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KDE 4 Uses 40% Less Memory Than 3 Despite Eye-Candy
An anonymous reader writes "Pro-Linux reports that KDE 4, scheduled to be released in January 2008, consumes almost 40% less memory than KDE 3.5, despite the fact that version 4 of the Free and Open Source desktop system includes a composited window manager and a revamped menu and applet interface. KDE developer Will Stephenson showcased KDE 4's 3D eye-candy on a 256Mb laptop with 1Ghz CPU and run-of-the-mill integrated graphics, pointing out that mini-optimizations haven't even yet been started." Update: 12/14 22:40 GMT by Z : Or, not so much. An anonymous reader writes "The author of the original KDE 3.5 vs KDE 4.0 memory comparison has come out with a more accurate benchmark. In reality, KDE 4.0 uses 110 MB more memory than KDE 3.5.8.
Someone call Bill Gates and tell him to read this.
Seek and ye shall find.
GNOME running WITHOUT Compiz requires a good 256MB.
That's WITHOUT the eyecandy.
Good job KDE! It's yet another reason to stop using GNOME, if all the Microsoft pandering wasn't enough.
...KDE developers had some style. Has anyone looked at the hideous new theme? It looks like a bad Vista rip off. The new panel is freakishly large but is complimented really tiny icons.
Isn't that communist or something?
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Between this and Miguel de Icaza, it looks like I'll finally be switching to KDE.
Now I can just leave my extra few gigs of ram nice an empty, they need a rest! Once we get it down to 640k we can move back to dos.
I just downloaded and ran the Debian live version using KDE4 in vBox. It was pretty. However, I couldn't figure out how to disable the "Lancelot" applet thing, which was annoying since anytime the mouse cursor got near it, it'd launch a 1/4-screen-covering window with lists of recent applications, documents, etc. Couldn't even right-click on it to disable.
Still, covering 1/4 of the screen sure didn't take much memory!
This is going to be interesting to see go down... what will Microsoft's response be??
www.isoHunt.com
The laptop was recent, but he limited the memory use and throttled down the CPU to 1GHz. So it still had fancy instructions and a much bigger cache, bus, etc.
Tsunami -- You can't bring a good wave down!
I'm not sure why anyone would run KDE or GNOME. The are both clunky.
... with careful work. And a primary focus on excellence, instead of making money. And people that do care about their product.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Um, the KDE4 release candidate is a fully functional desktop environment.
My new blog
A RC is not non-functioning. It works. As you could have seen from the article.
However it is slower and bigger in the version demonstated, since a lot of debug code is in there.
MS is just looking more and more incompetent all the time.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
A non-functioning "release-candidate" uses 40% less memory than it's predecessor. Impressive.
If it's a release candidate, it's functioning.
One man's -1 Flamebait is another man's +5 Funny.
Well...all the major components are there, but I'd hardly call it "fully functional." It's an incomplete, buggy mess. And I say this as a huge KDE fan and KDE4 evangelist. But let's be serious, it won't really be ready until 4.1, probably around mid-2008.
"KDE 3.5 Was A Major Memory Hog"
GEOS only uses 128kb and that is including eye candy, mind you 640*200 resolution.
A release candidate is a "candidate for release" and, barring whatever bugs users find, could be released as it is.
Thus, I would sure hope their RC does not contain any debug code.
A geek just earned his pocket protector :')
Tokyo Robot Lords! Smile! Taste Kittens!
WAY too much bloat for features most never use. Real men use dash (if you *must* have a program that's a shell and only a shell) or if you don't mind something a bit more versatile to save disk space at potentially the risk of slightly higher memory consumption when all you have is a shell, you use a symlink to busybox for your shell. But not with that glibc cruft mind you, uClibc is the only path to efficiency.
Also, you don't use init, you have the kernel run the aforementioned shell directly instead. Who needs all the cruft of startup services and a well set up tty, after all.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Good news, though I would think that even KDE4 will run better with IceWM as memory manager.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
just to speed things up a bit:
"The fact that a new version of an application does not always ressourcenhungriger must prove the KDE project with the next generation of the environment."
I think I just found my new word-of-the-week
Ah, the second time I've said this today: a release candidate is JUST THAT: A FUCKING CANDIDATE FOR RELEASE.
They are not non-functioning. They are feature complete. Release candidates become releases. Sure, they're not perfect but they're supposed to be basically "we think this is ready for production use, but we're just giving it one last test to be sure".
Really, Microsoft really couldn't give a flying crap.
Ask anyone other than your core geek friends about this and they'll say "Wuh?"
No-one cares outside of geekdom, really they don't.
And it doesn't help that all the screenshots I'm seeing of this are of an interface that really does look pretty average.
You give this news far to much import compared to what it actually has.
Not sure about KDE specifically, but for a project of this scale the sensible thing to do would be to enable/disable full debugging at compile time. That way those who want debugging get debugging, and those who don't get a lean mean KDE machine, both from exactly the same source. Assuming KDE does this, what is wrong with having debugging code in the RC source? Hell, it even makes sense to leave it in the final release - just disabled by default.
Forget world peace, bring on -1 pointless
Sure, they're not perfect but they're supposed to be basically "we think this is ready for production use, but we're just giving it one last test to be sure".
Have you tried it? If this is kde4, then kde4 sucks ass, is full of bugs, and looks like crap.
I'll subscribe to Slashdot when I see a month without a dupe, a typo, or an article the "editors" didn't read.
Yeah, I've been using KDE for a while now. Almost forgot that I'm in it sometimes. I hate the quirkiness but there is a lot more functionality than gnome. I still want to use gnome as a primary but I've gotten used to KDE so much it's kind of annoying. The last thing is that KDE does put up faster than gnome. It's more stable and refined than it used to be a couple of years ago. I've had less app crashes overall and like I said before, I like gnome but KDE is starting to creep up into my primary desktop.
I've read this one like 10 times already, geez.
Too bad it doesn't look good. Seriously, KDE 4 looks like the retard offspring of Vista and OS X. Look at this and tell me I'm wrong. I could not even imagine using KDE4 at the default appearances. Not even the search box has a nice appearance and why is the battery "widget" so large?
"but money is the God of Algiers & Mahomet their prophet." - Rich. O'Bryen June 8th 1786
What!? Whatever happened to the "GUIs are for infants and grandmas. if you can't do it on the command line you shouldn't be allowed to use a computer in the first place" flame?
It's a sad day in Linuxland. What became of the holier than thou, I program in assembly, certifiable *nix prick?
Oh, and don't forget, "Desktop environment x is so bloated."
You young whippersnappers and your fancy shell this and tty that. Real men feed their programs into a time share systems as big as a barn using punch cards, you young hooligan! Why, when I was a lad, all we had were toggles and lights, and we were grateful! Now get off my lawn before I shake my cane at you a second time!
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
The summary incorrectly states that KDE 4 is demonstrated on a "56Mb laptop with 1Ghz CPU and run-of-the-mill integrated graphics."
Actually, the article states that it was run on an X60. I have an X61 (almost identical) and let me tell you, those are not the specs. It has a core 2 duo with an embedded graphics card capable of playing halflife 2 and portal (although not at excellent frame rate).
The article states that he used CPU scaling and some kernel arguments to reduce the system settings. This is actually very misleading and isn't equivalent to a system that ran at 1GHZ, as some commenters on his site point out.
The CPU may be running at a lower clock rate and have one core disabled, but clock rate isn't the only thing that determines CPU speed. The core 2 duo comes with SSE3, which any real 1GHZ machine will not have, and is majorly impactful for graphics operations. Also, the core 2 duo is designed for energy efficiency much more than prior intel and AMD CPU's. So, it likely has significantly more instructions per clock than a real 1GHZ machine. Finally, the graphics card is actually pretty decent (vista aero runs on it fine...) so there's nothing surprising about the computer being able to offload a lot of work to it.
So to summarize this computer has: SSE3, more clocks per cycle, and a nice graphics card that real machines of the 1GHZ era will not have. I'd be surprised if a machine with a lot higher MHZ but lacking SSE3 and the grpahics card could compete.
Also, all he ran on it was an instant messenger... which he said started slow. If he'd down any significant work with that amount of ram given KDE apps, it would have started swapping endlessly. This is not much of an endorsement for KDE.
Also, even if the claims of this article were true, which they aren't, it wouldn't be that impressive. I used to run OSX on a 333MHZ PPC with 32MB of ram, and it had all of the graphical glitzy crap that KDE and Gnome barely make work on high end machines. That a 1GHZ machine would seem impressive just shows how bloated and horribly slow modern desktops like vista, KDE, and Gnome have become.
As a side note, if Gnome or KDE work on your hardware (good luck) then go with it. I know that at least Gnome is pretty well supported, and that makes using linux a bit easier. If not, I highly recommend XFCE. It lacks some features, but has a much lighter weight design, is more compatable with various hardware, and has a window manager that isn't a total piece of shit like metacity and friends. It is especially handy for a laptop with an external monitor. Since xinerama actually works in XFCE (it has major bugs in metacity) you can run both your external monitor at full resolution and your laptop at a lower one, and stick all of the small windows you want to monitor on it (instant messenger, email, etc).
Would it be 60% without the ocular sweetums?
And this is coming from a defender of the free market and devout believer in its virtues, but since Microsoft has largely benefited from partnering up with other large manufacturers of hardware and assemblers of said parts into systems to be sold, it would not be that hard to believe that they designed to a certain market level.
I.E.... "here you go gentlemen, the standard system you are able to use is X Ghz, and X Gigabytes of DDR 1600, anything less than that will be obsolete by the first service pack anyways, so get crackin'!!"
Linux people and most of the OSS folks (Unix as well) have been server dedicated systems for a long time, and built on a robust or rather "efficient" (perhaps a better term is "effective"?) platform. As a result, they've been building to extract as many cycles and memory space as possible for use by client applications, not the Host Operating System.
As a result, Microsoft has it in its best interests to PUSH the upgrade cycle. If they can be depended to push the upgrade cycle to keep selling new boxes, the retail computer builders will continue to give Microsoft the plugs and keep shipping their OS as the "default" or "preferred" or "Supported" Operating System for their Big Bad Ass Kicking Rigs (tm).
" What luck for rulers that men do not think" - Adolf Hitler
seriously, one day 640k of memory will be enough for everyone.
Typically you an even compile the debug code into a final version. It is your option to leave it out or put it in. In binary releases the debug code is usually not included. But, remember this is the Unix world. For a lot of software you can get a source code release and compile it yourself, with whatever options you like.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
I do reconfigure a lot of this -- but I do it exactly once per machine.
If/when I decide to actually share my home directory somehow, I will do it exactly once, and it will stay configured for all time.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
If by "fully functional" you mean "it works but only if you use it the same way as the developers and don't want to configure anything." Since a key functionality of of KDE is its configuriblity, indeed it's why many people use it, you can't really call it "fully functional" if you're stuck with the godawful default desktop that nobody who uses their computer for anything serious would tolerate for longer than it takes to change it. I really hope the Serenity style gets fully ported. It's the first original KDE style that hasn't looked like somebody put Deviant Art in a blender. I'll take a blocky win9x style over the monstrosity that was Keramik any day. Plastic was tolerable but there were no decent light but low contrast color schemes that worked well with it. Polyester is just frightening and has so many rendering errors it's unusable.
The parent is an anti-Linux, anti-OGG, anti-GPL, OS X fanboy troll as shown by his comment history. That observation explains his ludicrous assertion that OS X runs on 32 MB. Even the first version of Mac OS X (10.0) had a hard memory requirement of at least 64 MB. And OS X's memory requirement has only been going up with subsequent releases.
In KDE land RC means "Pw0ned! We just tricked you into beta testing on your work machine!"
That's the thing. This isn't a serious release candidate. If they released the current version, it would be THE WORST THING THEY COULD DO. It's very feature incomplete. It's a release candidate, but only in name, not in usability.
It's not so much fixing as improving. QT4 (which the KDE team doesn't have much involvement with) is what KDE4 is based on, whereas KDE3 uses QT3, which is a lot more monolithic. They trimmed fat. We should definitely pat them on the back for doing more with less. That's what's called development. Which is the opposite of what Microsoft does, which is to make something less functional while still demanding more resources.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
"I love my job, but I hate talking to people like you" (Freddie Mercury)
IIRC the Qt3 -> Qt4 move brought about explicit double buffering of all surfaces by Qt itself.
Does anyone here know how much of the 40% save (however it is measured) comes as a result of applications no longer needing to do their own explicit buffering, in places where double buffering is desirable?
And whether there is a corresponding increase in memory used elsewhere, eg within the X server or in video memory itself?
>I was starting to buy into your comments until I read "OSX on a 333MHZ PPC with 32MB of ram".
>This is simply not possible. Even in Mac OS 9, you needed 64MB ram to run Netscape 6.
I did in fact use the setup I described... and you can check that imacs were sold with 32 megs on wikipedia. Please check your facts before calling me a lier.
What you are not considering is that
1. Netscape 6 was an incredibly bloated app for that era and difficult to run on any computer... it was the reason that people switched to IE. I think I used internet explorer on that computer, or maybe omniweb (this was before safari I believe).
2. OSX had *much* better virtual memory than OS8 and OS9. Although the OSX finder itself was more bloated than the OS9 finder, the system as a whole could actually handle higher memory load. Also, at some point (I forget if they'd done it by 10.1) OSX started compressing the backing store for windows, which is a neat optimization and freed up a lot of ram.
3. I'm not talking about OSX 10.5, which is a different beast and has a lot more services, but OSX 10.1, which was probably the most efficient OSX (fewer requirements than OSX 10.0).
4. I primarily used project builder (the precursor to xcode) on that computer and did opengl development.
Like I said, developers have gotten lazy, but it is entirely possible to develop a system with modern services and profile and optimize it to run on limited hardware. The average developers idea of what limited hardware is is incredibly ridiculous at this point.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IMac_G3
The original iMac had a 233 MHz PowerPC G3 (PowerPC 750) chip, with 512 KB L2 cache running at 116.6 MHz, which also ran in Apple's high-end Power Macintosh line at the time, though at higher speeds, with more expensive models shipping with 1 MB L2 cache. It sold for US$1,299, and had a 4 GB hard drive, 32 MB RAM, 2 MB video RAM, and shipped with Mac OS 8.1, which was soon upgraded to Mac OS 8.5.
Could the lameness filter be set to block copies of the parent post from being posted anymore?
Grammar Nazi
Could have fooled me... I just wanted to perpetuate the four yorkshiremen-style thread going on.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
I'm sorry, but just adding up the memory usage columns from something like 'top' is a horrible way to measure actual memory usage. Why? Well, shared libraries is one big reason. Most of those applications are likely to use a similar set of shared libraries, which the operating system only loads once in memory and then uses for all of the applications. However, things like 'top' include the memory usage of those libraries in every application that uses them. Thus, if 'libkdeprint' is 1 MB and is used by 10 KDE programs, the ACTUAL memory usage of that library would be 1 MB, but top would report 10 MB of memory used (1 MB for each app).
This effect is very noticeable with desktop environments like KDE and GNOME, where there are a ton of programs that all use the same set of shared libraries. If you reduced the size of a few very basic libraries (e.g. 'libkdecore') by a sizable amount, then you could show a fake "huge savings" across the ~30 KDE/GNOME apps that were running.
It isn't that I doubt that KDE 4 uses less memory -- it undoubtedly does -- it's just that using overly simplistic methods to measure the difference in usage is misleading and somewhat pointless.
See a longer discussion of the issue at: http://virtualthreads.blogspot.com/2006/02/understanding-memory-usage-on-linux.html
Are you taking notes?
Less is more!
Maybe, but who are they releasing it to?
In this case, it looks like a candidate for releasing to testers. Now, if they'd said "production release candidate", you'd have a solid case.
-- Alastair
Are people seriously bragging about composited graphics? I mean, Vista shipped with them a year ago.. VISTA. Are people supposed to be impressed with a feature set that has been available for years? Can we please get past this and move on to things that really matter?
Windows NT has a nice looking window manager and uses like 16 meg of memory. Add a pretty wallpaper and your good to go.
Too bad GOD (Stallman) does not approve of KDE as free software, so this is useless. All hail Stallman. O/
you can check that imacs were sold with 32 megs
Yeah, and they all had Mac OS 8 or 9 installed, not OS X as you claimed in grandparent. Neither OS 8 nor 9 were known for their visual appeal. And OS 8/9 certainly didn't have anything glitzy that's comparable to today's KDE.
As for your assertion that MAC OS 8/9
had all of the graphical glitzy crap that KDE and Gnome barely make work on high end machines.
First of all that's not true, as proven by this article and the countless YouTube videos of special effects on KDE and Linux. The tone of your comment reveals a case of "sour grapes syndrome" coming from an Apple and proprietary fanboy who sees that the open source community is creating software of better quality and features. And software that actually works for users, not to restrict them.
I think Gnome is a bit like Apple in this respect. Strange for beginners and nice to long time users. Oh thinking of it, that must be true for KDE and Windows XP and Vista, too... No, I don't believe in oranges here.
KDE 4 looks ugly. I hope I can use Plastik theme again. But anyway, I feel that we're not going to see KDE 4 in Slackware to soon, so I can hapilly use KDE 3 until then :)
No-one cares outside of geekdom, really they don't.
You bet they care when they see two opened instances of IE bringing down their 3-month old computer to a screeching halt because Vista ran out of memory and is using a hard drive swap file formatted in NTFS.
Strange, considering everything I read about Vista, and my current experiences (problems installing Adobe Reader, impossible to run PDFCreator, some hardware that didn't work well), Vista broke much of backwards compatibility. So as XP broke it too, by not running DOS programs anymore. Therefore, the idea that Vista is bloated because of backwards compatibility sounds strange to me.
On the other hand, I recall reading something about network traffic problems on Vista when copying files, and IIRC it was related to it doing some fiddling on the network stack to make it more difficult to copy media files, that is, DRM related.
I actually tend to believe that more of Vista's bloat is due to DRM than it's due to backwards compatibility, of which it actually has very few.
If you have to use that fancy new X11 stuff, I prefer uwm. It wastes no precious screen estate on useless "decorations".
Has no one pointed out that the numbers are actually completely, utterly wrong? See Lubos and Thiagos (two high-ranking KDE and Qt devs) comments here:
http://www.kdedevelopers.org/node/3138
See the original authors retraction, here:
http://www.jarzebski.pl/read/kde-3-5-vs-4-0-round-two.so
So really, it should be "KDE4 uses 75% more memory", which is actually incredibly lame, but doesn't make for as good a title. I'm absolutely amazed that usually cynical slashdot readers have accepted this so uncritically.
That's why I love being part of the Linux community. Say what you will about us, but we've got some creative thinking!
Quack, quack.
I only care if the powertop rating is down.
It's indicative of an overall philosophy in the OSS community. A philosophy that in the long run *will* impact companies like Microsoft if they continue their current course. Consumers might not be aware of the details regarding software performance, but they aren't stupid.
Quack, quack.
Is your peers and potential employers can see your work.
Quack, quack.
This is a kdelibs release candidate, it is not a kde desktop release candidate. Big difference
Different parts of KDE are at different phases.
The core libraries and system are pretty much done.
Most of the desktop environment itself is feature complete. You seem to confuse this with "works perfectly" - all the features are there, but but don't necessarily all work properly yet.
The applications may not quite be up to this stage yet.
As with 99.9% of all memory benchmarking, it was done by someone who didn't totally understand how to measure memory use (and how Linux doesn't allow accurate measurements without a patched kernel). Just read the comments in the post which pointed at the original story.
http://www.illusionary.com/GNOMEvKDE.html
I was about to say 13256278887989457651018865901401704640, but it appears this number is private property.
...OSX?
I can boot Damn Small Linux to a full gui with 8 megs of ram put on a nice wallpaper and you're at ~10.
How are those security patches for your NT machine holding up?
Let me guess: your day job is writing copy for porn sites. :-)
I don't know what Vista uses all its memory for, but KDE using less memory means Linux can use the left over memory as file system cache, as it has done for quite a few years.
Meep.
2 gigs of ram is now $50
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820231121
That 200MB of ram you are saving costs $5. I think $5 is worth it for an easier to use desktop.
Are the GUI designers taking a nap while the programmers work? What's with all the empty space and huge nonessential widgets? Every single window in the screenshot (except maybe Konquerer) needs heavy redesigning:
- System monitor: Huge tabs, huge menu Compare it to Windows's Task manager or OSX Activity monitor - they pack much more data in a more readable way.
- Kopete: That toolbar is enormous! And the status bar at the bottom of the window looks mostly useless. The icons inside it are not only badly distributed spatially and of uneven / visually unadjusted size, they are also ugly and uninformative. The whole window looks like it's been designed by a novice VB programmer in a hurry.
- That window in the background: It looks like it's some sort of configuration application, and from what I see, the "main thing" in the application, probably the reasin the application exists, takes only about *half* of the window space. I'm talking about the list of effects. The rest of the window is taken by the menu, probably some kind of toolbar, probably a search bar, some kind of help label, tabs, a "hint", and a space at the bottom of the window which probably contains "ok/cancel/reset" buttons.
I'm not saying that all window elements should be close together - I appreciate the aesthetic space around the widgets, but this particular UI on this particular screenshot is heavily underdesigned.-- Sig down
Remember Mozilla 1.0 was targeted to fit on a single floppy disk. Indeed a few revisions were down to the 1.6 and 1.7 MB range never once actually fitting on a single floppy. What did we find with this? Not enough support for an entire internet suite, and stability issues. Now Firefox which is not a suite is bigger than those really small Mozilla releases.
So, is KDE 4 going to be a sleek carbon fibre shell on a titanium frame like Damn Small Linux, or is it going to be rice paper stretched over balsa wood like some of those Mozilla versions were?
The preceding post was not a Slashvertisement.
Isn't anyone going to explain why 3.5 was using so much memory in the first instance? Bad programming?
GNOME running WITHOUT Compiz requires a good 256MB.
...you must be a newbie, 'cause everyone knows that if you want Gnome to really fly, you have to switch over to evil 256mb.
It would be interesting to see your source about this. The claim on OpenOffice.org Writer may be credible, but KWord (I suppose you meant that by KWrite, since KWrite is a very basic text editor) is way faster and snappier than MS Word (fine, it has also less features and all, but it is faster to load), and I am not going to believe your claim without data to support it.
Not sure about GEdit, but Notepad is almost featureless and has not changed in a decade or so. It has no code highlighting, no handling of different line endings, no support for different encodings, no tab handling, no plugin framework, no multi-file mode, and in fact its only feature is a search feature without regular expressions. Of course it's going to be fast. For that sake "Hello world" is even faster. I do most of my programming in Kate and I am very happy with that. Notepad may be faster, but it does not do what a text editor is supposed to do in order to be useful.
Victims of 9/11: <3000. Traffic in the US: >30,000/y
How does the number of dynamic libraries affect it? Linux running on a desktop is made up of thousands of smaller projects and libraries. Microsoft is able to consolidate these into fewer, larger, libraries. Does that have any advantage? In other words, could Linux benefit from combining lots of the smaller dynamic libraries into more monolithic libraries?
If you can't say something nice, make sure you have something heavy to throw.
*Sound of nuclear attack siren in background*
If I mod you up, it doesn't necessarily mean I agree with what you've said, sorry.
It uses CPU Cycles, not Memory for most cases. With faster CPU's expected you can use less memory for more eye candy
Lets take the bouncing Icon. There are two normal ways to program this. Get the icon render each frame for each bounce and save it in memory. And just load the memory and play it. That way it plays smooth and quick every time, because it is in memory all pre-rendered. Now with a faster CPU which spend most of its time idle it can render the icon on the fly between each frame and still keep it smooth so all it needs to do is store the main image the next image to be displayed and perhaps what is currently on the screen. So with a 16x16x8 icon that is around 2k of ram using the CPU method it will only take 6k of ram. vs around 40k of ram for the bouncing icon. But if the CPU couldn't do the work in the time needed to get it done using the memory is the only good option. Memory vs. CPU has always been a balance.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Don't be a smart-ass.
Steve Jobs was the one who thought that 128K would be enough.
Ugly fuck-buddies are more grateful.
OK... I just have to ask - which apps do you use this memory for? I have gkrellm up all the time, and the only time I have used more than 60% of my memory was when Firefox flipped out and needed to be restarted. And I have less than 1 gig (768). I can have OpenOffice.org, Firefox with 5+ tabs open, 5+ konsoles, Amarok, Gaim, GIMP, all running on a dual-display system.... and still have plenty of memory left. What do people use to eat their memory? (I did submit as an Ask Slashdot, but it was rejected)
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
uClibc ? You gotta be kidding me. Thats one of the more bloated C libs that i have worked with, only eclipsed by the at-least-half-a-megabyte-for-any-simplest-thingy glibc.
Try looking into avr-libc sources and see what i mean.
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.slashdot.org Errors found while checking this document as HTML5!
With the higher end desktop environments like Gnome and KDE whats wrong with XFCE, i started using it when i put Xubuntu on a server i was working with about a year ago so i could play with it and code somewhere comfortable... It works, it did all i needed it to do and then some... Sure it doesn't have radial menus and the ability to mow my lawn, but it allows me to launch applications and start things when i boot...it has a clock and multiple desktops and even a few nifty configuration tools, i know it was meant as a joke but if you think XFCE4 lacks functionality you expect too much out of something thats mission was to be a lightweight desktop environment for various *NIX systems. Designed for productivity, it loads and executes applications fast, while conserving system resources. It does exactly what its meant to and nothing more.
I used KDE for a number of years simply for all the, what has been referred to as, Clutter. Once i got past the whole omg it does so much i realized it was eating resources I could be using for other things. If KDE4 is using less resources then yeah its going to be nicer and easier to use on older and less powerful systems but its not like you can use the fact its a resource hog against it, you just have to take a step back and look at what they were trying to do with the system when they designed it.
I think too many people generalize programs for Linux, when every program that has a category was designed to have a purpose beyond that, (IE Lightweight, cutting edge, integrated), and people just go OH IT DOESN'T HAVE LASER BEAMS AND EXPLOSIVE BUTTONS SO IT MUST SUCK.
So good for KDE4 making what it does well already less resource hungry allowing it to be used on systems it normally wouldn't be practical on.
Measuring real memory consumption is notoriously hard, without some evidence of systematic and careful measurement (unavailable in English), I would anticipate that this is great advocacy, but almost certainly totally bogus.
You should try using "strip" when you're done linking.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
My pet peeve: KDE does not include print selection in the 3.3.x series!
Now the 4.x series uses trolltech's (QT?) printing backend there's STILL no print selection.
I've been flipping between the e17 that ships with the everex/walmart pc, which is buggy as hell and has a number of big-time gotchas and XFCE4 on Debian Etch. I enabled compositing on XFCE4 and it is an excellent balance of speed, eye candy and functionality. The default XFCE4 in Etch doesn't do it justice.
Got Trader Joe's? friendwich.com RSS feeds work now!
KDE using less memory than XFCE?
;')
...
Well, all I can say is that dreams are important, so never give up your dreams no matter how far from reality they get. Like KDE ever using less memory than XFCE. ROFL.
On the KDE front, all I can say is : "Yeaaa! It's about FREAKIN' time!" Now all I have to do is wait 5 years for it to make it's way into a debian based release.
Now if we can only do something about this honking huge kernel and that king of memory hogs OOo.
I might be able to finally dust off my old 8088 @ 10MHz w/ 1MB RAM, and use it again. Oh those were the days
when hardware was made to last longer than the warranty.
Woz didn't create the Y2K problem! WTF are you smoking!!!
The *real* Y2K issue was on big iron -- mainframes. Programmed in COBOL.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
What's purple and commutes? An Abelian grape.
I prefer GNUStep (with WildMenus plug-in of course).
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Maybe 3.5 just sucked. I used it quite a bit and it worked well. It doesn't touch Windows yet but it definitely was useful and fun.
With fairness, they have rewritten the equation editor from scratch for Office 2007, and it is a *vast* improvement over the old one. You can enter the equation linearly and it'll format it properly for you (e.g. (a_0 + b^2)/2 ), and special characters are done using the autocorrect engine with a LaTeX-like syntax (e.g. \forall is replaced as you type with the upside-down A).
Of course, you can still point & click you if like, so engineers don't need to worry. (Just kidding...).
What's purple and commutes? An Abelian grape.
Crap.
Nothing will draw users to Linux like hand editing an xorg.conf 50 times until they get it right.
I didn't realize those pictures with Ruben Studdard were saved in the cache...
I had another sig before, but this one is better
So in your example, the burden of proving that there is a link between Iraq and 9/11 lies on the person who claimed there was a link (GWB), who failed to do so.
But in the case of Gates, the burden of proving that he did says such a thing lies at the feet of those who claim that he did, and so far, no-one has provided even a hint of a source for the quote. A quick Google & Wikiquote suggest that no-one has ever managed to trace where the quote came from, not even to something as vague as "anonymous sources in Microsoft". Thus, the assumption must be that it is apocryphal.
The closest traceable comment resembling the 640 remark was in a 1989 interview, where he said "I have to say that in 1981, making those decisions, I felt like I was providing enough freedom for 10 years. That is, a move from 64k to 640k felt like something that would last a great deal of time. Well, it didn't - it took about only 6 years before people started to see that as a real problem." (Source).
What's purple and commutes? An Abelian grape.
,, wash, rinse, repeat.
The perversity of the Universe tends towards a maximum. - O'Toole's Corollary
with all the vitriol in this thread you'd think this was another vista release. I'm personally pumped for this; Between KDE4 and CFS I haven't been this excited for a new release of all the linux distros in awhile. Don't like it? Don't use it. Why slam everyone's hard work though? To the developers: Thank you very much.
"Tricked"?
Betas on my work machine give me 100% bullet-proof coffee-break alibis!
Then again, so does Vista...
"I think an etch-a-sketch with an ethernet port would beat IE7 in web standards compliance."
... I didn't INHALE..."?
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
Have you actually used the release candidate in question? They may call it that, but it is by no means ready for release. Rather it seems "rc" is the new "beta."
No kidding ? Have you tried it ? With uClibc minimum static binary will be a few tens of kilobytes on ARM9, with glibc the number is just shy of half a meg. x86 code is somewhat more compact, but not terribly so. And no, dynamic linking cant be used everywhere, and even if it could, that 500kb of C library wont fit on my 128KB on-chip flash.
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.slashdot.org Errors found while checking this document as HTML5!
He's not "evil" because of what he says. Evil is also a matter of what one does, so one ought to look at actions as well as words. People frequently do evil with good intentions; I dare say that people do evil that way more often than they do evil for its own sake. Callousness and indifference also seem to outweigh those who would revel in cruelty for no reason, for that matter.
He did evil due to his methods of competition, destroying competitors by underhanded legal, quasi-legal and illegal means (breaking contracts, lying, and hiring lawyers to bail them out of trouble, etc.). He's done evil in forcing people to do things that are good for Microsoft, but harmful to themselves and to their businesses.
He's also done good, though, using his wealth to help the poor. Thus, he's doing better than he could be doing, but not as good as he should be doing. But that describes a lot of people, myself included.
Agnosticism is the ability to admit you don't have enough evidence to make an informed decision about the origin of the universe.
I think you sum it up very nicely.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
... In the computer lab at the school I work at. * I've got the license. * It runs ok on a 700 MHz machine with 256M ram. So far I've seen nothing of XP that makes me want to upgrade. (I know, I should be running linux. But these computers have to support several ed packages, somehow running a an application under Wine under linux on machines that aready are low on memory just doesn't hack it.)
Third Career: Tree Farmer Second Career: Computer Geek First Career: Teacher, Outdoor Instructor, Photographer.