Re:Gentoo's portage is nice...
on
Gentoo 1.0 Released
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
I never really understood the rationalization for having seperate/var or/tmp partitions on a single harddrive. It just makes filesystem space allocation less dynamic and flexible. In general, most installations don't bang/var and/tmp hard enough to necessitate putting them on seperate drives, and its a little unreasonable to expect documentation writers to cater to those with very specific needs for/var and/tmp (like news servers). Also, I don't quite understand how lack of atime can effect whether you have new mail. If mail is stored in one big file (which is an evil practice that should be relegated to the dust-bins of history) then mtime is what should be read. If mail is stored as seperate files, then its the mtime of the directory which should be read.
if you wanna compare usability/functionality with NT4, go with KDE1, XFree3, and a 2.2 kernel. >>>>>>>>>>> Umm, nope. NT4 has everything that KDE 2.2.x with XFree4 and the 2.4 kernel does. This includes a component model (COM), accelerated OpenGL, a journaling filesystem, etc. Aside from all the stupid UI gimmicks (which I turn off anyway) NT4 is feature-complete.
I'm sick and tired of everybody complaining about how slow kde2 is, and they're trying to run it on a machine with as much power as a low-end TI graphing calculator. put blackbox on low-powered machines, and save kde2 for the nice desktops. >>>>>>>>>>> Do you consider an Athlon 1700 a 'nice' desktop? Well it too runs KDE2 slowly.
I'm using KDE3 beta3 on a 1400 athlon w/ 640megs of ram, and it is extremely snappy. >>>> Obviously, you're dead. Only a dead person would consider KDE to be "snappy." (Unless, of course, KDE3 is three or four times faster than 2.2.x, I haven't tried it yet). Try using BeOS sometime and see "snappy."
I ran it for a few days, without ever shutting down multiple konsoles, evolution, mozilla, mozilla mail, gaim with 8 concurrent sign-ons, and konqueror, and it ran perfectly. I booted into windows and just tried using it with a few mozilla windows, trillian, emacs, and windows pic viewer...and it was awful. the speed decrease was inexcusable. >>>>>>>> Umm, you probably shouldn't be using programs like Mozilla and emacs, which aren't really Windows-native (they've got giant abstraction layers, such as the Mozilla cross-platform layer, and Cygwin in the case of emacs). You should be using IE6 and Visual C++.
Don't be daft. Win2K is a good deal faster than Win98 in the UI department (and after service pack 2, in the gaming department as well)! Moving from the 16/32 bit mess that is Win98 to the pure 32bit code of WinNT made a big difference.
Umm, nope. Sorry, no cigar. The default method of communication in XFree86 4.2 on Linux is UNIX domain sockets. Sure there is the MIT-SHM extension, but that is only for XPutImage and XGetImage. There is no shared memory transport for XFree86 on Linux.
I run KDE 2.2.2 on a K62-350 w/64MB of RAM. Shut down some unnecessary services and you'll find that the "slow" stuff isn't so slow anymore (hint: you're probably running out of "real" RAM.) And even poor old Win98 runs slow on this box. >>>>>>>>> Obviously, you've got the reflexes of a slug. If I hear any more accusations of misconfiguration, I'm going to scream. I've got only a few critical services running (notably, sshd), certainly not sendmail or apache. I've compiled a custom kernel using every patch set I can think of (jp6, mjc2, and various combinations of rmap, O(1), preempt, and lock-break) and finally settled on XFS + preempt + lock-break. I've got the latest drivers from NVIDIA, and I'm using Debian, so its not the packaging. Go use a BeOS machine for a month then come back and see how painfully slow your Linux desktop is. (BTW: I doubt its the RAM. I've got 256MB).
Hate to tell ya this, but the Windows world is standardized only in theory. >>>>>>> I've never had a Windows program refuse to start up because it couldn't find some obscure bitmap font that I long ago wiped off my computer in favor of TTF. In Linux, programs constantly refuse to accept the fact that I like Arial as the default, and that I don't have Helvetica installed.
Hooray. I run VNCServer on *n?x, MacOS (including OSX), and Windows. You have to have that faster network connection for it to be worthwile, though, especially with eyecandy-happy OSX. >>>>>>>> What's VNC got to do with anything? I'm saying that Win2K and X both of network transparency, and Win2K is a heck of a lot faster. IE: Network transparency != slow.
Repeat after me: there's speed, then there's stability and security. Guess what's more important? >>>>>> Speed? To me anyway. Besides, KDE has bailed on me far more often than Win2K. Actually, its like 2 crashes for KDE and 0 for Win2K, but its (2/0 == infinity) times more unstable! BeOS in several years of use only crashed on me when I was doing driver programming.
And as I said before, you're probably some poor sap without enough RAM, and you probably have Apache and all sorts of crap you shouldn't have running if you're using your machine as a desktop machine. >>>>>>>> And as I've said before, I've got enough RAM and have been shutting off unneeded services since I started using Linux back with Slack 3.5!
Shut off the network services. All of 'em. >>>> But then how'd I ssh into my machine? Or ftp? I ran web, ftp, firewall, and telnet services on my BeOS box for ages. Never noticed slowdown. Now, my Linux machine is relieved of the firewall duties (probably the most taxing on the machine, and something even my 486 can handle!) and it still runs slowly. It's not my setup (IceWM runs great, compiles run great), its not my RAM (if 256MB is enough for Win2K, its enough for KDE2, plus I'm not hitting swap according to vmstat), its entirely the fault of KDE (and GNOME)!
In general, journaled filesystems tend to have two advantages:
1) They tend to be more modern as a whole because journaling became popular comparatively recently. BFS (BeOS filesystem) was a very fast, modern filesystem, and journaling (or some form of crash-protection) is one of those checklist features modern filesystems are expected to have that aren't present in older filesystems like ext2.
2) They allow the use of asynchronus metadata writes. While ext2 tended to care little about crash protection and did asynchronus metadata writes without crash protection, most systems (like BSD) used (slow) synchronus writes for metadata.
So can you open 42 versions of the same.avi movie on your Linux Desktop and play them simultaneously without dropped frames while surfing the internet on a PII450? >>>>>>>>>> It depends;) Using proper drivers (NVIDIA, which allows the use of XVideo extensions), a lightweight WM (IceWM), and a good player (MPlayer), yes. Under KDE 2.2.2 and Noatun, no. It's all in the userspace! That's why these BeOS on Linux things are so great!
A) GNOME and KDE, as good as they might be to deluded Linux users, is nothing compared to BeOS and Windows. I know. After having used BeOS for years on my 300MHz PII, KDE 2.2 and GNOME 1.4 run painfully slow, even on my new Athlon 1700+. Win2K on both machines is blazingly fast.
B) X is not perfect. There is tons of stuff that could be improved (but at the cost breaking compatibility). Also, it is not standardized. I'm sick of every single program havng its own way of doing fonts and printing.
C) Umm, you can do remote desktop on Win2K as well, its called Citrix. The damn thing is fast enough to run Word comfortably over a medium-speed DSL line.
D) Who cares if it can support apps written for a totally different architecture? There's actual useful features, then there's nerd jack-off features. Guess which one this is.
The problem with X is its design. It was designed with remote usage in mind and local usage is far from optimal. Even with UNIX domain sockets (which, btw are slower than most other forms of IPC on Linux) there is all this protocol overhead that is unnecessary locally. Instead of a standardized protocal, X should have been a standardized API. That way, everything between the API call and the implementation could be optimized for the specific case being used. Think, for example, if X was based on COM. Then each API call would be a simple virtual function call locally (instead of a rather expensive socket call), and remote transparency would be preserved.
Back when people used BeOS, Linux couldn't deliver that kind of performance. Linux users were trudging along with 200ms latencies and ext2 while BeOS users laughed at them from their journaled-filesystem, ultra-low latency machines. In a short period of time, Linux has come an extremely long way to becoming a kick-ass workstation kernel. In fact, it has even eclipsed BeOS in latency, filesystem, VM, etc. The only place where BeOS still has the advantage is in userspace, where BeOS totally whips GNOME and KDE in terms of speed, ease-of-use, simplicity, consistancy, etc. Apparently, this fork tries to take the best ideas from both sides.
1) I can get open specs to every piece of hardware (not just ideology, I like to fool around with kernel development), 2) I can get CPUs that (efficient as they might be) can compare to my Athlon 1700 both in performance and price, 3) I can get decent supporting infrastructure for that fast CPU (SDR RAM? In 2002? C'mon!) 4) I can run a 100% open source OS, not just a partially open source OS, that is actually supported by the manufacturer, 5) When it runs BeOS;)
Of course, some of the allegations about Apple are totally moronic. Those 'leet UNIX hAxOrs who complain about Apple's user base. Clue: People don't need to know about computers. Oh no. The blasphamy. To many users, computers are little more than tools. Just as people don't need to know about their cars to use them, they don't need to know about their computers to use them. It is the goal of car makers to make their products as easy and safe for people to use as possible, and it should be the goal of software makers to do the same. Of course, this doesn't preclude software meant for computer nerds, just as it doesn't preclude cars made for auto nerds. It just means that the designers of said products shouldn't force others to have the same interests as themselves.
*ATI* has flaky drivers? They've yet to have a decent driver set in the last several years! ATI cards are slower and flakier. Why in god's name should Apple is them?
Maybe because the PS2 software has yet to need *any* patches? This whole "patch" thing is more or less unheard of in the console world. The only bug I've ever seen in a PS2 game is in FF-X, where the text will sometimes smear due to the way the game engine does the water wave effect. In fact, the only time a console has ever crashed on me is once in 1996, when my N64 crashed playing Mario. Most computer users would kill for 6 months without a crash, much less 6 years!
In terms of what? I don't doubt that Linux is faster at actually doing *work*. However, I find it hard to believe that it is anywhere near as "snappy." I mean opening menus, starting programs, etc.
Just/. pages. Trying to open a new tab on a/. thread will take several seconds during which the whole UI will freeze up. 'Great' is very relative. For me, KDE-2 is barely tolerable even on a 1.5 GHz Athlon XP. For other people, KDE-2 is tolerable even on a 233 Pentium. I've been rather spoiled using BeOS all these years, and it takes a hell of a lot to make the cut. Of course, Win2K can do it, so it can't be all that hard.
Umm, how to you view images in Lynx? Dynamic content? Java applets? Also, xemacs is slower than sin and xjed and gedit aren't word processors. CSS is too slow to use just for document processing. As for the GUI comment, some of us are visual (oh my god, a nerd with asthetics, can't be!) and need to SEE what we're working on. Besides, a GUI is a hell of a lot better for word processing (just as a CLI is a hell of a lot better for file management).
I've seen in several places people say that its okay for newer software to require newer hardware. That's absolute bull-crap. Newer software should only require more power if it is more features than older software. I can accept a fully anti-aliased, transparent-everything desktop to be slower than a standard one, because of all the eye candy. However, KDE and GNOME in their present state aren't any more functional than Windows 2k/XP. Yet, they are much, much slower*. Say you're grading things wholistically. You're three important catagories (on the desktop) are features, performance, ease of use, stability, and security. Win2k/XP wins the first one, not only because it has features that GNOME and KDE don't, but because these features are much more mature and widely used. The KDE/GNOME component systems might be great, but far more apps take advantage of COM/OLE on Windows. Win2k/XP wins the second one, hands down. Even with my 1.5GHz KDE2 machine, I still sometimes look longingly at my brother's 750Mhz Win2K machine. The stability bit is a wash. WinXP itself is rock solid, but Windows apps are often flaky. On the other hand, same parts of GNOME and KDE (Konq and Galeon in particular) can be flakey as well, so its probably even. In terms of ease of use, its also probably a wash. As long as you've got a sysadmin, WinXP is as easy to maintain as KDE/GNOME. WinXP is more consistant than either, but Windows apps tend to be more annoying and less customizable, which cancels that out. In terms of security, both are even. WinXP has far more powerful security options (ACL, etc) which are important in multi-user desktops. However, WinXP tends to have more security faults, which cancels the advantages. Normally, security would go to Linux, but on a desktop, access control tends to be more important than hacking-resistance. So, in most of the catagories, its even between WinXP and GNOME/KDE. If WinXP performs a hell of a lot better, what advantage does GNOME/KDE have? The only thing I can think about is that its free software, which is the only reason I use Linux and not Windows. Its a damn good reason, but it would be nice to have some other perks too...
* Which is ironic in itself, because they're running on kernel that is much, much faster. They can't even blame X, because (from the benchmarks I've done) X is damn competitive to GDI, and in many respects (blitting bitmaps, for example) can even beat DirectX. Nope, after about 4.x, the "but X sux" arguement kind of dissapeared.
What do you use for web browsing? Galeon crawls* on anything less than 600MHz. What do you use for word processing? Abiword slows down visibly when dealing with large documents. Highlighting parts of big documents can become a chore. There are many apps that don't have decently performing versions, and its a rather silly situation. And don't tell me people should use vi or elm. People shouldn't be forced to upgrade to 1GHz+ procs just to use reasonably feature-rich GUI programs. Not even MS requires people to have the kind of horsepower that a *modern* Linux desktop does.
* It's not so much that Galeon crawls, its that the damn thing is agressively single-threaded, so page-rendering freezes up the whole app. On slower systems, page rendering takes up a lot more time, and thus the app seems very unresponsive.
The performance of Linux GUI systems in general is pretty awful. Recently, I upgraded from a 300MHz PII to a 1700+ Athlon. Why? Almost everything I did (compiling, etc) ran fine on my old system. The only reason I had to upgrade was to run my desktop at a reasonable speed! Win2K is pretty damn snappy on 300MHz, and instantaneous on anything above 700MHz. Meanwhile, both GNOME and KDE are only barely tolerable on my 1.5GHz Athlon! Its still not instananeous enough, especially in KDE and GNOME. In terms of performance, Win2K is about equivilent to window maker with straight Xt applications or perhaps some of the more well-made GTK+ apps (ROX, Sylpheed). Given that Win2K does a hell of a lot more features than any of those combos, however, that's a pretty pathetic showing for Linux GUIs.
PS> I'm using Debian (sid), so no, its not the packaging!
A rule is a rule. >>>> No, there are real rules and fake rules. Real rules are there for important things (don't kill people). Fake rules are there either just to cover somebody's ass (basically, any rule in the public school system) or to protect people from themselves. The first one is bad to break. The second one is stupid not to break, because everyone else is too. If a rule isn't enforced unless somebody actively complains, then it probably wasn't important anyway.
Uh, running Sid right here with XFree 4.1. Works perfectly. In fact, Sid is a hell of a lot more 'stable' than Mandrake 8.1. I've had several broken packages in 8.1 (especially when I enabled cooker) but I've been using Sid as long as I've used Debian, and not a single problem yet.
Slashdot Mirror
I never really understood the rationalization for having seperate /var or /tmp partitions on a single harddrive. It just makes filesystem space allocation less dynamic and flexible. In general, most installations don't bang /var and /tmp hard enough to necessitate putting them on seperate drives, and its a little unreasonable to expect documentation writers to cater to those with very specific needs for /var and /tmp (like news servers). Also, I don't quite understand how lack of atime can effect whether you have new mail. If mail is stored in one big file (which is an evil practice that should be relegated to the dust-bins of history) then mtime is what should be read. If mail is stored as seperate files, then its the mtime of the directory which should be read.
if you wanna compare usability/functionality with NT4, go with KDE1, XFree3, and a 2.2 kernel.
>>>>>>>>>>>
Umm, nope. NT4 has everything that KDE 2.2.x with XFree4 and the 2.4 kernel does. This includes a component model (COM), accelerated OpenGL, a journaling filesystem, etc. Aside from all the stupid UI gimmicks (which I turn off anyway) NT4 is feature-complete.
I'm sick and tired of everybody complaining about how slow kde2 is, and they're trying to run it on a machine with as much power as a low-end TI graphing calculator. put blackbox on low-powered machines, and save kde2 for the nice desktops.
>>>>>>>>>>>
Do you consider an Athlon 1700 a 'nice' desktop? Well it too runs KDE2 slowly.
I'm using KDE3 beta3 on a 1400 athlon w/ 640megs of ram, and it is extremely snappy.
>>>>
Obviously, you're dead. Only a dead person would consider KDE to be "snappy." (Unless, of course, KDE3 is three or four times faster than 2.2.x, I haven't tried it yet). Try using BeOS sometime and see "snappy."
I ran it for a few days, without ever shutting down multiple konsoles, evolution, mozilla, mozilla mail, gaim with 8 concurrent sign-ons, and konqueror, and it ran perfectly. I booted into windows and just tried using it with a few mozilla windows, trillian, emacs, and windows pic viewer...and it was awful. the speed decrease was inexcusable.
>>>>>>>>
Umm, you probably shouldn't be using programs like Mozilla and emacs, which aren't really Windows-native (they've got giant abstraction layers, such as the Mozilla cross-platform layer, and Cygwin in the case of emacs). You should be using IE6 and Visual C++.
Don't be daft. Win2K is a good deal faster than Win98 in the UI department (and after service pack 2, in the gaming department as well)! Moving from the 16/32 bit mess that is Win98 to the pure 32bit code of WinNT made a big difference.
Umm, nope. Sorry, no cigar. The default method of communication in XFree86 4.2 on Linux is UNIX domain sockets. Sure there is the MIT-SHM extension, but that is only for XPutImage and XGetImage. There is no shared memory transport for XFree86 on Linux.
I run KDE 2.2.2 on a K62-350 w/64MB of RAM. Shut down some unnecessary services and you'll find that the "slow" stuff isn't so slow anymore (hint: you're probably running out of "real" RAM.) And even poor old Win98 runs slow on this box.
>>>>>>>>>
Obviously, you've got the reflexes of a slug. If I hear any more accusations of misconfiguration, I'm going to scream. I've got only a few critical services running (notably, sshd), certainly not sendmail or apache. I've compiled a custom kernel using every patch set I can think of (jp6, mjc2, and various combinations of rmap, O(1), preempt, and lock-break) and finally settled on XFS + preempt + lock-break. I've got the latest drivers from NVIDIA, and I'm using Debian, so its not the packaging. Go use a BeOS machine for a month then come back and see how painfully slow your Linux desktop is. (BTW: I doubt its the RAM. I've got 256MB).
Hate to tell ya this, but the Windows world is standardized only in theory.
>>>>>>>
I've never had a Windows program refuse to start up because it couldn't find some obscure bitmap font that I long ago wiped off my computer in favor of TTF. In Linux, programs constantly refuse to accept the fact that I like Arial as the default, and that I don't have Helvetica installed.
Hooray. I run VNCServer on *n?x, MacOS (including OSX), and Windows. You have to have that faster network connection for it to be worthwile, though, especially with eyecandy-happy OSX.
>>>>>>>>
What's VNC got to do with anything? I'm saying that Win2K and X both of network transparency, and Win2K is a heck of a lot faster. IE: Network transparency != slow.
Repeat after me: there's speed, then there's stability and security. Guess what's more important?
>>>>>>
Speed? To me anyway. Besides, KDE has bailed on me far more often than Win2K. Actually, its like 2 crashes for KDE and 0 for Win2K, but its (2/0 == infinity) times more unstable! BeOS in several years of use only crashed on me when I was doing driver programming.
And as I said before, you're probably some poor sap without enough RAM, and you probably have Apache and all sorts of crap you shouldn't have running if you're using your machine as a desktop machine.
>>>>>>>>
And as I've said before, I've got enough RAM and have been shutting off unneeded services since I started using Linux back with Slack 3.5!
Shut off the network services. All of 'em.
>>>>
But then how'd I ssh into my machine? Or ftp? I ran web, ftp, firewall, and telnet services on my BeOS box for ages. Never noticed slowdown. Now, my Linux machine is relieved of the firewall duties (probably the most taxing on the machine, and something even my 486 can handle!) and it still runs slowly. It's not my setup (IceWM runs great, compiles run great), its not my RAM (if 256MB is enough for Win2K, its enough for KDE2, plus I'm not hitting swap according to vmstat), its entirely the fault of KDE (and GNOME)!
In general, journaled filesystems tend to have two advantages:
1) They tend to be more modern as a whole because journaling became popular comparatively recently. BFS (BeOS filesystem) was a very fast, modern filesystem, and journaling (or some form of crash-protection) is one of those checklist features modern filesystems are expected to have that aren't present in older filesystems like ext2.
2) They allow the use of asynchronus metadata writes. While ext2 tended to care little about crash protection and did asynchronus metadata writes without crash protection, most systems (like BSD) used (slow) synchronus writes for metadata.
So can you open 42 versions of the same .avi movie on your Linux Desktop and play them simultaneously without dropped frames while surfing the internet on a PII450? ;) Using proper drivers (NVIDIA, which allows the use of XVideo extensions), a lightweight WM (IceWM), and a good player (MPlayer), yes. Under KDE 2.2.2 and Noatun, no. It's all in the userspace! That's why these BeOS on Linux things are so great!
>>>>>>>>>>
It depends
A) GNOME and KDE, as good as they might be to deluded Linux users, is nothing compared to BeOS and Windows. I know. After having used BeOS for years on my 300MHz PII, KDE 2.2 and GNOME 1.4 run painfully slow, even on my new Athlon 1700+. Win2K on both machines is blazingly fast.
B) X is not perfect. There is tons of stuff that could be improved (but at the cost breaking compatibility). Also, it is not standardized. I'm sick of every single program havng its own way of doing fonts and printing.
C) Umm, you can do remote desktop on Win2K as well, its called Citrix. The damn thing is fast enough to run Word comfortably over a medium-speed DSL line.
D) Who cares if it can support apps written for a totally different architecture? There's actual useful features, then there's nerd jack-off features. Guess which one this is.
The problem with X is its design. It was designed with remote usage in mind and local usage is far from optimal. Even with UNIX domain sockets (which, btw are slower than most other forms of IPC on Linux) there is all this protocol overhead that is unnecessary locally. Instead of a standardized protocal, X should have been a standardized API. That way, everything between the API call and the implementation could be optimized for the specific case being used. Think, for example, if X was based on COM. Then each API call would be a simple virtual function call locally (instead of a rather expensive socket call), and remote transparency would be preserved.
Back when people used BeOS, Linux couldn't deliver that kind of performance. Linux users were trudging along with 200ms latencies and ext2 while BeOS users laughed at them from their journaled-filesystem, ultra-low latency machines. In a short period of time, Linux has come an extremely long way to becoming a kick-ass workstation kernel. In fact, it has even eclipsed BeOS in latency, filesystem, VM, etc. The only place where BeOS still has the advantage is in userspace, where BeOS totally whips GNOME and KDE in terms of speed, ease-of-use, simplicity, consistancy, etc. Apparently, this fork tries to take the best ideas from both sides.
A "Like OSNews except slower on the uptake" department?
1) I can get open specs to every piece of hardware (not just ideology, I like to fool around with kernel development), ;)
2) I can get CPUs that (efficient as they might be) can compare to my Athlon 1700 both in performance and price,
3) I can get decent supporting infrastructure for that fast CPU (SDR RAM? In 2002? C'mon!)
4) I can run a 100% open source OS, not just a partially open source OS, that is actually supported by the manufacturer,
5) When it runs BeOS
Of course, some of the allegations about Apple are totally moronic. Those 'leet UNIX hAxOrs who complain about Apple's user base. Clue: People don't need to know about computers. Oh no. The blasphamy. To many users, computers are little more than tools. Just as people don't need to know about their cars to use them, they don't need to know about their computers to use them. It is the goal of car makers to make their products as easy and safe for people to use as possible, and it should be the goal of software makers to do the same. Of course, this doesn't preclude software meant for computer nerds, just as it doesn't preclude cars made for auto nerds. It just means that the designers of said products shouldn't force others to have the same interests as themselves.
*ATI* has flaky drivers? They've yet to have a decent driver set in the last several years! ATI cards are slower and flakier. Why in god's name should Apple is them?
Maybe because the PS2 software has yet to need *any* patches? This whole "patch" thing is more or less unheard of in the console world. The only bug I've ever seen in a PS2 game is in FF-X, where the text will sometimes smear due to the way the game engine does the water wave effect. In fact, the only time a console has ever crashed on me is once in 1996, when my N64 crashed playing Mario. Most computer users would kill for 6 months without a crash, much less 6 years!
Yea, a 1GHz G4 is just as fast 1.4 GHz Athlon. Great. Too bad that 1.7 GHz Athlons are dirt cheap in comparison to any Apple machine!
They load fine. Been using a preempt+lock-break+XFS + nvidia system for several months now. Works great.
They'll probably never be as bloated as Windows (or as inflexible),
>>>>>>>>>>
I wish they were! Win2K is so much faster than KDE 2.2.2 or GNOME 1.4!
In terms of what? I don't doubt that Linux is faster at actually doing *work*. However, I find it hard to believe that it is anywhere near as "snappy." I mean opening menus, starting programs, etc.
Just /. pages. Trying to open a new tab on a /. thread will take several seconds during which the whole UI will freeze up. 'Great' is very relative. For me, KDE-2 is barely tolerable even on a 1.5 GHz Athlon XP. For other people, KDE-2 is tolerable even on a 233 Pentium. I've been rather spoiled using BeOS all these years, and it takes a hell of a lot to make the cut. Of course, Win2K can do it, so it can't be all that hard.
Umm, how to you view images in Lynx? Dynamic content? Java applets? Also, xemacs is slower than sin and xjed and gedit aren't word processors. CSS is too slow to use just for document processing. As for the GUI comment, some of us are visual (oh my god, a nerd with asthetics, can't be!) and need to SEE what we're working on. Besides, a GUI is a hell of a lot better for word processing (just as a CLI is a hell of a lot better for file management).
I've seen in several places people say that its okay for newer software to require newer hardware. That's absolute bull-crap. Newer software should only require more power if it is more features than older software. I can accept a fully anti-aliased, transparent-everything desktop to be slower than a standard one, because of all the eye candy. However, KDE and GNOME in their present state aren't any more functional than Windows 2k/XP. Yet, they are much, much slower*. Say you're grading things wholistically. You're three important catagories (on the desktop) are features, performance, ease of use, stability, and security. Win2k/XP wins the first one, not only because it has features that GNOME and KDE don't, but because these features are much more mature and widely used. The KDE/GNOME component systems might be great, but far more apps take advantage of COM/OLE on Windows. Win2k/XP wins the second one, hands down. Even with my 1.5GHz KDE2 machine, I still sometimes look longingly at my brother's 750Mhz Win2K machine. The stability bit is a wash. WinXP itself is rock solid, but Windows apps are often flaky. On the other hand, same parts of GNOME and KDE (Konq and Galeon in particular) can be flakey as well, so its probably even. In terms of ease of use, its also probably a wash. As long as you've got a sysadmin, WinXP is as easy to maintain as KDE/GNOME. WinXP is more consistant than either, but Windows apps tend to be more annoying and less customizable, which cancels that out. In terms of security, both are even. WinXP has far more powerful security options (ACL, etc) which are important in multi-user desktops. However, WinXP tends to have more security faults, which cancels the advantages. Normally, security would go to Linux, but on a desktop, access control tends to be more important than hacking-resistance. So, in most of the catagories, its even between WinXP and GNOME/KDE. If WinXP performs a hell of a lot better, what advantage does GNOME/KDE have? The only thing I can think about is that its free software, which is the only reason I use Linux and not Windows. Its a damn good reason, but it would be nice to have some other perks too...
* Which is ironic in itself, because they're running on kernel that is much, much faster. They can't even blame X, because (from the benchmarks I've done) X is damn competitive to GDI, and in many respects (blitting bitmaps, for example) can even beat DirectX. Nope, after about 4.x, the "but X sux" arguement kind of dissapeared.
What do you use for web browsing? Galeon crawls* on anything less than 600MHz. What do you use for word processing? Abiword slows down visibly when dealing with large documents. Highlighting parts of big documents can become a chore. There are many apps that don't have decently performing versions, and its a rather silly situation. And don't tell me people should use vi or elm. People shouldn't be forced to upgrade to 1GHz+ procs just to use reasonably feature-rich GUI programs. Not even MS requires people to have the kind of horsepower that a *modern* Linux desktop does.
* It's not so much that Galeon crawls, its that the damn thing is agressively single-threaded, so page-rendering freezes up the whole app. On slower systems, page rendering takes up a lot more time, and thus the app seems very unresponsive.
The performance of Linux GUI systems in general is pretty awful. Recently, I upgraded from a 300MHz PII to a 1700+ Athlon. Why? Almost everything I did (compiling, etc) ran fine on my old system. The only reason I had to upgrade was to run my desktop at a reasonable speed! Win2K is pretty damn snappy on 300MHz, and instantaneous on anything above 700MHz. Meanwhile, both GNOME and KDE are only barely tolerable on my 1.5GHz Athlon! Its still not instananeous enough, especially in KDE and GNOME. In terms of performance, Win2K is about equivilent to window maker with straight Xt applications or perhaps some of the more well-made GTK+ apps (ROX, Sylpheed). Given that Win2K does a hell of a lot more features than any of those combos, however, that's a pretty pathetic showing for Linux GUIs.
PS> I'm using Debian (sid), so no, its not the packaging!
A rule is a rule.
>>>>
No, there are real rules and fake rules. Real rules are there for important things (don't kill people). Fake rules are there either just to cover somebody's ass (basically, any rule in the public school system) or to protect people from themselves. The first one is bad to break. The second one is stupid not to break, because everyone else is too. If a rule isn't enforced unless somebody actively complains, then it probably wasn't important anyway.
Uh, running Sid right here with XFree 4.1. Works perfectly. In fact, Sid is a hell of a lot more 'stable' than Mandrake 8.1. I've had several broken packages in 8.1 (especially when I enabled cooker) but I've been using Sid as long as I've used Debian, and not a single problem yet.