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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.
Between this and Miguel de Icaza, it looks like I'll finally be switching to KDE.
... 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.
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
Omit this functionality if you wish but don't advertise it as a "feature."
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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
I'd have to back you up there: when I first installed Ubuntu I went with KDE because it seemed less foreign than GNOME. (And I'm quite happy.)
The government can't save you.
Again, the same. I have used both DEs a lot and I find KDE more capable technically, but Gnome is easier on the eye. I like the top bar and separate window bar at the bottom. I also like the distinct lack of clutter. However, the new KDE looks better in terms of performance and with the new QT libraries, it's apparently easier to create apps that work on Linux and Windows.
If anyone created a KDE "theme" that made it look and work like Gnome, I'd be extremely happy with it. Probably the KDE camp would find that distasteful though.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.