Ark Linux Review, A Distro with an Identity Crisis

mikemuch writes "ExtremeTech has a review of Ark Linux 2006.1, which launched earlier this month. Overall, the reviewer likes this free KDE-based distro, but had to question some implementation choices, such as using the less-compatible Konqueror over Firefox for its default web browser. And for a distro that bills itself as 'a Linux distribution for everyone — designed to be easy to install and learn for users without prior Linux' the installation should hide command-line scrolling and be able to more automatically install standard graphics card drivers."

Comments

Reviewer missed the point

[dbIII]

Konqueror shares libraries with other KDE applications so is likely to have a smaller memory footprint than Firefox.

Konqueror

[AaronW]

I have been using Konqueror a lot. I got fed up with Firefox when after 24 hours of browsing it was consuming 800MB of RAM, even though the cache size was set at 32MB. I have found that Konqueror is often faster, uses a lot less memory, and is generally more stable. There are a few sites where I have had trouble, but I've also had problems with some sites with Firefox (and a few of those worked with Konqueror). Konqueror has gotten a lot better, especially 3.5. A number of additional fixes went into 3.5.4. My only real complaint is that the adblock feature needs a lot of work to catch up with the Firefox extension.

The file dialog for Konqueror, when I download and save binaries, is infinitely better than the one in Firefox. The UI on Konqueror is also much easier to customize, adding or removing buttons at will. Some of the buttons I find quite useful, like scaling the web page larger or smaller. I also like the fact that plug-ins run as a separate process than the browser and I can run them niced. It also means I can run a 64-bit browser and integrate 32-bit plugins.

I also like the bookmark toolbar better in Konqueror. I can easily add folders or book marks to any folder I want with only a couple clicks.

As a file browser, Konqueror is actually quite nice. It's not the big bloated mess people make it out to be. In fact, if anything is a big bloated mess, it's Firefox. Konqueror uses kparts, so that if, for example, I open a .c file in it, it loads the shared libraries for the editor, or if I click on a multimedia file, it loads kaffeine. Just about everything in KDE is a part, so they can be reused. PDFs are also great in Konqueror when it uses kpdf instead of that bloated Acrobat mess.

Hell, I can't even open more than one instance of Firefox, even on different machines if my home directory is shared over a network. Konqueror has no such problems.

The Konqueror browser I'm typing this from has 18 open tabs and has been open for probably about a week or two. It's consuming 475MB of virtual memory and 116MB of resident memory, but I have had a *lot* more tabs open in the past. I can rarely keep Firefox going for more than 24 hours or so, and it gobbles up memory at an astronomical rate (even 1.5.0.6).

As far as rendering web sites goes, I believe Firefox had problems with Slashdot for the longest time, while Konqueror did not.

Re:So which is it?

[ozmanjusri]

So which is it?

It's Konqueror. The Ark Linux devs give their reasons in one of the forums:

We think that Konqueror is a much better browser. Konqueror follows the standards (in particular CSS) more closely than any other browser, it integrates better with the rest of the system, it doesn't drag in hundreds of libraries nothing else needs, and its user interface is better, because it doesn't make weird decisions like using the wrong button order. (We think the weird "Do you want to do this? [No] [Yes]" button order used by Firefox and a couple of other projects is plain wrong, because it contradicts normal language use -- what's the last time someone asked you in plain English "Do you want to xyz? No or yes?"?

If you absolutely need it, you can simply apt-get install firefox though.

http://forum.arklinux.org/viewtopic.php?t=65&highl ight=firefox

Re:Let's be accurate.

[IamTheRealMike]

A quick way to compare KHTML to Gecko (the rendering engine of Firefox) is to look at the source code for each. What one will immediately notice is that while both are written in C++, the code of KHTML is far cleaner than that of Gecko. Gecko suffers from an over-architecturing, which directly leads to code bloat and unnecessary complexity. KHTML, on the other hand, has been designed to be simple and clear, without an overly convoluted architecture.

That's a little unfair. In fact I have read the source code to each and I wouldn't say one is far clearer than the other. Maybe that used to be the case but they've cleaned Gecko up a lot in the past few years. It's true that the Mozilla dialect of C++ is a little more obtuse than the Qt dialect, however, Mozilla is a hell of a lot more portable than KHTML is not only between operating systems but also between compilers, and that makes a big difference. Gecko also has a lot of features that KHTML does not have - for instance the combination of the fact that its objects are easily exposed to JavaScript and XUL is what makes the Firefox extensions culture so vibrant. Where are the extensions to Konqueror? There might be a few, I guess, but nothing like what you have with Firefox. It's hard to see how they could have made extensions so powerful without the platform parts like XPCOM which make the C++ harder to read.

What we end up getting with KHTML is a rendering engine that is of a far higher quality than that of Gecko

Meaningless assertion, not backed up by fact. I claim the opposite. Gecko is fast, very standards compliant and trivial to extend using reasonably well documented APIs and technologies. For instance look at XTF. It has support for a lot of new things like SVG, MathML, designMode and so on. KHTML might support these things, depending if you use the Apple fork ... or it might not.

With the upcoming KDE 4 release, which will likely be portable to Windows and Mac OS X, the portability advantages of Gecko's architecture will be rendered obsolete.

No, I rather think it won't. The portability of Geckos architecture already allowed it to make massive gains on Windows, the only platform that matters statistically. Where was KHTML in all of this? Now don't get me wrong, it's not a bad rendering engine at all, but to claim a Windows port of KHTML will make Gecko obsolete is rather naive. Maybe KDE 4 will rock my world but right now it's mostly a set of marketing web pages and fancy codenames for various abstractions over already quite abstract technologies (HAL, gstreamer etc).