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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.
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!
That would be wrong, though. A basic KDE 3.5 desktop environment uses mid-way between what a Gnome 2.14 and an XFCE 4.2.2 will use. This suggests that a 4.0 desktop may consume less than XFCE does now.
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You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
Or to completely underload it, as in Ion
Summary of Ion features
* Tiled workspaces with tabbed frames, as discussed above.
* Designed to be primarily used from the keyboard.
* Fully documented configuration and scripting interface on top of the lightweight Lua extension language.
* Modular design. The main binary implements only basic window manager functionality. Additional modules implement extra features and window management policies.
* The query module implements a line editor similar to mini buffers in many text editors. It is used to implement many different queries with tab-completion support: show manual page, run program, open SSH session, view file, goto named client window or workspace, etc. Menus are also displayed as queries.
* A statusbar that adapts to the tilings, taking only the space it really needs, modulo constraints of the layout. The statusbar can also be configured to swallow other (small) windows, and does so automatically for Window Maker protocol dockapps, and KDE-protocol system tray icons.
* Full screen client windows are seen as workspaces on their own. It is possible to switch to a normal workspace while keeping several client windows in full screen state and also switch clients that do not themselves support full screen mode to this state.
* The scratchpad module provides a conveniently toggleable area for random tasks, akin to the consoles of many FPS games.
* To run those particularly badly behaving programs, Ion also supports floating windows of the PWM flavour. These can be had as separate workspaces without an underlying tiling, or floating on top of a tiling. Tiled windows can be detached to float, and reattached.
* It is not a project of the self-proclaimed "free" or open-source software movement, and does not suffer from popular fads among it, such as Xft/fontconfig and autoconf.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
Well, it works fine on an eeePC 900MHz celeron M (as has been noted earlier): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wedw701Gy8s
Also, since there's so much integration within KDE, the RAM usage doesn't jump that much when using an application. I'm running KDE 3.5 with opera, kmail, ktorrent, amarok, and yakuake, plus all the services, and I'm at about 300MB of RAM used - not much higher than when none of the apps are running.
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.
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.
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