... but personally i use Gentoo and FreeBSD.

Re:Novell's attitude towards Linux desktop

[Filmwatcher888]

They are being "desktop neutral". by trying to lift GNOME's memory footprint to the same level as KDE, both products end up using the same amount of resources. Then, Novell could sign up _both_ KDE and GNOME fans.

Re:Novell's attitude towards Linux desktop

[fungai]

nat friedman said on the linux link tech show that suse wil move to gnome... it was in an interview that was linked to slashdot about a week or 2 ago.

Re:Novell's attitude towards Linux desktop

[10Ghz]

There isn't a company dedicated to maintaining GTK+. There is a company dedicated to maintaining Qt.

So what? Why is that relevant? There is a company dedicated to improving Gnome (Ximian), KDE does not have such company. Why is that fact irrelevant?

Re:Novell's attitude towards Linux desktop

[m50d]

If there was such a thread (and I am subscribed to kde-multimedia and didn't see it) I can't imagine it being about anything other than the practical problems mixing C and C++ causes. The primary, in fact pretty much only, reason I saw for not adopting gstreamer was its lack of stability, which is still a concern.

Anyway, the proof of the pudding is in what they actually do, and kde looks to be about to adopt gstreamer. Even if they don't, they have adopted plenty of gnome technologies e.g. DBUS, either because they are superior or simply for integration. Wheras I can't find a single case where gnome has adopted a kde technology. Gnome went beyond mere discussion and wrote esd from scratch because they didn't want to use arts.

The stuff is coming from the users who see it. I have actually tried my family on both, and those who notice prefer kde. As do I, because it looks far nicer and is much better integrated. Look at Linux Format's review of gnome 2.8 - they give it a high rating and the reviewer talks about having overtaken kde, yet if you read the whole thing all of the improvements he lists are things which have been in kde from 3.2 or earlier. And yet gnome is the only desktop which publicly recieves corporate support.

The APIs may get more attention but it has paid off. Gnome has three inconsistent apis to use for your widgets, and a lot of cruft and a not insignificant performance hit that comes from them. KDE has only one Right Way to do anything, but the APIs that exist are clean and very useable. Remember the mozilla port in 48 hours? And you can do more with them. So people build the apps, and they are good. Things like K3b; an independent project that works very well, looks good and is integrated properly.

Re:Novell's attitude towards Linux desktop

[m50d]

Not on kde.org, on that independent windowmanager listing site. It didn't win, but kde was well above gnome. And have you bothered to actually look at Novell's offerings? Because I think you'll find they are suse and ship with KDE as the primary desktop, although gnome is also supported. (Interestingly, kde distros tend to support gnome but gnome ones do all they can to avoid including kde. I'm biased but the obvious explanation is that they're afraid to give their users the choice). Even if you look at number of users on primarily kde distros compared to those on gnome distros, I think you'll find they come out ahead.

Re:Novell's attitude towards Linux desktop

[10Ghz]

it doesn't change why KDE has had a head-start compared with GNOME.

Yep it did. It was started before Gnome was started. But at this point, that difference is more or less irrelevant. Few moths difference back then is irrelevant today, since both desktops have thousands of man-years of developement behind them.

ou seem to be stuck in a "GNOME vs KDE" flamewar mentality. Grow the fuck up.

Pot, meet ketttle. Kettle, this is pot.

Re:Novell's attitude towards Linux desktop

[m50d]

Suse professional still ships with kde, and they have publicly stated that they remain committed to supporting it.

I don't know about crazed zealots, but how do you suggest I sample other than looking at online registrations and polls? They may be a bit biased against business users, but I'm pretty sure most distros suggest people register and not very many home users do either. If you go for big publicised migrations like Munich you're going to be far more heavily biased in favour of the "business" distros. To the best of my knowledge there haven't been any large-scale "which OS do you use" surveys other than on the web.

Re:Novell's attitude towards Linux desktop

[m50d]

Oh yes. Because looking exclusively at what big businesses are selling to other businesses and ignoring what home users choose for themselves will really give a fair and balanced picture of which desktop the users prefer.

Re:Novell's attitude towards Linux desktop

[m50d]

If they paid money for the support, they are likely to have taken whatever the people offering the support are offering them. Businesses are unlikely to care whether they are using gnome or kde, they care about the support and will do as the support people care. Home users are the ones who are actually choosing for themselves the OS they want to run. The actual users will likely look at both desktops and try them, and see what they prefer. Corporate users will likely take what they are given - you don't mess with the software on a corporate machine, you get on with working with it. And the fact you're resorting to insults shows you know you've lost the argument.

Re:Novell's attitude towards Linux desktop

[m50d]

I have hard data on commercial users. You have a webpoll that, even if you take it at face value (a ridiculous notion given how hopelessly unreliable they are), shows KDE just a little bit ahead. Christ you're a pathetic zealot.

Not just a little bit, quite a way ahead. 181-70 in fact.

Not met a lot of real users then, have you? You do realise that you're talking a complete load of bollocks -- as anyone familiar with Microsoft's near-total dominance of the desktop will testify.

Yes I have. Sure many home users don't fiddle that much. But they will try different types of software, they will at least look at some alternatives for some things they do. I defy you to find a home machine where the user hasn't installed at least one piece of software since it was set up for them. Yet I can show you plenty of corporate machines where that's the case.

You aren't making an argument. You are stating that you believe KDE is more popular... based entirely on FAITH. You have nothing to back up your statements of faith other than assertations that fly in the face of fact. It's rather pathetic really.

I have webpolls and lists of distros. Yes, not the most reliable of data, but it's some. You claim you have solid evidence for commercial users, which I haven't seen, and are claiming that this better reflects user preferences than what people vote for and what distributions ship.

Re:horrible idea

[BenjyD]

Yeah, because GNOME is only developed by volunteer hermits living in caves at the moment. It's not like there are big companies paying developers' salaries to work on it or anything.

It's GPL therefore it's Free software. Whether people are paid to work on it or do it out of the goodness of their heart doesn't matter as long as their contributions are GPL.

motivation or reward?

[jd142]

Is this motivation for people to find the bugs, i.e., there's some programmer out there thinking, "Hmm, if I do this and this, then Gnome will run three times as fast. Oh well, I'm a KDE supporter so I don't care." Or is this a way to reward all of those people who do care about Gnome and are working on it by giving them a specific area to concentrate on and then rewarding them for their hard work, in other words some programmer thinking, "Hmm, I've got some free time and I can either work on fixing eyecandy or fixing memory leaks. Guess I'll fix the memory leaks first and get a reward."

Everyone has been assuming that this is pure motivation, appealing to the greedy nature of people who aren't already contributing. I don't think that's the case. Generally speaking, those people who are good programmers and know the code well enough to actually identify and fix problem areas are probably already doing so. This "bounty" seems to be more a way of rewarding them and helping to give them a list of priorities.

Re:motivation or reward?

[Steve Cowan]

...or, maybe they're trying to reduce the bloat in Gnome.

Re:horrible idea

[mattyrobinson69]

the kernel development is funded by the OSDL, some are under the direct employ of redhat, and probably other companies (maybe novel, IBM, im not sure)

trolltech is a company that makes QT, and thats duel licensed, one license being GPL.

the firefox lead developer is employed by google.

many large opensource projects have people being paid to develop them fulltime, its a good thing because the source stays open.

eugenia?

[hitmark]

not the eugenia from osnews now is it?

Re:I love this

[salimma]

Apple does make OS X go faster at every release between 10.0 and 10.3 (and 10.4 should follow in the same path, minus the overhead of indexing files for Spotlight, but plus the performance benefit of CoreImage shifting a lot of graphical effects to the graphics card when supported).

Yes, Darwin the base OS is open-source, but a lot of the improvements are in the layers they build on top of that.

Perhaps they want to move away from KDE?

[glrotate]

This would be a good way of paving the way.

Re:horrible idea

[Fishead]

What if someone wants to work on an OSS project, yet finances won't allow them? I think this is great.

If I was a financially troubled programmer (heck, if I was a programmer at all) I would be interested in taking on one of these projects not only because of the benifit to the community, but the extra cash can help programmers with such real world necessities as WoW registrations.

This can only be good

[schleyfox]

I like this, from my observations it alwasy appears that OSS is a bit heavy on the memory while closed source tends to be heavier on harddrive and processor dependent (not to say it is bloat free, far from it). That said, I run Gnome 2.8 on my old Pentium 2 laptop with 128mb of RAM. It actually works decently well, other than the screen refreshes which can use up all my processor and still take a few days :) . It is quite usable though and future versions of gnome will hopefully perform even better. Thank You Novell

Re:This can only be good

[spitefulcrow]

Are you referring to the fact that "top" and "free" will always show almost all of your memory being used on a Linux system? This is because Linux caches as much data as it can to avoid accessing the even-more-expensive-and-slower-than-RAM hard disks and optical drives.

Re:This can only be good

[XO]

That comment is incredibly out of date. My web server typically has 64+MB of it's 384MB free at any given time (even when being pounded by a Fark photoshop contest entry). On the other hand, my desktop has 128MB and is almost always 100+MB into the swap file at any given time. Thanks!

Time and space complexity concerns

[rbrito]

Now, it seems that (finally) developers are looking at resources that our programs use.

Unfortunately, for many in developing countries (like me, here in Brazil) having a computer filled with RAM and with the fastest processor available on the market isn't an option.

For instance, my desktop has a Duron 600MHz with 256MB of RAM. That's the fastest computer to which I have access here and it is some years old, but still working fine.

I can't say how happy I am with this bounty for optimization of memory.

In Computer Science we always have this concern with both time and space complexity and it seems that if Free Software developers start caring about good data structures and good algorithms (and avoid layers and layers and layers of abstraction over and over), we can actually use our computers more efficiently.

Again, this is especially important for those who have to use computers of two or three generations ago.

A welcome movement indeed.

P.S.: If you have never felt the need for less memory comsumption, then you won't probably understand how important this project is and probably this post makes little sense to you.

Re:I love this

[youngerpants]

I can remember a very recent one, W2K3 server; by cutting out the eye-candy and switching services off by default W2K3 server runs on significantly less resource than XP.

I admit, not enough so that I would actually want to run windows as a server, but Microsofts strength is in usability, and that means a GUI, which means resource hogging

Perfect Labor Capital Market

[Doc Ruby]

We might finally have the open source capitalism model that kills these "commie" snipes dead, and leaves proprietary competitors dead in the water. Offer to employ programmers by buying their labor in a contest! Leverage the open source on the Net to get as many job applicants as possible, who submit the finished work, then give the "job" to only a single winner whose superior work is used. The losers need only inspect the open source of the next version for any of their content to keep the process honest.

This creates parity for labor in the capital markets. Programmers can sell their labor as a packaged product, just as vendors can resell the programs to consumers. Programmers can market their code with better documentation, APIs and popular features. While integrators like Novell can get access to the labor market, without risking that the labor they're buying is better at job interviews than at delivering on deadline.

There is an issue of the "waste" of the losers' code submissions. But since these projects are open source, the losers can fork the project and compete with it. If the losers are really better, they can compete better with the original project - which itself might be forked by the original contest sponsor. Brand equity will determine winners in the long run, but the open source lets brand equity be earned by persistent quality, as determined by the consumer market, rather than the funder of the code.

Ladies and gentlemen, start your engines!

Re:Perfect Labor Capital Market

[hsoft]

1. Create a "contest" for some code.
2. Take none of them, or take a fake submission you created yourself
3. Let the fool create a forked project
4. Get the code for free (It's open source right?) and integrate it in the project.
5. Profit!

Re:Perfect Labor Capital Market

[Doc Ruby]

How would you integrate it into the project, without publishing it, and getting caught? If you published your own code, why would you bother recruiting others' code (unless yours were actually better)?

Re:Perfect Labor Capital Market

[hsoft]

There is no need to hide the fact that you took the code. It is perfectly legal and ethical to take GPLed code and integrate it into another GPLed project.

Thus, what I'm saying is that to get a guy to create GPLed code for you for free, you only have to start a "contest", don't take the guy's submission, wait until he forks your project with the code he created for the "contest", and integrate that code in your own project. Perfectly legal and ethical, since your project is also GPL, and you didn't pay a penny for that code.

Re:Perfect Labor Capital Market

[hsoft]

I guess I didn't make myself clear enough. Let's go with an example:

- CompanyA has a GPL project ProjectA.
- CompanyA wants to add a feature to ProjectA, and starts a "contest"
- DeveloperA creates some great code, and submit it to CompanyA for the "contest"
- CompanyA asks one of it's developers to create a fake entry to the "contest"
- CompanyA chooses the fake entry as the winner.
- DeveloperA, seeing that his code hasn't been chosen, forks ProjectA, and name the forked project ProjectB
- CompanyA, seeing the GPL ProjectB, take a look at it, find the code create by DeveloperA in ProjectB, take that code, and integrate it to projectA.

Now this was perfectly legal because CompanyA didn't use the DeveloperA submission, it used ProjectB (a GPL project) code. with GPL, you CAN'T restrict the use of the code. Thus, if DeveloperA releases the code under GPL, *anybody* can use it, including CompanyA. Free developer labor!

Re:Perfect Labor Capital Market

[Knuckles]

Congrats, you just killed the reputation of the company

Re:Perfect Labor Capital Market

[Spectra72]

I don't have to publish the source unless I distribute. I can take all the GPL code I want, make all the changes I want, but as long as I don't distribute the resulting work, I don't have to publish jack or squat. I can simply enjoy all the benefits in-house. This is quite explicit from the FAQ. Now, in terms of Novel and this contest specifically, it's quite obvious that they will be distributing the resulting work, so of course they will be required to publish the source. The contestants will therefore have that protection.

Re:Perfect Labor Capital Market

[Doc Ruby]

The contest rules don't prohibit Novell from getting your code from another publication other than your submission. Of course you can't prohibit them from copying a GPL'd copy on the Net, but you can prohibit them from accepting the copy you submit directly, by requiring they accept it only provided they do not use a copy available elsewhere. OTOH, if you fork the project to include your code upon rejection, why should Novell be different from anyone else in their freedom to use your code, just because they got you to write it?

And your scam is not really free. CompanyA paid to run the fake contest, and even to create the fake winning code. Then they had to wait for DeveloperA to fork the project. Then they had to reevaluate ProjectB, to take the code, and take it.

These bounties are for tiny tasks, which cost less in time and money than the overhead of the scam you describe. DeveloperA is going to fork the project only for code larger than they would risk developing on a no-guarantee bounty. In my original post, I was talking about many losing developers, with a large combined contribution and experience, possibly forking the project.

Re:Perfect Labor Capital Market

[Doc Ruby]

True. Of course, this contest is no different in regards to this scam than any other submission of work that can be "rejected" without payment, but secretly used.

Ditch the dependencies and deprecated code

[Florian]

The bounty is a first good step, but the Gnome project will have to go much deeper to get rid of its bloat.

• Remove all deprecated libraries from the codebase of the Gnome core.

  In its history, Gnome has changed its libraries and subsystems several times, from imlib to gdk-pixbuf, from gnome-canvas to pango, from Corba to Bonobo to possibly Mono, from esd to gstreamer, and so on. Many Gnome apps still use older, deprecated libraries. Get rid of those libraries and port all apps to the standard core API.

• Remove or replace subsystems which never really were useful

  I'm thinking of Bonobo and gnome-vfs here which are not consistently used in Gnome and whose quality and use value is questionable. If their functionality is still needed, it could be replaced by KDE's superior kioslaves and kparts (just as KDE is ditching its arts sound demon in favor of gstreamer)

• Make all demons optional

  Neither Gnome, nor KDE applications should be depending on any desktop-specific userspace demons. Make it possible to deactivate gconf, for example, and have applications read and write configuration files the classical Unix way, by one central switch. Make the sound demon optional, so that audio output could just be written (in old-fashioned, non-overlapping way) to /dev/dsp. Etc.etc. The demons might have some use for some people, for for many, they are just bloat and unnecessary complexity.

Yeah, I know that all would be a Herculean effort. Probably, it makes more sense to start with a lean and clean codebase like XFCE and just bring its usability to Gnome level, instead of cleaning up a bloated mess...

Re:Ditch the dependencies and deprecated code

[Stween]

Yes, what you suggest would be a substantial effort, but it all makes sense.

I particularly like:

Make all demons optional

Neither Gnome, nor KDE applications should be depending on any desktop-specific userspace demons. Make it possible to deactivate gconf, for example, and have applications read and write configuration files the classical Unix way, by one central switch. Make the sound demon optional, so that audio output could just be written (in old-fashioned, non-overlapping way) to /dev/dsp. Etc.etc. The demons might have some use for some people, for for many, they are just bloat and unnecessary complexity.

I always run a fairly minimal setup, due to preference rather than any burning desire to use as few clock cycles as possible. To have settings carry for applications like Gaim I use on a regular basis, I have to run 'gnome-settings-daemon' before starting any application such as this for them to look how I want them to look.

Sure, it's something I put into ~/.xinitrc and forget, but I could have saved myself some time many moons ago when I was figuring out just what the hell I was meant to be running for the application settings to carry.

I'm all for this third and final suggestion of yours :)

Re:Ditch the dependencies and deprecated code

[zeromemory]

Make all demons optional

I'm sure making all demons optional will certainly be a welcome change...

But, seriously, your suggestions seem crazy to me:

Make it possible to deactivate gconf, for example, and have applications read and write configuration files the classical Unix way, by one central switch.

Deactivate gconf with one central switch? Not only would that require rewriting a ton of applications, it would also be incredibly impractical. How would we deal with common variables? Oh yes, let's just make another randomly-named file stored in some random hidden directory and have all daemons read from it. No thanks, I'll stick with gconf.

Make the sound demon optional, so that audio output could just be written (in old-fashioned, non-overlapping way) to /dev/dsp.

You do realize that using the sound daemon is already optional in Gnome, right? Check Applications->Desktop Preferences->Sound. And sure, let's only allow _one_ application to use the sound device at a time. That really sounds like progress...

The demons might have some use for some people, for for many, they are just bloat and unnecessary complexity.

I don't know about bloat, but I find it ironic that the two types of demons you mentioned are usually transparent to a user's experience.

Re:Ditch the dependencies and deprecated code

[BenjyD]

> And sure, let's only allow _one_ application to use the sound device at a time.

With ALSA and DMIX, any sound card can be used by any number of programs at once. I think many cards will do hardware mixing as well. ESD really isn't necessary any more at all.

The processor usage of ALSA vs ESD playing back Oggs is much lower.

Re:Ditch the dependencies and deprecated code

[oliverthered]

'Make all demons optional'

And this will reduce bloat in what way? I fail to see how having a central service instead of each application implementing the services it's self (possibly badly or out of data) is going to cut the bloat and complexity.

Applications are free to cat dev/ramdom > /dev/dsp and screw up my system or assume that my fstab is in standard format and not XML any time they like, today, at no added cost. Or they could use gstreamer and getmntent and do the job properly.

Re:Ditch the dependencies and deprecated code

[moranar]

Yeah, I know that all would be a Herculean effort. Probably, it makes more sense to start with a lean and clean codebase like XFCE and just bring its usability to Gnome level, instead of cleaning up a bloated mess...

NIH Syndrome! NIH syndrome!

Seriously, you seem to imply that it's somehow easier, or even possible, to replicate the insane amount of effort the GNOME and KDE desktops have made in all fronts in a short period of time, rather than pruning the bad fruits, as it were. Suuuure. Not to mention that you're assuming also that a clean, lean codebase actually exists and is scalable to this.

The last time someone did that, they were called "Netscape". Rings any bells?

Re:Ditch the dependencies and deprecated code

[jcupitt65]

That's a good idea. There's also a lot of deprecated API (eg. GtkCTree) which can be removed from the system with just a few -Dsomething during configure. You can turn off the GObject run-time type checks with another -Dthing, which helps speed another 10% or so in my experience.

Bonobo is slowly being removed since GtkUIManager came on the scene. I think gnome-vfs will be around for a while, especially since the new file chooser can plug in to it (I think).

Re:Ditch the dependencies and deprecated code

[cortana]

> Remove all deprecated libraries from the codebase of the Gnome core.

I believe that deprecated libraries tend to be replaced by stubs that backport the new functionality to the old API. Eg, the gnome_sound_play function currently sends a sound file to Esound; when (if) GStreamer becomes part of the platform, the function in libgnome will be replaced with code to do the same thing in GStreamer.

The old APIs can not be removed until the developers decide to make a new release backwards-incompatible--this will be Gnome 3.0 (http://live.gnome.org/ThreePointZero).

> Remove or replace subsystems which never really were useful

Most people I see using Gnome use GnomeVFS all the time. Being able to access files shared on the network without having to be root to mount them is really nice. Even nicer is the sftp virtual filesystem, used for accessing files over SSH's SFTP. If GnomeVFS is to be replaced by something else, it will be by freedesktop.org's D-VFS.

As for Bonobo: I believe panel applets use it all the time, and I don't think KParts can be a sensible replacement for it: Bonobo isn't just for GUI components. Since it is a Corba implementation, one can use out-of-process components with it, as well as components running accross the network. It's more like DCOM, whereas Kparts are analogous to ActiveX.

Furthermore, I don't see the Gnome developers starting to use C++ any time soon. Besides the matter of taste and familiarity, C++ has problems with ABI stability. It took an age for Debian to recompile every C++ program when GCC 3.2 came out; I believe one of the reasons GCC 3.4 won't be in Sarge is because it breaks ABI compatibility again.

> Make all demons optional

Sounds like you want to duplicate the code from the daemons and copy it into each application. This would only increase memory usage and the number of bugs, while decreasing functinality. The reason GConf is really, really good is because of the signals/notification system. I'm not sure one's desktop would run much faster if every program one used polled its config file for updates every second.

As for Esound, it will go away in the future if GStreamer becomes a part of the Gnome platform. This will be really nice when it happens, because the job of picking which sound server to use (esd/polyp/arts/jack/none), configuring it, etc will be left up to the distributor. But GStreamer has a fair bit of improvement to do before this can happen; and since removing Esound all together is backwards incompatible, it will have to wait for 3.0.

Re:Ditch the dependencies and deprecated code

[idlake]

How would we deal with common variables?

We put them where they belong: into the X11 server. It is, in fact, depressing that the most common native X11 desktop fails to use standard X11 functionality and fails to work properly over remote connections, for this and many other reasons. KDE at least has the excuse that it's based on cross-platform technology, but Gnome is not.

And sure, let's only allow _one_ application to use the sound device at a time. That really sounds like progress...

Either Gnome should use a Gnome-independent network audio standard, or it should just leave the mixing to the kernel. There is no need for Gnome to invent and use its own sound daemon.

Re:Ditch the dependencies and deprecated code

[BenjyD]

What is this "Unix" of which you speak. Is that some kind of old-style Linux distro? ;)

Re:Ditch the dependencies and deprecated code

[cortana]

FYI, if you create a .gtkrc-2.0 then GTK will look there after attempting to load settings from gnome-settings-daemon. A program like gtk-theme-switch2 will do this for you if you don't know how.

Re:Ditch the dependencies and deprecated code

[drinkypoo]

Making daemons optional is really not a reasonable request. Removing deprecated libraries would really solve the problem that there are too many daemons. However, it makes complete sense that all configuration should be done through a daemon so that someday you can store all your configuration in a sql database, or as extended file attributes on a reiserfs system, or what have you. It makes more sense to use the daemons to provide the functionality to all apps in the same way, and to expect all of those apps to use the functionality in the proper way so that they will continue working when gnome is upgraded. Ever notice how some windows 3.1 programs still work properly on Windows NT 5.x? That's because they did what they were supposed to. It can be harder to get good performance, but when the system is upgraded underneath a program, it continues to work and even gains performance improvements.

Re:Ditch the dependencies and deprecated code

[oliverthered]

it's all part of the Hurd

Re:Ditch the dependencies and deprecated code

[oliverthered]

I have to run 'gnome-settings-daemon' before starting any application such as this for them to look how I want them to look. ... That's the price you have to pay to have everything looking the same.....

You could always staticly link gnome-settings-daemon to all of your applications and not have to run the deamon, but I think you'll find your systems a lot more bloated.

Re:Ditch the dependencies and deprecated code

[TravisWatkins]

I thought the point of esd and arts was that if you were using a remote X session the sound would come out on the computer you were using, not the one serving up X sessions.

Re:Ditch the dependencies and deprecated code

[Sax Maniac]

Yeah, the daemon thing bugs the hell out of me. I run KDE, but occasionally use a gnome app, whether on my box or another. I get random gnome daemons stranded all over the network. Remember, this is X, and sometimes we do useful things like run apps on remote boxes.

KDE seems to know how to start up DCOP and all that stuff, and then blow it away when you're not using it. Not well, but it does.

The last thing that really drives me nuts is forcing apps and settings to be session specific. Example: I use VNC frequently for work. In the olden days, it was possible to run just sawfish and panel inside a VNC, because I could tell sawfish to do opaque moves and wire-frame resizes. Using VNC remotely over DSL, this is the fastest way to operate.

Enter metacity. In the name of reducing preferences that people ostensibly don't use, they got rid of the option. Now you only have "reduced resources" which means wire-frame move AND wire-frame resize. BUT: wire-frame move over VNC is slower than opaque move.

Gee, thanks. Guess I won't use GNOME anymore inside VNC anymore.

I would like to use GNOME or KDE inside the VNC, rather than yet another environment. After all, I use plently of KDE and GNOME apps.

On my main desktop, I want all that stuff turned on - font AA, opaque resize, blah blah. But not inside my VNC session.

Finally, there seems to be no way to have two sets of settings, one stuck to my VNC desktop, and one stuck to my real desktop. Turn off font AA? Well, it's off everywhere. Turn on "reduced" resource? Too bad, it's off everywhere. There seems to be "session managers" and I've tried making a VNC session - but it does nothing. All settings still affect my main desktop too.

Re:Ditch the dependencies and deprecated code

[IamTheRealMike]

As long as it's a GConf only option you could probably write a patch to implement that mode. Or just use Sawfish with GNOME, there's nothing forcing you to use metacity after all.

Re:Ditch the dependencies and deprecated code

[Ulric]

Running Gnome inside VNC doesn't seem like a very good idea anyway, but having separate settings for separate desktops (actually displays) is a problem that was solved until KDE and Gnome unsolved it.

Re:Ditch the dependencies and deprecated code

[nutshell42]

with KDE you can set KDEHOME to the config dir you want to use.

Simply put a

export KDEHOME=~/.kde

in your .xinitrc (or wherever) and a

export KDEHOME=~/.kde-vnc;

in your vnc settings before you launch startkde.

Alternatively you could create a copy your startkde and replace the default dir in the copy (it's around line 50). AFAIK kde doesn't care what the script's called

Re:Ditch the dependencies and deprecated code

[Havoc Pennington]

You can't make the daemons optional because the desktop environments are not a set of independent apps, they are a "swarm of processes" that work together. Some of the processes have graphical representations (such as the panel and window manager) and some don't. But all of the processes _do something_, they aren't just sitting there for the hell of it.

So saying "make the daemons optional" is no different from saying "make the window manager optional" - you have to answer the question "what is going to do the thing that the daemon did"

What would "make the window manager optional" mean? Either it means you can swap in any WM (as you can), or it means you suck the WM function into an existing process - old WMs like WindowMaker essentially put the whole desktop in one big process.

In fact, in essence gnome-settings-daemon is a "catch-all" daemon that does a bunch of unrelated/random stuff to avoid having tons of separate daemons. So some of the "sucking the functionality in to a single process" has already been done.

You refer to gconfd and gnome-settings-daemon specifically I think because those daemons don't have GUIs and thus it isn't user-visible what they do; but that doesn't mean they do nothing. Stuff virtually everyone does care about would break if you removed them.

For example, the control center will not even think about working with old-type UNIX config files, because when the control center changed a setting the rest of the desktop would not know about the change. In most cases this would mean the change would not take effect. In KDE this is addressed through the dcop daemon rather than a special config daemon, but there's still a need for a daemon here.

gconfd also keeps a shared cache of all the settings, so guess what... it *reduces* memory usage overall.

The desktop need not be implemented in this "swarm of processes" way - desktops as diverse as Enlightenment and Lotus Workplace use a single-process approach. But there are advantages to multiple processes.

Re:Ditch the dependencies and deprecated code

[Curtman]

Either Gnome should use a Gnome-independent network audio standard, or it should just leave the mixing to the kernel. There is no need for Gnome to invent and use its own sound daemon.

Are you referring to esound when you say 'invent and use its own sound daemon'? That's exactly what the KDE crew did with artsd though.

Re:I love this

[NineNine]

when was the last time a closed-source software outfit (Microsoft I am looking at you) acctually tried to make the packege MORE efficiant?

Never. Bloat is something that you work to avoid when you're still designing and archtecting the software. Chopping off sections of code after the fact only helps minimally. I think the whole project is terribly flawed, and will always be as slow as molasses (which is why I won't use it).

While they are at it ...

[Alain Williams]

fix some of the startup slowness. Have you ever done strace on a gnome app ? Did you ever see it open and read the same file again & again ? It might cost a little RAM to cache the results but should be worth it - most of these files are quite small. How about reading into a per user shared memory segment - just read once and share between all processes.

The best way of ensuring that it stays fixed is to give all the gnome developers PIIIs with 128 Mb RAM.

Re:While they are at it ...

[Lispy]

Yeah, give them pills instead of bounty. ;)

Re:While they are at it ...

[Jeffrey Baker]

It is still costly to enter all those syscalls. You don't have to read the data from disk, but you do enter the kernel again and again. Once I looked at an strace of "yelp", the GNOME help program, and for a list of several tens of thousands of files, it would stat, open, mmap, and close each file 5-10 times. It was horribly bad, even with all the data already in core. In fact it was faster to start Mozilla than to start yelp.

Re:While they are at it ...

[cynyr]

i think it should be a 386 with maybe 1MB ram
that should fix all of that.

Remember...

[CrackedButter]

NO disintegrations.

Yup, Eugenia from OSnews

[sonamchauhan]

Yup, it's her. I found out by clicking the link on her name in the story.

Re:Yup, Eugenia from OSnews

[hitmark]

heh, i looked at that link to but could not find any reference to osnews, but it looked like the same person given the interest in beos :P

-1, Not Sufficient Geeky

[ggvaidya]

In The Hobbit, gnomes were used to refer to the Noldor, but Tolkein changed that because of the stereotype gnome being short-and-fat and very unelvish (in the Tolkein universe). An overweight Noldor would look a lot like an overweight human. And, if the movies are to be believed, very gay, but I'm not buying that ...

Re:horrible idea

[stevesliva]

can't we think of other ways to motivate people besides money?

Economists have been working on that very problem for centuries. They have not yet come up with a better way to motivate people.

Forgive the sarcasm, but what's a better motivater than cash? A job that pays cash? Threatening developers with death?

Re:I love this

[EdMack]

So, why does XP load so quickly? By accident?

Nope. it's because a lot of people put hard work into it.

Re:I love this

[Directrix1]

Exactly why do you think it is flawed?

KDE has been doing this since day one

[AntiOrganic]

While they've still got a long way to go, each successive release of KDE is substantially improved in terms of required CPU power and memory usage. KDE 3 ran a great deal faster than KDE 2 despite all sorts of added functionality, and KDE 3.4 RC1 is the fastest yet by a pretty big margin. The upcoming Qt 4 has a whole slew of performance improvements which should reduce requirements further.

Re:KDE has been doing this since day one

[Masq666]

Guess i'll have to update my KDE. KDE has done a good job optimizing but there's allways room for more. As long as they keep up the great work i'm happy.

Re:KDE has been doing this since day one

[WMD_88]

Argh.

KDE fans always talk about how the team is optimizing it all the time. While I don't doubt that *something* is being done, in my own tests, there is contrary performance.

Let's take the P1s I've run KDE on - a p1/133 with 40MB ram, and a p1/166 with 32MB ram. Both are low-end machines without a doubt. (And the one with less ram had a brand new hard drive.) One machine ran KDE 1.1, and the other ran 3.1.4.

In short, 1.1 was moderately fast, but 3.1.4 was so slow that it'd be unusable to the average person (I have a lot of computer patience myself). I'd say the difference was around twofold faster for 1.1.

Perhaps it's not the KDE team's goal to run on 32 or 40MB machines. Which I guess is okay - anyone running Linux on one of them is probably using Fluxbox or something. But still, the performance between old and new went way down - which it shouldn't if any optimization is taking place. (And I hardly believe that the extra 8MB ram given to 1.1 helped it *that* much.)

Re:KDE has been doing this since day one

[m50d]

That's a 20% upgrade there, equivalent to probably 100mb on a modern system, and if it makes the difference between all the kde libs being able to fit into core and not, then it could easily give a 2x speedup. Anyway, there are many many more features in 3.x, but you at least get more "value for money" in terms of features/performance. It's being optimized but they are also adding more features.

Re:KDE has been doing this since day one

[WMD_88]

if it makes the difference between all the kde libs being able to fit into core and not, then it could easily give a 2x speedup.
I've checked top. The machine was still swapping, abeit less than the 3.1 machine. So no, not everything fit into RAM.

Re:KDE has been doing this since day one

[evilviper]

each successive release of KDE is substantially improved in terms of required CPU power and memory usage.

Not true at all... Sure, KDE3 was a HUGE improvement over KDE2, but that's only because KDE2 was such a dog. KDE1 can smoke KDE2 any day, and I'm willing to bet it's still faster than KDE3, despite not getting the new optimizations.

Now, I'm not trying to devalue the improvements made to KDE, just your own personal BS benchmark... KDE2 set the bar very low, so, of course, successive releases would be faster.

If early versions of GNOME had been incredibly slow, they would have been speeding-up successively since then. Instead, GNOME started off with decent performance, so it couldn't possibly have kept improving by leaps and bounds. It's certainly bloated now, but that's besides the point.

Re:KDE has been doing this since day one

[AntiOrganic]

This is true, of course, but it does not in any way change the fact that KDE is steadily improving performance-wise regardless.

Re:KDE has been doing this since day one

[m50d]

Yeah, but if it's the difference between having to swap parts of the libs and only having to swap the apps, that's going to make a big difference. Not that I'm saying 3.1 doesn't need more power than 1.x, it may well do, but at that little ram you really need to compare on the same machine.

Pay Peanuts, Get Monkeys - Catch Fleas

[Doc Ruby]

The bounties Novell is offering are too low. They're offering $1-200 for tasks that will take an adequately skilled programmer, already familiar with GNOME, something like 2-4h to complete, including the docs that will let GNOME integrate the code (which will help win the bounty). The programmer doesn't need to spend time testing the code, though that will increase their chances of winning. So they're offering $50:h.

That isn't enough to support a community of coders, even if the range of bounties were scaled up to supply a significant headcount with enough work to keep busy (say, 500-1000 bounties a year). The labor might be fueled by people who are coding GNOME anyway, to prioritize completion/submission of some tasks. But the better, even more productive coders won't be available at those rates. It remains to be seen whether a multitude of mediocre submissions can compensate for too-cheap bounties that can't attract quality coders. Or perhaps this model will merely send all coding offshore, to programmers who can work so cheap that a single $100 bounty won can fund a month of unsuccessful submissions to other bounties they lose.

Re:Pay Peanuts, Get Monkeys - Catch Fleas

[XO]

It'll take me longer just to install GNOME and get it working, on my P3/600 with 128MB RAM than it will for some of these things to get fixed.

And to install the entire development trees and actually do a compile? Ludicrous. heh.

Re:Pay Peanuts, Get Monkeys - Catch Fleas

[Doc Ruby]

1000 bounties per year, at $150 per bounty, is $150,000 per year. That would feed 5 programmers at your $30,000 per year income, doing about 2500 hours of work. Which is almost right: A 40 hour week is a 2080 hour year, and programmers always do at least 10% paid overtime every year (though 2500:2080 is 20%). But what about all the losers? Every loser who submits to the bounty is another multiple, another fraction of the pie lost that leaves the loser hungry.

And how good is your code, that you can't compete with people getting more than $15 per hour, though you've got at least 5 years experience? Can it win? If it can, do I want to use it daily in my desktop, for these hidden critical-path operations? And what about the overhead of work to participate in the contest, and the overhead of programming on a series of disconnected, specific tasks within the huge, complex GNOME system?

Re:Pay Peanuts, Get Monkeys - Catch Fleas

[Doc Ruby]

I think this would work only for people "already doing it", to prioritize submission of these patches to Novell. For a GNOME-dev beginner, just finding/reading/reconciling their poorly documented code and specs will take over an hour, just to get started on one of these highly specific tasks. But if you've got to decide whether to start a new GNOME SourceForge project that will die in "pre-Alpha", or complete one of these useful patches, that $100 might decide you. And that will at least create a larger labor pool submitting patches, from which one might be acceptable for finishing that GNOME task.

Re:Pay Peanuts, Get Monkeys - Catch Fleas

[Rahga]

Doc: The only problem with theme is that they really quite a lot longer to do properly than 4 hours. Conceptually, it's easy. I could tell you how to fix the background bounty as well as include proper SVG background support in Nautilus, but implementation is where all the time will be wasted... Making sure there's no regressions and all the bases are covered. Heck, I fear how many days an average GNOME hacker might spend just getting familiar with eel before fixing this....

Re:Pay Peanuts, Get Monkeys - Catch Fleas

[Doc Ruby]

That's what I meant by "a single $100 bounty won can fund a month of unsuccessful submissions", for some people.

Re:Pay Peanuts, Get Monkeys - Catch Fleas

[Doc Ruby]

Maybe limited success with the bounties will get Novell to invest in producing a much more productive theme system. Or other tools to contribute code/content to their system. Automating lots of these code submission systems more than just cvs, especially in documenting APIs, would make this system more reliable for production schedules. And generally improve the code available for all open source projects. SourceForge was a big step. But I'd love Novell to roll out some kind of Open-Xchange platform for development collaboration that could manage the distributed coding model they're indulging with these bounties.

Re:Pay Peanuts, Get Monkeys - Catch Fleas

[xenocide2]

Think of it as a fairly cheap recruiting campaign. Maybe the bounty isn't all that great, nor the bug more than trivial, but you've likely found two or three guys who are knowledgable enough to install, run, compile, debug, fix, and submit patches for your software. Exactly the kind of employee you're looking for. And even if Novell isn't taking it like that, somebody probably should be.

Re:Pay Peanuts, Get Monkeys - Catch Fleas

[XO]

not to even get into comprehending the ties to the other pieces of software

Good luck!

[daVinci1980]

Seriously... I've spent a very significant amount of time optimizing four shipped titles now--mostly games, one commercial shrinkwrap application--for both speed and size tradeoffs.

The big annoying thing with optimization is that assuming you are working with talented people (I believe the people who work on GNOME are talented), there is generally little low-hanging fruit. An example of low hanging fruit is places where you are using--for example--a vector, but you should be using a map or a hash table. Another example is places where complex code can be skipped over by checking some preconditions and bailing early.

Although premature optimization is the root of all evil, most of us recognize these sorts of places early, and do the relevant optimization work in the first place. What you're left with in terms of optimizations is places where your initial architecture is *just wrong.* This kind of performance / memory deficiency really sucks, because most of the time the code is too complex and there are too many other dependent pieces of code to do the necessary rewrite.

The other thing that makes optimization work hard is (lack of) tools. There are basically two types of problems you can optimize: speed and size. Sometimes you get lucky, and fixing size problems *also* increase speed (generally because your smaller code now fits in the instruction cache, or because your data memory fits in the L1 or L2), but that is usually the exception. With size problems, the best bet is usually to make all objects pooled individually. This allows you to dump out information during the program run as to how many objects you've allocated of a particular class, as well as how much memory they're taking up.

With speed concerns, it's a little more difficult. There are basically two types of speed problems. Problems that occur constantly, and problems that occur as a result of user interaction or are themselves cyclical. Effectively it's a matter of identifying spikes versus identifying plateaus. Plateuas are the easier of the two, because they are identifiable via tools like Intel's VTune (which has been--I believe--ported to Linux by Intel). But spikes are harder, in that identifying them requires code instrumentation, and although there are some suites that will do it automatically, they often over instrument places which lead to artificial spiking.

Anyhoo, sorry for rambling... optimization is something very near and dear to my heart.

Re:Good luck!

[rbarreira]

In my opinion, any decent programmer likes optimizing. It's just fun! So congratulations :)

Re:horrible idea

[dont_think_twice]

I think this is a horrible idea. When you have to offer bounties to encourage people to alter open source, then you're basically hiring and paying programmers...Open source isn't about hiring and paying people, it's about everyone working together to make better software for themselves.

I think you are confusing Open Source Software and Ken Kesey's Magic School Bus. One solution to this problem is for your to do way less drugs.

Lies

[Anonymous Coward]

> Yeah, because GNOME is only developed by volunteer
> hermits living in caves at the moment. It's not
> like there are big companies paying developers'
> salaries to work on it or anything.

GNOME isn't developed by hermits. Let's clear this up:
* GNOME is obviously developed by Gnomes (duh) and Simians
* KDE is obviously developed by Trolls (and Dragons)
* BeOS is obviously developed by colonial insects
* GNUstep is obviously developed by Dancing GNUs
* OS X is obviously developed by the porn industry

And BTW, gnomes don't need no stinkin salaries. Just give them enough underwear and a TV to watch South Park and they'll be happy.

open source IS about hiring and paying people

[idlake]

Open source isn't about hiring and paying people, it's about everyone working together to make better software for themselves

Most open source programmers are employed and get paid to do open source programming.

Open source isn't about some utopian, socialist community, it's about companies paying in order to develop software for their own benefit. Open source is a more efficient free market alternative to big software companies.

To put it more bluntly, you can hire a lot of well-paid programmers with the money people spend on Windows licenses--a lot more than the number Microsoft hires from their revenue.

Re:open source IS about hiring and paying people

[XO]

What?

Are?

You?

Smoking?

I doubt there's any way to do a survey to check this, but I'd be willing to lay odds that the ratio of People who Do This For Fun, and People Who Do This As Their Job are better than 1000:1.. Just the people who do this as their job, are the ones doing the most visible and active projects.

Re:open source IS about hiring and paying people

[idlake]

There is a way to check this: you do look at the important and successful projects, and you do look at what people do for a living. And you will find that they are usually employed by some employer that has an active interest in the open source projects they are working on (this includes university students, where it is part of education--also, in a sense, job related).

In fact, if you are in the US and working anywhere in the computer industry or academia, you usually cannot work on open source projects without your employer's permission because otherwise they would own everything you do.

Re:How can Gnome be bloated?

[bhalo05]

Of course. In real life, things are not so simple. But at least is Free Software, given enough time and resources things can be improved by anyone. Don't expect miracles though.

Re:horrible idea

[G-Licious!]

Robert Love (inotify fellow) is a Novell employee, IIRC.

Re:cat Gnome /dev/null

[Anonymous Coward]

Isn't that the Gnome2.x manual?

You mean the gnome project aims for people not unix-knowledgeable to use a GUI? The horror!

Re:The best way to improve Gnome...

[X0563511]

Fluxbox.

It runs KDE programs, i _think_ it runs Gnome applications as well. It's simple, powerful, SMALL, and FAST.

And, it plays nicely if you put it on with KDE and/or gnome at the same time. You don't like it? Take it off without hurting what you already had on.

Re:I love this

[DashEvil]

For what XP is, it does boot rather quickly.

Re:horrible idea

[bhalo05]

Perhaps you've been bitch slapped enough by now, but someone who just found /. a couple years ago doesn't need to come around telling *US* what open source is about. That took serious cajones. It's spelled 'cojones' ;)

BTW, I agree with you.

Are you kidding me?

[Inoshiro]

When you're like me, working through Univursity to pay for a computer science degree that's being paid concurrently, these are great. Rather than going to a soul killing job that has no relevance to my course of studies, but happens to pay me money, I can just do a mod to Gnome (which is relevant to my studies), and get paid 10 times my soul-sucking hourly rate.

This isn't for people who have jobs which pay them so much money they can have sexy-parties with hookers and blow every Tuesday, this is for people who need a little financial incentive to do it, or for people who aren't established and want to make some money while they're making their name. Obviously you're a hookers and blow kind of guy, so maybe you shouldn't send in any patches.

Re:Are you kidding me?

[Doc Ruby]

I posted "they're offering $50:h", and also that a contestant could probably expect $1000:y. The "discrepancy" comes because it's a contest, with multiple applicants. The format lets Novell pay a capped amount, while applicants work with a lower probability of getting paid. If you don't consider the waste and competition, making the single payout different from the share of total income, what do you expect?

Re:Are you kidding me?

[Doc Ruby]

Moderation -1
100% Troll

I guess it's dangerous to taunt people who can't get decent programming jobs with visions of cocaine and hookers. Because they have lots of Slashdot time on their hands, and become enraged TrollMods at the very idea.

Re:cat Gnome /dev/null

[InfiniteWisdom]

That accomplishes exactly nothing. cat /dev/null > gnome, perhaps

Re:horrible idea

[Nikker]

I think what this will do is take the script kiddies that just talk and make them actually do it. Once they get that confidence that add to the people who code for OSS. Some will contribute for money only, others will contribute for reputation.

The best thing maintainers can do is make sure people can attain a rep, this way it will work better than money in most circles.

Re:These bounties are not payment, they're prizes

[Doc Ruby]

Well, he can call the compensation whatever he wants. I'm sure Novell also pays lots of fulltime onsite "contractors", avoiding taxes and benefits obligations, like any other large American corporation. But it's still payment for work.

As we agree, it's not enough to support a person's own economics, unless perhaps they live somewhere that programmers are willing to make about $1200:y. Or they're getting paid by someone else (perhaps their own project). It's really just a bounty to prioritize the patches that are submitted to GNOME, rather than languishing (perhaps unfinished) in someone's inbox or source directory.

Re:Nah

[_|()|\|]

GNOME Terminal is actually a wrapper for VTE, which is a rewrite of ZVT. More than anything, I think it just needs more attention. The bugs pile up, but VTE is basically maintained by an overworked Red Hat developer.

One person attempted a hefty rewrite, but ended up forking to the Multi Gnome Terminal.

Stop these posts, your code already exists

[Ars-Fartsica]

If you insist on running five year old hardware, just run ten year old code on it (early fvwm, xterm, xclock, etc) and go your way. There isn't going to be a version of GNOME or KDE optimized for Pentium systems with 64MB of RAM. EVER. So stop waiting for it. If you can't afford $400 for a new P4 system, you're on your own.

Microsoft should take the idea too

[TPoise]

Just imagine if Microsoft just went across the board to all their application programmers and said "Hey, here's a $3000 bonus on your next paycheck if you can take time to reduce bloatage in WinXP or Office ". I would then think the world would be a better place.

In all fairness, GNOME has a long way to go to reduce the bloat, but I wish them all the very best.

Firefox could use the treatment too. This would be great if there could be some kind of metric available for the FireFox team. E.G., "Here FireFox with 3 tabs open only uses 300KB of RAM, while IE uses 30MB of RAM".

Re:Microsoft should take the idea too

[Ian.Waring]

I seem to recall that the performance of VMS on small memory systems progressed leaps and bounds when a few hundred people at Spit Brook (VMS Engineering) got shiney new VAXstation 2000's on each of their desks with minimum memory only. It went from dog to decent performance in very short order.

Additive bounties

[theantix]

What I would like to see is the ability for me as a user to add to the existing bounties and start new ones of my own. I would like to be able to propose a bounty and send money to a reputable bounty clearinghouse like at Novell or Ubuntu, and then they could offer the bounty as if it was their own since they have my cash until the bounty expires or is completed. And then while the bounty is still up for grabs I would like to be able to send the clearinghouse money to add to the existing bounties in order to make them more lucrative to potential hackers.

I could setup this site right now fairly easily, but people wouldn't trust my joe random site as well as they would trust a bigger and more established organization like Novell or Ubuntu/Canonical. But I can't be the only one looking to put my money where my mouth is, so why does this functionality not exist?

I like the idea

[hsoft]

Sourceforge should extend it's donation system and create a bounty system. When you donate money to a project's bounty system, you get a vote for each dollar you give. People submit for the bounty, and then, you can vote for who will get the coding contract.

Some are fixed, yet bounty not paid

[Anonymous Coward]

I just took a scan through all the bounties listed at the link and noticed a few things:
1) Many of the bounties are already fixed
2) The fixed bounties still haven't been claimed or paid after more than a year in some cases.
3) The bounty hunters all start early on the bounties, but then no progress for months while people wonder if it's being worked on.
4) Sometimes a patch is submitted, but it never gets applied by the coordinators.
5) It's very collaborative. Many are just a long thread of incomplete fixes that go on for years.
6) The patches often get lost after the original author gives up to it not being included after a period of months/years.
7) Changes often impact other projects, whose maintainers may not want thier project patched.

Frankly, I'm amazed that in some cases it takes 2 years to fix and patch a simple bug. Meanwhile, the source tree is changed, rendering the original patch unusable. Don't tell me how I should contribute to improve it. I was thinking about doing just that until I came to the realization of how horribly inefficient the whole process is. If I fix a bug, I don't want to wait 2 years, if ever, to get paid thank you.

Re:I love this

[NineNine]

Exactly why do you think it is flawed?

Because in order to get any kind of usable performance, you need a high-end pentium, especially when comparing in W2K.

Novell and GNOME

[CarpetShark]

Well, the thing is that parts of Novell DEPEND on GNOME, since they now develop evolution etc. SuSE might use KDE, but not in such a core-business way. Personally, though, I wouldn't be investing in GNOME these days. Seems like it's going downhill to me, while KDE is improving in leaps and bounds.

You must be a yank.

[Inoshiro]

I have no problem subsidizing education, much like I have no problem subsidizing universal health care. Ooh, some money I don't really need is lopped off my paycheque. Big deal. There are larger things than what you take home every pay period affecting the country.

Re:You must be a yank.

[Doc Ruby]

I have no problem subsidizing education, or health care. I lived and worked in Canada, and was happy to keep the quality of Canadians high, through the taxes my entrepreneurship paid - it was coming back to me in the quality Canadians upon whom my income depended. Those are two of the best investments people can make in our communities, in terms of return on investment. I do have a problem with people ignoring how subsidy investments depend on those who have capitalized on their own round, to create the surplus on which those subsidies depend. Especially when those ignoring the subsidy system talk about subsidizing it, when they actually don't - because they're net recipients.

If gnome really wants to reduce bloat

[Anonymous Coward]

If gnome really wants to reduce bloat they should consider moving back to gnome office from OO.o

Too much WoW

[Johnny Mnemonic]

You know you've been playing too much World of Warcraft when you look at the headline and start thinking up ways to min/max the gnome character, and how to spend the money from the bounty for doing so...

My question is....

[p.rican]

what type/specs are the machines most developers use to crank out code. I'm not a programmer but if they're creating code on a dual processor system with 512 MB RAM FSB ~800MHz, is that going to affect how well the software will perfom on my AMD 850?

It would seem to me that you would want your development machine to have low end specs so you can get a better feel for how the software will perform on the majority of older PCs out there?

I hope that made sense.

speed matters

[mnemonic_]

I hate to say it, but the slow GUI speed is why I don't enjoy using Linux. Even xfce4 is slower than Windows XP, which is ridiculous. Gnome used to be my favorite environment (it's by far the easiest to use), but I got fed up by the sluggishness. I hope this project can bring me back to GNOME.

Re:How can Gnome be bloated?

[Ulric]

No, the bloat has been increased by the "many monkeys with typewriters" principle.

Re:FUD

[iamwahoo2]

These days you can choose from either QPL or GPL licensed Qt.

"I am very pleased to see that Qt is now available under the GPL," said Richard Stallman, President of the Free Software Foundation. "This is a big win for free software and a great gift from Trolltech to the community."

Re:The best way to improve Gnome...

[Anonymous Coward]

you sir, are a complete idiot. Fluxbox is a window manager it doesn't run anything. KDE / Gnome applications are just applications that use KDE / Gnome libraries, and so will run in any X environment, or linux framebuffer environment depending on the backend they use.

How?

[Luke-Jr]

How do you pull this off? I've got two systems running KDE 3.4...
The first one (running 3.4 final) has 1 GB of physical RAM. There is never a time when KDE is running that it isn't using at least 1.5 GB of RAM (including swap, discluding cache).
The other one (running 3.4 rc1) has 256 MB of physical RAM. It is almost consistently maxing out while care is taken to be running only the minimum services/programs.

So... how did you get KDE working properly with a mere 128 MB of RAM?

Re:How?

[Klivian]

It does work without problems on 128MB ram, you don't have to do anything really. Perhaps increase with 256MB swap just to be safe for those corner cases:-) The thing is how Linux tend to fill up the memory, it is just lazy in reclaiming it that's why it is consistently maxing out. I used 128MB for years whitout any problems, it almost always was at 98% plus 64MB or more in swap. But you don't notice any performance loss when running, you can try it yourself and see. Perhaps the only way you'll get convinced(Use the mem option when booting). Only slowing you will see is in app start-up since you don't have so large disk cache, but it's about working not starting and stopping applications. As a curiosity, I for a time used 48MB to run a machine with KDE2.2. It was ok, as long as you didn't open too many apps, more than 5 Konqueror windows and it started swapping like mad:-)

Re:How?

[Espectr0]

So... how did you get KDE working properly with a mere 128 MB of RAM?

You have to remember that no matter how much ram you have, linux uses as much as it can.

One person said to me "in linux, unused ram is wasted ram".

Sure it boots slow but it is usable for browsing and such, and if you have patience, maybe openoffice

Re:How?

[Luke-Jr]

Maybe not released, but I'm pretty sure it's tagged... and I'm relatively sure my last checkout was either right before or after the tagging, so if it's not final, it's certainly close.

Re:How?

[Luke-Jr]

Swap may be all good on x86, but disk I/O is extremely slow on x86_64 and PPC (even with DMA enabled on the x86_64) for swap.

New systems with 64 MB of RAM

[Luke-Jr]

Have you considered that maybe such systems are not 5 year old hardware?
The new Zaurus SL-C3000 (released within the past 6 months) computers all have 64 MB of RAM (along with 4 GB HD and 400 MHz overclockable to ~600 MHz).
So where exactly do you suggest I find a similar system with better specs for *any* price (let alone something affordable)?

Re:New systems with 64 MB of RAM

[Luke-Jr]

Not sure what you are saying... They can run at 600 MHz (400 MHz overclocked), so CPU isn't a big issue. 4 GB is plenty of space for a complete KDE/GNU/Linux system.

vector is not "low-hanging fruit"

[Chemisor]

Before you even touch any vector-to-map conversions you should make sure your disk IO is optimal. If you are reading/writing/opening any file more than once, you will see no measurable gain from adding binary search to some measly thousand element vector. If you are using the network without a pretty darn good reason, or not caching the results, you can forget about doing any other optimizations. If you need to start twenty daemons to run a word processor, you have some serious architecture design issues.

In other words: fix the slow stuff first!

Stupid Question

[mslinux]

This may be a stupid question, but here goes: Why don't these guys use languages (Python, for example) that are memory friendly?

This will work better

[Mr. Underbridge]

find / -name "gnome" | rm -rf.

I'd like my $200 now.

Re:I love this

[Directrix1]

I have a AMD T-Bird 1.2GHz, which I wouldn't call high end by any means, and it runs fine. It does like the RAM though. I found performance to be roughly comparable to when I was running W2k on this same machine.

I'm sure you can be helped by a demon-start demon

[RedLaggedTeut]

What you are proposing sound like you could be helped by starting a demon which autostarts the needed gnome demons ;-)

Another demon, but maybe you#d like this one ..

$3000!!!!

[SleeknStealthy]

Wow, so much money, so much incentive. Honestly, I think Novell may get a little too much credit with what they have helped do with linux. I mean look at the contributions to the kernel mostly from OSDL, Redhat and IBM. What about Sun paying developers salaries for OO development. Meanwhile KDE developers make KDE much more memory efficient than Gnome for free and Novell profits. Novell simply is trying to get in the news with a prize instead of pumping a sufficient amount of money into either Desktop Environment. Lets all fight over $3000!w00t.

Mod parent up

[willis]

(lame post) This would be useful for normal users, and help get corporate users into the loop...

Space is often traded for time

[Sits]

Actually it's quite common in an algorithm to trade space for time. Algorithms tend to work on abstract levels where there's lots of one resource in order to trade off. In fact many algorithms are concerned precisely about abstraction over anything else.

The other catch is you've got to be wary of optimisations that complicate code. It used to be the case that gotos could provide a fast way to short circuit your way out of code at a cost to a reader trying to follow the code's logic.

Best Possible Start

[elmegil]

Get rid of the horrendously evil clone of the Windows Registry.

I love Slashdot

[bonch]

Basic visual cues are "eye candy," the favorite intellectual fallback weapon to describe anything that makes you feel less elite for using it.

This isn't 1987 anymore. My CPU can handle drawing pleasing visual effects so that after 13 hours of programming, my eyes aren't fatigued.

Re:I love Slashdot

[Mr Z]

Some "eye candy's" helpful. For instance, drop shadows behind menus and the mouse pointer give better "figure-ground separation," thereby making them easier to spot.

Menus that fade in/out, roll in/out, etc. aren't particularly helpful. Transparent xterms aren't particularly helpful either, unless you're trying to get your desktop on TV and can combine them with some fancy wallpaper and a photogenic (if unusable) theme.

--Joe

Re:cat Gnome /dev/null

[Tribbin]

A desktop- and windowsmanager of your choise?

The reason

[bonch]

It's because so much gets pointlessly reinvented. Take a look at Mozilla sometime. So many wheels are reinvented in that code just for the sake of easy portability. The code is horrible. Take a look at that layout code sometime and attempt to decipher it. And Mozilla is supposed to be a golden child of OSS development!

Also, there is less structure and discipline because it's not a corporate environment with lead programmer, project leaders, and so on overseeing things like performance and code size. Instead, it's a volunteer effort that takes code from all over the place rather than from the small pool of gifted programmers you hired solely for your project.

Everything has advantages and disadvantages, and OSS has its disadvantages like any other model.

Re:omg, pseudo nerd, eugenia, jerk, world hates us

[Tribbin]

How is somebody a jerk for being naive? How can you hate somebody for being naive?

With 'the whole world' you mean everybody except the Americans and the people who do not hate Americans?

Re:horrible idea

[Tribbin]

Some kind of really wanted ring?

Re:I'm sure you can be helped by a demon-start dem

[Stween]

The point was that it's not something that runs by default unless you log into Gnome.

Run gtk apps outwith Gnome, and you'll lose some settings. Someone else points out that after the settings daemon, a ~/.gtkrc-2.0 will be checked by GTK, though as I recall this isn't bulletproof (font settings not stored in the rc file change the moment the daemon is up and running, last time I toyed with it).

I have no problem with many daemons running, my point was purely that to have to carry this settings daemon around with you even when you're not using Gnome seems a bit excessive. Granted, anybody who truly gets off on using as few CPU cycles as possible isn't going to be using GTK-2.x... ;)

Re:I love this

[eraserewind]

"Seems fast" is all people want for a desktop environment. It can still be "actually slow", so long as it uses some psychological trick to "seem fast".

How about "Don't use CORBA?"

[kriston]

KDE realized this years ago and moved to the lightweight DCOP for inter-process communications. Come on, GNOME team, CORBA is for inter-computer communications and should be abandoned immediately in favor of a lightweight replacement. Bonobo doesn't count.

When are people going to learn?

[e_xworm]

Any DE will need a configuration system
Any such system will be hierarhical
Any hierarhical system can be displayed in a registry like format...
Is THAT really a problem? Geez get a grip on yourselves

Re:When are people going to learn?

[elmegil]

Guess what? Firefox needs a hiirarchical (note correct spelling) configuration system too, and didn't have to resort to the abomination that is the GNOME Registry Reimplementation. I'm sorry, but duplicating ALL the HORRIBLE non-features of such a NON TRANSPARENT configuration system was a really stupid move. There are plenty of ways to manage hierarchical data without resorting to such utter performance hogging shit.

And there's nothing better than "oops, something screwed up my registry, gotta delete it and start from zero."

Re:When are people going to learn?

[e_xworm]

Read again. I'm just saying that any hierarhical configuration system can be displayed in a tree... just like registry. It's pretty nice if you think of it.
Ah... when are people going to learn...

Re:When are people going to learn?

[elmegil]

I'm not objecting to DISPLAY, I'm objecting to IMPLEMENTATION. So one could advise you to read MY post again, eh?

Re:When are people going to learn?

[e_xworm]

Ermmmmm No.
Totaly different Implementation.
No CLSID's in gconf. And what's wrong with the implementation? Just good old xml

Re:When are people going to learn?

[elmegil]

Just good old xml

Really?

[Default]
0,id=118199e006000110174345800000075260 002
0,RestartStyleHint=2
0,Priority=40
0,Progra m=gnome-panel
0,CurrentDirectory=/home/ph28385
0 ,CloneCommand=gnome-panel --sm-config-prefix /gnome-panel-DzaISd/ --profile default
0,RestartCommand=gnome-panel --sm-config-prefix /gnome-panel-DzaISd/ --sm-client-id 118199e006000110174345800000075260002 --screen 0 --profile default
1,id=118199e00600011017442470000007526000 4
1,Program=gnome-terminal

And that's just one segment of one of dozens of little files running around in my .gnome2 directory. Doesn't look like any XML I've ever seen.

I suppose that perhaps they DID reimplement using XML in the latest releases, but I'm not a "keep up with the Joneses" kind of guy. If they HAVE reimplemented, then you might have said so. But in the bad old 2.0 days, it was utter crap.

Re:omg, pseudo nerd, eugenia, jerk, world hates us

[e_xworm]

Actually (this may come as a shock to you) America is not just USA
So with the whole world he means everybody (quite a bunch even if you just count china) except some Americans who do not hate Americans :) hope I helped you there
Hope I didn't sound too korny I just wanted to be funny

Re:horrible idea

[dustmite]

Something non-monetary that is often an important motivator: glory/credit/recognition. Put their name in lights for their achievements/contributions.

Re:Math

[Mr Z]

sqrt(2)....

Oh, ok, you can if you use an infinite number of powers of 2...

Novell is a newcomer but even so

[Chuck Chunder]

I'd argue that they are indeed investing credible resources (if not "pumping money") into important parts of desktop infrastructure.

Robert Love working on HAL.
Robert O'Callahan working on Mozilla.
David Reveman working on Glitz/Cairo
Etc, etc.

This is JUST SILLY!

[diablobsb]

everyone knows that gnomes are fat...

http://members.aol.com/TheRobots2/jpeg/gnome.jpg

btw: i'm a kde user...
kde 3.4 Rocks.... and kde 4 (with qt 4) will rock even more...

what I'd like

[CAIMLAS]

I'd like it if they'd optimize it so that the save dialog actually works instead of being a UI nightmare. It feels like it's about 10 years of negative progress.

Even the Windows save dialog is better.

The answer to the bloat is..

[fishermonger]

KD ^H ^H Emacs of course (eh, wait..)

Not to trauuull, but KDE people: get over it, TrollTech just missed the the licsencing train by a few years. A good lesson to all s/w companies.

Re:horrible idea

[LinuxHam]

Thanks and thanks ;)

Re:I love this

[Aldric]

It is fast. WinXP takes around 10 seconds to boot into the desktop on my machine, while Linux takes around 30-40 seconds to enter runlevel 5.

Have you tried xfce4?

[xororand]

I've recently switched from kde to the gtk-based xfce4 because I wanted more free memory. It is stable, fast and still looks good. If you want to give it a try, check out http://xfce.org. The only drawback I've noticed personally is the (imo) odd file manager which can't be compared to Konqueror or Nautilus in functionality. You can still use one of these though.

Re:I love this

[eraserewind]

I agree you see the XP desktop faster, that's my point. The thing is, though that it hasn't finished booting when it shows you the desktop. It continues for quite some time afterwards, whereas linux doesn't show you the desktop until all the other stuff is basically done. So this quick desktop falls into the category of "trick".

The "complete" XP boot may or may not be overall faster, but you can't tell anything about it from how fast it shows you the desktop, other than the microsoft people are smart enough to know that we don't like to wait around for 40 seconds to use the desktop.

I don't agree with you...

[leonbrooks]

...but I have cursed (metamodded against) the idiot who painted this with a "Flamebait" rating.

Note to such idiots: modding is not about whether you agree with what's said, it's about how well the poster made their point. This post was well written, made some good points (if not as valid as the author might hope), was on topic and (-: hallelujah! :-) gramatically correct.

I'd give it +1 Interesting. Perhaps Slash needs to do something like LXer and break the ratings out into separate agree/disagree, quality/trash scales?

Re:cat Gnome /dev/null

[aichpvee]

Wait, you're saying you can use the gnome GUI? I'm calling bullshit!