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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.
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.
Between this and Miguel de Icaza, it looks like I'll finally be switching to KDE.
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.
I don't use KDE, but I use fluxbox so I can use my gigs of ram for actual applications. Until memory is literally free, all you "but memory is so cheap" people can kiss my ass.
Maybe not
You've already heard Microsoft's entire planned response (i.e. nothing).
If Microsoft were cornered on the question, their response would be "RAM is cheap and anything other than our software is crap anyway".
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.
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.
"KDE 3.5 Was A Major Memory Hog"
Still, covering 1/4 of the screen sure didn't take much memory!
... well, goofy, you might as well have installed something like Fluxbox or go back to using nothing but xterms, learning to do without the more subtle but useful effects available or being developed elsewhere.
Speaking of wasted space and distractions, and not to be trollish, but I've always wondered why it is that KDE and Gnome insist on using large-to-oversized-to-supersized icons for everything, KDE being notable in that it traditionally distinguishes itself with icons of brighter colors, in wilder designs, and offers greater customisability?
Seems to me that the term eye-candy, while often used in a disparaging fashion, should refer to a certain kewl aesthetic, rather than literal candy of the M&M variety. It's almost the inverse of a Queer Eye for the Straight Guy episode -- instead of getting a great design from three flaming queers, you get a flaming queer design from a bunch of straight guys. Well, maybe not that bad, but still.
I mean, really, do people really need toolbars that takes up a 1/3 of the space of an application window? Is the boredom threshold so low that everything has to be decorated with bright colours, or is it that people find it hard to to hit things with their mouse? Sure, both KDE and Gnome are better than Windows, but by the time you've customised things to be less
I'll subscribe to Slashdot when I see a month without a dupe, a typo, or an article the "editors" didn't read.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
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
Hey!
:)... while the current generation can't even turn the damn TV off long enough to think for themselves... perhaps gates was right about that.... 640K is all you ever need, if you're not filling it up with pictures of Britney and the latest American Idol's nudie pics.
You sound like my dad, only he doesn't use a cane and he DID work on those punch card systems... he still reminisces about it and had that EXACT attitude when I showed him some of my OOP work in college, he asked me "where's the workflow, where's your goto's and breaks? what's all this mess?"
Granted he was from a generation that could use that "poor coding practice" of "goto's" and the like to go to the moon (presuming the naysayers are wrong
" What luck for rulers that men do not think" - Adolf Hitler
Point taken, but for KDE to expand on the old functionality while reducing memory footprint by 40% is not a tradeoff - it's just a flat-out improvement.
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
What DRM processing? You act like every single system call is brute force decoding a message from the NSA or something. You're making this absurd accusation without backing it up.
When Ballmer claimed open-source is Communist, he was rightly criticized for making an absurd accusation with no evidence. Perhaps this should go both ways.
I'll save you some time and tell you that you can't change the panel yet. It's coming though. KDE 4.0.0 is going to be a bit rough, so don't let that taint your perception of the whole KDE 4 cycle.
No one else needs to. We just hit the recompile button and hey presto!
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
He didn't become evil until the evilness was "enabled" by the market and reinforced by investors. Without a perfect storm of opportunity and investment, he would be just another geek. Arguably, he would be a better geek if he were able to concentrate on building great products instead of making his budget. There is an eposide of "Star Trek" in which Spock fits equally well into both the "good" Enterprise and the "evil" Enterprise in the mirror-image parallel universe. Gates would fit in equally well as an OSS guy.
Just remind him of Mark Twain's quote: I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.
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.