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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.
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!
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!
... 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.
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.
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"
Indeed. XFCE is nifty. Having switched to it, I don't think I'm missing anything.
Deleted
GEOS only uses 128kb and that is including eye candy, mind you 640*200 resolution.
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.
No, seriously, I was curious how it was shaping up, design-wise, and I check out the site and find stuff like this:
http://www.kde.org/announcements/announce_4.0-rc2/krunner.jpg
And this:
http://www.kde.org/announcements/announce_4.0-rc2/dolphin.jpg
Colours, fonts, and icons are all over the place. Insane and useless borders and gradients cluttering up the interface, and an overall lack of clarity of any kind. It's like a big joke.
I mean, just look at that krunner screenshot again. What is that thing? Black, white, black, white, then suddenly grey and shaded and colourful icons, and fonts right out of a VGA BIOS.
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
It's called a theme. You can change the theme layout to anything you want. I do agree with you though, that is one very ugly theme.
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.
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
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'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
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.
I wouldn't admit to having actually read it 10 times.
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.
Sorry but you are completely full of shit. OS X does not run for any reasonable definition of "run" on 32mb of RAM.
Have a look at the minimum requirements for OS X 10.1 which you say was the most efficient OS X.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_OS_X_v10.1#System_Requirements
Notably: RAM required 128 megabytes
And you're saying you did OpenGL development on a quarter of the minimum requirements. Riiight.
Troll. Nice one though. The moderators believed you at least.
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.
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.
Well, KDE is listed on the Free Software Directory (directory.fsf.org). Also, just recently, RS was quoted commending KOffice devs, and challenging Gnome devs over their stances on ODF.
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.
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
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
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.
2000 called and they want their FUD back.
Trolltech released QT v2.2 under the GPL back in September 2000, after which RMS stopped complaining and granted forgiveness as they did what they wanted.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
I think you're being a bit harsh.
He said 10.0 not 10.1. Even so, I think folks are entitled to be a little hazy on machine specs from yesteryear. OS X 10.0 "ran" quite well on 64MB of RAM. (And 333 MHz is actually a pretty liberal estimate. I had 10.2 work quite nicely on an aging G3 Powerbook.)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_OS_X_v10.0