"We received reports that GNOME was orders of magnitude slower than CDE on Sun Rays. To verify and measure this, I designed and ran some performance tests in order to compare the time and bandwidth usage of GNOME (JDS) with that of CDE on Sun Rays. The tests measure the time it takes to display data using various desktop applications: Browser, StarOffice and Terminal." Read more here.
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Well of course JDS is slower than CDE. JDS has anti-aliased text, almost everything in CDE does not. JDS has great accessibility support, CDE does not in comparison. JDS has a very user-friendly interface that has evolved in recent years. CDE hasn't evolved since the COBOL days practically...
That's why you run CDE on your old SPARCstations, and Gnome/JDS on your dual-AMD64 boxen.
Does CDE really do anything more than provide an FVWM work-alike coded to some PHB specs? Next thing you'll be delivering the shocking news that twm uses less memory than KDE.
Naturally, GNOME is bound to use more RAM and CPU than KDE, but it's still way too weighty. I mean, someone found out recently that just to set the volume on GNOME startup, it parses a bloody 300k XML file! Insane!
All the time I see newcomers who try Linux, but are turned off by the bloated, slow and weighty desktops and apps. Hopefully at some point the GNOME folks will realise how big a potential userbase they're missing with all the bloat...
Naturally, GNOME is bound to use more RAM and CPU than KDE, but it's still way too weighty.
We're discussing CDE and GNOME, not KDE and GNOME.
sun rays are terminals that use network resources to drive the display.
Mmm. I am posting this from a SunRay running KDE. It is pretty fast, but yes GTK applications seems really slow on the SunRays for some reason.
CDE of course is just useless. More people are using FVWM2 than CDE.
"All the time I see newcomers who try Linux, but are turned off by the bloated, slow and weighty desktops and apps. Hopefully at some point the GNOME folks will realise how big a potential userbase they're missing with all the bloat..."
Actually i just switched from windows to ubuntu. And personally its very close to being a perfect environment for me. i would like better fast user switching. I don't think it is bloated. its rare that my system ever goes to the page file.
There are several lightweight gui's for linux. I don't really think Gnome should follow them. A lightweight gnome will never be a contender for desktop or for noobies. if so why doesn't everyone use something lighter than gnome? Because they aren't as easy as gnome. you can say that you think it is pushing noobies away, but i think that is rediculus. If what noobies wanted was speed and efficiency, we would all be using the command line interface. What people really want, is an easy to use GUI that is well designed, efficient, responsive and easy to look at.
There are several lightweight gui's for linux. I don't really think Gnome should follow them.
Agreed - Gnome shouldn't aim to be a lightweight desktop, at the expense of desirable functionality. But that doesn't mean it shouldn't be a desktop composed of lightweight parts.
I know there's been a fair amount of work on cleaning up inefficient operations - things like poor memory usage or like that 300k XML file someone mentioned. That's a good trend.
If you want speed, you will almost certainly lose some functionality. If you want functionality, you will almost certainly lose some speed. The best you can hunger for is a compromise system, XFCE does that quite nicely. UI design is a completely different thing. A fast desktop can have crappy UI. A slow desktop can have crappy UI. Speed doesn't guarantee quality, or lack thereof.
Dave
Well of course...
It's always amusing to see people make comments like that, especially when the results of the tests are available.
It's certainly reasonable to assume that CDE is faster than JDS, but until it's measured, no one is quite certain. It's also beneficial to know to what degree that a difference exists. Is it 10% slower? 100% slower? 5 times slower? Such information is very useful to have.
Perhaps though someone can come up with a series of performance measurements that people might find useful, then someone can simply tell us how they'll turn out, so someone doesn't have to go through all the trouble of actually performing those tests.
I think they call it... teh snappy? 
Windows has raw UI speed
OSX is pretty much as fast / smooth with OGL and very good looking.
Gnome is coming along with the UI but is definitely lacking teh snappy
KDE is just too overwhelming with options for my taste
XFCE is pretty good but I'd like a desktop and a file manager that doesn't suck
okay, now i'm curious, what happened?
Here's what happened. Eugenia put a story about Cairo/Gtk+ being 2x as slow as gtk+ is now earlier this afternoon.
After being threatened by Gnome developers to be hated even more than she is now she yanked the entire story.
But until we get an explanation from Eugenia we'll have to keep on bringin it up.
I was late to see the Cairo/Gtk+ story, but if it is like you say, it would be pretty sad. Even Slashdot doesn't delete bad/dupe stories, and that says it all.
She basically posted a news item based on nothing more than a couple of mailing list postings earlier today, and made quite a few poor assumptions about what they meant.
She implied a lot more was going on than really was, and when some Gnome people came in and pointed that out, well...it's gone now.
Here's a synopsis if you really want to know. http://tieguy.org/blog/.
Naturally, GNOME is bound to use more RAM and CPU than KDE, but it's still way too weighty. I mean, someone found out recently that just to set the volume on GNOME startup, it parses a bloody 300k XML file! Insane!
All the time I see newcomers who try Linux, but are turned off by the bloated, slow and weighty desktops and apps. Hopefully at some point the GNOME folks will realise how big a potential userbase they're missing with all the bloat...
Uh, here all Gnome does is read my ALSA Mixer settings. Plus, even if Gnome is "slow", I will still always appreciate it for the sensibilities of its interface as compared to KDE applications.
Its nice to have 'benchmarks', but it would be even nicer if they included the specification of the server used; yes, the client is using a SUN Ray 100 - all very nice, but what is doing the heavy lifting? a 72way, 144 core StarFire?
What I think would be really nice is a benchmark of a 8 way/16core Opteron system, loaded with Solaris; see how many SUN Ray appliances can be hooked up to it, and still provide reasonable performance for end users; it would be a great way to promote their server/SUN Ray combinations to medium size businesses over the current PC centric setup that most businesses rely on.
If I define "screen bloat" as the unusable parts of a user interface then CDE is way more bloated than either Gnome or KDE.
If you mean with "slow" the time it takes to switch from one window to the one behind it, then Gnome and KDE are approximately 10 times faster, simply because they have a taskbar and CDE has none.
Speed of a computer is always a combination of how fast a user CAN be and the computing speed.
However it would be nice if Gnome (and also KDE) would get faster computing still!
HAHA, i almost fell out of my chair.
seriosusly. i compared gnome vs xp and gnome isnt the fastest when resizing, but while actually DOING things in the program, there is no comparison gnome wins hands down.
switching apps is instant on gnome, while xp has a delay.
try opening hte control panel, watch the speed.
right....
xp is not fast, windows 2000 is pretty quick (it should be noted that i have themes disabled and xp is still prettty sluggissh