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Funnily, I did try Fedora Core 2 on a 128 MB Linux-certified machine (that was before I upgraded it to 384 MBs recently). I knew that FC2 required 192 MB minimum for graphical, but I didn't want to nuke my FC1 on my other machine that has 512 MB of RAM, so I decided to give it a quick TEST shot on that Duron machine with 128 MB. The result:

FC2 *was unusable*. And I mean, *unusable* with either KDE or Gnome. Things would load ages later or wouldn't load at all. I could only *kinda* use FC2 at 128 MB when I switched to XFce.

On the same machine, with 128 MB memory, I also tried Xandros, Mandrake 10, Arch Linux and Linare Linux. From the bunch Mandrake was the one that was "a bit" heavy, but all in all, the machine remained usable (NOT confortable by any means, but usable if you wanted to do a quick job with it). But FC2 was really not usable at 128MB, and because that fact gave me a glimpse of what's coming soon I actually decided to upgrade that machine (I didn't have any incentive to upgrade that machine before, it is not my primary machine, I just use it for some tests).

Now that X is being developed again things might improve, the weakest part of linux has always been the GUI and X. KDE and Gnome have added a lot of polish over the years and now look really slick, but this comes at a performance cost, which improvements to X might fix.

Still, RAM isn't exactly expensive anymore and running WinXP on less than 256mb RAM is pretty bad too.

It is not all that bad, it is just about choice. For example, I installed Libranet (which is quite user-friendly) on 128MB and 64MB 400MHz machines. With IceWM and Opera that works quite well, and it isn't really more difficult to use than e.g. Win9x.

Yep, I agree that KDE and Gnome are bloated these days.

BeOS wasn't cool for no good reason. BeOS can make 6 year old hardware feel fast.

What is the solution for Linux? Copy everything that BeOS does. Run the legacy kernel on top of the L4 micro kernel. Have all the desktop features use the micro kernel and multi-threading directly.

Just a thought. Oh, and before you say it, micro kernels will make a difference in this case. Why? Look at BeOS driver management. Drag and drop.

With ever progression the requirements for any os goes up. Gnome however, is known to be slow right now compared to the latest KDE, so Id expect that. I wonder if the author has Swap on as it works really well. My experience is the new 2.6 kernel isnt freindly with older hardware compared to the 2.4 series, so things like mandrake 10 id install 2.4, which is what I in fact did on a relatives pc and it ran pretty good. It was a pII with 400mhz. the Killer here is the RAM, as long as you have like 192 your good, hell even 128 will do. Its like my freind who had a celeron 500 mhz. it ran windows 2000 slower than the pII, my guess is exactly cause it only had 64 mb ram.!

Anywheres people installing oses generally aren't joe six pack, its usually their geek freind or the office tech so installing vector linux or any low end thing should be fine. There is used ram out there now a days on ebay since the market atificially inflates SDRAM prices when they technically should be worth dirt by now. Actually if one has a pII id tell them to buy a new comp for 500-600 dollars. They can get an athlon XP cheap as well as a graphic card for a good price.

Running XP with less than 256MB of RAM (if you're going to do more than play solitaire) is a disk-thrashing nightmare. 512MB is comfortable.

Microsoft recommends 128MB minimum and claims that it'll run, albeit badly, with a mere 64. I'd rather use an abacas than try that. The point is, 256MB is really not so much considering XP was released in 2001 and FC2 was released in the middle of 2004, YEARS LATER. Why should an OS that has been evolving over the last three years (since XP was released) be expected to conform to the system requirements of an OS that's been out for years? Following that logic, the XP system requirements (which dwarfed 98's requirements, and came out roughly as far apart as XP and FC2) were just as horrible and alarming as this person seems to think Fedora's are.

I'm forced to wonder if this guy was clutching his Pentium 200 to his chest and screaming, "It's not fair! It's just not FAIR!" when XP came out ... I mean, that P200 Classic would run 98 just FINE, how DARE Microsoft make 300Mhz the recommended spec for XP!

Or maybe I just don't get it.

Linux is not getting fat. Fedora, or any other distro with those requirements are. Keep the word Linux in context with the kernel and we are a lot less troubled. If you choose to run KDE/GNOME2 and then add GDM, and all the bells and whistles (gdesklets for example)... expect to use some ram up.

Secondly, why should users have to install Slackware, Debian or Gentoo just to get adequate speed? Those distros are primarily targeted at experienced users -- the kind of people who know how to tweak for performance anyway. The distros geared towards newcomers don't pay any attention to speed, and it's giving a lot of people a very bad impression.

I still don't understand what the giant obsession with pleasing everyone is. I think there is a distinction in making a distro for 'newcomers', and just making a user-friendly distribution. Just because Mandrake is easy to install doesn't mean it is made for newcomers. Windows isn't the Microsoft OS for newcomers, it's just damn easy to use period. I think the same flies for easy-to-run Linux.

>Running XP with less than 256MB of RAM is a disk-thrashing nightmare

I am running XP with 256 MB of RAM daily. That's my PRIMARY machine, a dual Celeron 533 and 256 MB RAM running XP PRO.

I run IE, OE, Winamp, Notepad and Trillian at the same time with no problems at all. Things only get a bit strictier when I need to use an IDE or PaintShopPro, but overall, 98% of the time I only use the 5 apps mentioned above, and 256 MBs are more than enough to run those. At least for my needs, it runs great at 256 MB.

Something they has needed to be said for awhile. Look, I love GNOME, but on my eMac with Debian, it's slower and takes more memory than Mac OS X while doing less. That is pretty lame and I definately hear you on GNOME Terminal, it is VERY slow. I see the GNU/Linux niche being in performing well on low-end systems, with benefit to third world countries and budget conscious companies, but at the current rate it just isn't happening. Windows is *so* more responsive than GNU/Linux at the moment and I don't care whether the blame lies with X or GTK or the language, all I care about is that it is, and so does every other consumer. Look at an old NeXT system, or look at the Contiki OS and how much they do with so little, it's embarrassing. Yes, times have changed and the level of complexity has increased, but people shouldn't need a 1.5GHz system with 512MB RAM to decently browse the web, e-mail, type up letters and listen to music.

I did try to run RedHat 8.0 on my Toshiba 64mb 433Mhz Celeron laptop, and it was totally unusable. I was n00b back then (well, I´m still a newbie, but atleast I know the basics), I thought after reading comments on Linux how good it was compared to Windows, that RH would run on my laptop. That experiment brought me back to reality, so to speak.

I didn´t switch back to Windows tho. I installed Debian with Xfce, and it runs like a charm. My 3Ghz 1G Ram P4 box is running Mandrake 10.0. For my friend, new to Linux, needed OS for his old AMD K6-2 box which had Win98 before until it got totally trashed, I offered old RedHat 6.2, which runs quite good. Atleast if our hardware can´t run the latest Linux, we can get old versions and still use our comps.

But, Linux apps could use better coding, I got apps running who get totally slow even on P4!

Fedora has some steep requirements, and suddenly the "Linux platform is getting fat?"

Guess I'm hallucinating the memory footprint of my Gentoo installation.

...which is almost my specs for my dual-boot system you start noticing how much slower Gnome 2.6 is than XP Pro.

When I first got this sytem back in January I was sitting in linux most of the time just for the mere fact that just to get everything up and running on gentoo, including wireless, and both desktop just the way you want it is a part-time week in itself. I thought Gnome looked good. The fonts were alright after I spent some time tweaking.

Well, for the past month and a half or so I've been in my XP Pro partition mostly working in Eclipse. Once I enabled ClearType things looked about a 1000% better in windows and eclipse just tends to run better in windows, plus with Firebird what the hell.

The other night I decided to play this very old BladeRunner DVD that windows media player just doesn't handle for whatever reason, but I knew that a program I had for gentoo would handle.

Well, I hadn't been in linux for quite a while and man I just didn't like what I saw. The fonts just look like crap compared to me be using to cleartype and Gnome 2.6 (even on a P4-3.2 ghz, 1 gig of ram, and a ATI 9600 Pro card) just seemed sluggish compared to windows.

Yeah, yeah, I know I can run fluxbox or whatever, but why should I. With a firewall, a router, Firefox I'm not getting viruses. I know how to keep my system clean so why should I even mess with Linux.

and it costs less than $40.

So, your point is FC2 won run on your old Duron box. OK, that's a point. It won't, and I think the Fedora people intended it that way.

Then you claim "Linux is getting fat" ...

Linux is a kernel. It runs on machines with 2MB of RAM quite well, depending on kernel version.

GNU/Linux is an OS. It runs on anything from an embedded system with 2MB of RAM to an IBM 390 with GBs of core.

This post is a troll...

I agree 256MB is realistic

Have a look on any major PC manufacturer's website. Until recently (I haven't looked in a while but maybe even still now) most laptops and pcs were coming with 256MB RAM as standard. Tho in my experience having a standard set of apps (Office suite, mail program and a browser) on that setup will begin to swap like hell on Windows after a couple of weeks of daily use.
Linux it seems will stay at the same level of performance without degrading over time at least but XP on 256 to begin with it fine.

@Mark

you can't keep things on the kernel: normal users don't know what a kernel is! They're pointing at their screen and say "This is my Linux." or "This is my Windows."

They don't care what makes it slow.

And normal users don't like to hack to speed up any OS. And I agree that Linux need better coding and usability, some examples:

When I copy a text on OpenOffice via the context menu why can't I insert in Mozilla Composer via the context menu?

Why don't I have a universal installer service? I don't like to bother about 24 libraries that are missing.

I use Mandrake 8.2 for my webserver @home and I tried to upgrade to Mandrake 9.2...but the KDE 3 was so buggy that I returned to Mandrake 8.2 with KDE 2...

This seems like a good place to ask -- my company might be distributing our new show control app as part of a custom Linux install CD. We'd like to have a Linux distro that (a) can be installed by someone who doesn't know a thing about Linux, other than "put the CD in the drawer, reboot, click Next until it's done", (b) auto-recognizes all reasonably recent (<5 years old hardware) and auto-configures it (including networking), and (c) Runs as snappy as possible -- an ugly fast GUI would be preferable to a pretty, sluggish API. (Our customers previously ran our app under BeOS, and they put a premium on responsiveness) It would also be nice (but not strictly required) if it had the capability to run directly from the CD, and if it didn't install a bunch of esoteric extra stuff that won't be needed. Any recommendations regarding distros to try for this?

Dude, Gentoo Linux running KDE 3.2.2, OpenOffice.org and Mozilla are slow as fsck too on 128MB RAM. Do you really dare to deny that?

I know, because I use Gentoo on a 366MHz box with 160MB 'o RAM. I would not DARE to run KDE on it. I use IceWM instead, but it's still painstakinly to run FireFox and OpenOffice.org and aMSN together.

However, the blame isn't just Linux. It's the apps. KDE, OpenOffice.org, Firefox...just to name a few. They are terribly huge. But no one likes to optimize for free, so you won't see that changing.

You can say a lot about Microsoft, but Office and MSIE start pretty damn fast and use less RAM than their OpenSource counterparts. Unless you like to compare lynx to MSIE and Abiword to MS Office, ofcourse.

Just for the record, I have just booted into KDE, and started only aMSN, Firefox, konsole and kdict. Memory footprint:

774680 TOTAL
263724 USED
17096 BUFFERED
124584 CACHED

That's 260MB used already.

At that time i ran Mandrake 7.1 on a PIII 450MHz 64 MB. I switched to Slakware (8.0 or 8.1). It was another world. Try Slackware. It's another way. I haven't yet tried Gentoo or Debian. I'm still on Slackware. (Though i changed to a P4 1700MHz 256 MB).

I also tried BEOS R5.. I feel Impressed, It's fast fast fast (but W98 is fast too on a P4). It's great. But it's dead, more or less, and Zeta it's something strange. I think they don't have BeOS code, so the hack and hack here and there without the possibility to really improve the kernel code etc.
Another problem with BeOS. It's not multiuser. Sadly.

BTW. On the office front TextMaker and Planmaker are good light (commercial) alternatives for OpenOffice.

>Running XP with less than 256MB of RAM is a disk-thrashing nightmare

what are u talking about...
I had a Celeron 400 with 128 mb RAM
and Win XP PRO and Office XP was usable on that machine. Not fast true, but not unbearablly slow.

Now I upgrade the machine to Celeron 533 + 256mb.
It's actually pretty fast (not fast enough to play game, but fast enough for IE+winamp+chat program).

Things will probably continue to get worse as far as desktop bloat goes when you consider that say your primarily a Gnome user, but like to use that one KDE app. Well by using that one KDE app you're probably bringing in 3/4 of the KDE desktop libraries as well.

I guess that's the price you pay for the "freedom to choose".

...You can't eat the cake and have it.

If ones expect the system to have all the bells and whistles, beautiful interface with lots of themes and decorations, everything plug and play, support to all type of multimedia formats etc, one should expect higher requirements.

I agree. However, XP and Windows 2003 Server does that better than Fedora/SuSE/Mandrake in terms of memory requirements and CPU needed. So, there will always be some comparison going on.

This article is right, apps for Linux are gettin slower and slower.. lets take my Notebook for example - Sony Vaio 450Mhz PIII with 320 MB of Ram. I had Mandrake installed before - was cool but sloooow - so I've switched to Gentoo - fast and liht very kewl.

I use it for Mail, web browsing, and working (I code web apps). And I can't find a descent editor which does 3 things: code highlighting, tabs for multiple documents, and customizable shortcuts the way I want.

I've tried them all, to name few: gedit, screem, quanta, bluefish, eclipse, kate, anjuta... and you know what? Except for Kate which I use now they all were unusable slow when editing file with about 1000-2000 lines of code - after pressing enter I had to wait like a 10-15 seconds for the editor to become usable again - and when you code you press enter quite often.

To spice things up I can say that running EditPlus with Wine was faster then using apps I menshioned above and this is very pathethic...

Why applications nativly written for Linux run slower then program running in emulator?
Bad code? Bad design? I don't know but this indeed is alarming...

I use Slack 9.1 in my celeron 434 MHz with 256MB RAM. It was installed with Slack 9.1 default Gnome 2.4 and X(still)Free 4.3. It used to use around 150MB in RAM right after the whole system loaded up with X and Gnome.

Surprisingly, after upgrading to Dropline Gnome 2.6 (with X.Org bundled), the RAM used is decreased to about 90MB. I noticed that either the previous XFree 4.3 and X.Org takes 11MB in RAM. Everything feels fast and faster than previous versions. Bloat ? Not happen to me...

Linux is a kernel. It runs on machines with 2MB of RAM quite well, depending on kernel version.

GNU/Linux is an OS. It runs on anything from an embedded system with 2MB of RAM to an IBM 390 with GBs of core.

This post is a troll...

Uh, no, Andrew/Mark. You're barking up the wrong tree. If you exclude the Linux kernel from what's "fat", then you also have to exclude the Windows XP kernel. It's pretty small, too.

The things that make an OS fat are the things that users interact with most commonly: Shells, apps, etc. Not the kernel. But, regardless of how you want to characterize "Linux", it is judged by what's included by default when you setup a distribution. People don't install Linux and say, "Wow, I really like the speed of the kernel -- but KDE really blows chunks perf-wise." They blame the entire stack because (a) most don't know what a kernel is, (b) even if they did, they don't have visibility into the kernel to differentiate between bloat there and the apps.

Computers are getting pretty fat too!

>Linux is a kernel. It runs on machines with 2MB
>of RAM quite well, depending on kernel version.

The title of the article is about the "Linux platform", meaning the desktop and surrounded apps, NOT just the kernel.

I wish Linux supporters stop using the same argument over and over when someone says something negative about the *platform* and they happen to use the word "Linux" simply because it is generic enough and convienient. We all know what the author meant, so there was no reason for the trivia.

Why applications nativly written for Linux run slower then program running in emulator?
Bad code? Bad design? I don't know but this indeed is alarming...

There's an old rule-of-thumb that, given a set of resources (CPU, GPU, memory, FPU, I/O devices, etc), applications will grow to consume all possible resources. This is so incredibly true. It is our nature (as human beings) to never be satisfied with what we have -- and add more features. Over time, Linux is going to continue to bloat and leave old hardware behind. This isn't a bad thing, in itself. There's a price to be paid for progress. But none of us should have the unrealistic expectation of being able to load Linux upgrade-after-upgrade on the same hardware year-after-year and expect that the perf will be the same or better. Just doesn't happen. Software developers get used to setting new hardware baselines, just as politicians get used to setting new tax baselines. It's inherent.

I am running XP with 256 MB of RAM daily. That's my PRIMARY machine, a dual Celeron 533 and 256 MB RAM running XP PRO.

I run IE, OE, Winamp, Notepad and Trillian at the same time with no problems at all. Things only get a bit strictier when I need to use an IDE or PaintShopPro, but overall, 98% of the time I only use the 5 apps mentioned above, and 256 MBs are more than enough to run those. At least for my needs, it runs great at 256 MB.

I don't believe that for a moment. I run XP Pro on an Opteron with 512M. If I'm running more than one program, it can take as much as a minute just to flip windows between programs. From my experience, XP needs at least 1G of RAM to run comfortably with multiple programs.

I'm not talking monster programs either. I'm talking about FireFox, Total Commander, and maybe something like Azereus. The disk thrashing on 512M is HORRENDOUS in XP Pro. By comparison, FC2 on the same machine is many times faster and more responsive.

The article is just FUD, and so are some of the responses. Lets hear a little truth for a change instead of blind astroturfing.

I agree in general with this article, but it's a bit overblown. Why not just say "no real desktop OS runs the latest apps without at least 256 mb RAM" and be done with it? Some perspectives:

- I recently watched the latest Knoppix fail to even start KDE on a new 2.4 gHz Dell Dimension with 128 mb RAM (since with Knoppix there's no swap). That's annoying.

- XP or OS X *will* run on 128 RAM ... but they churn horribly because they're dependent on swap/virtual memory in that case too. For our clients (nearly all Windows shops) we insist on 512 mb minimum for all new XP desktops. We've been doing this for at least the last year. The increased productivity is more than worth the measly $50 in RAM!

- I run the latest Suse 9.1 quite comfortably on a Pentium II 400 mHz with 384 mb RAM. The same machine ran Win2K quite snappily as well. But take away the RAM and it probably wouldn't boot KDE either.

- And we run dev servers on the latest Mandrake and Trustix distributions ... running LAMP + Samba + Postfix + a few others only requires about 90-100 megs of RAM, leaving plenty of room on a 128 mb machine for multiple httpd processes and a PHP bytecode shared memory cache like mmcache or php accelerator. These are Pentium-class machines and they respond nicely ... let's see Windows Server 2003 even try to boot on one of those!

Are Gnome and KDE bloated? Well, haven't they always been? And consider that most of the big distros like Suse are basically running them both all the time, because most people want both KDE and GTK apps ... and they're separate from the window server, which is separate from the kernel and so on. All of which are cross-platform code. Compare that to XP or a hobby OS like BeOS or SkyOS which vertically integrates all those components and is written for a specific chip architecture (x86 only) and of course a Linux desktop is going to be more bloated.

But if I can run the latest desktop distro on a 6-year-old Pentium II with 384 mb RAM, who cares?

> I run XP Pro on an Opteron with 512M. If I'm running more
>than one program, it can take as much as a minute just to
>flip windows between programs. From my experience, XP needs
>at least 1G of RAM to run comfortably with multiple programs.

I don't believe all what you say, not one bit. I use XP on a 256 MB machine as well as many others on an Athlon-XP 1.3 GHz and it runs great. Either your installation is hosed, or you blatantly lie.

Recently having to give up my big boxes, I was forced to recover my old K6 200mhz box with 60MB RAM (and 4MB integrated graphics yuck!) from the garden shed. Now I only have a w2k license so I installed that. Then, as I was beginning to install Mandrake the CD drive died. The Mandrake install CD must still be in there.. Maybe it was a hardware detection probe, maybe it just died through neglect.

So w2k with 60MB RAM and 200mhz - quite dog slow! I think I have to consider myself lucky that I didn't install Mandrake before I lost my CD!

Give VIM a try, it's likely to suit your needs.

If ones expect the system to have all the bells and whistles, beautiful interface with lots of themes and decorations, everything plug and play, support to all type of multimedia formats etc, one should expect higher requirements.

I'd have to disagree. The author mentioned Syllable, among others, so I'll pick up on it now. Syllable can boot from power-on to login window in around 16 seconds, even on machines as slow as E.g. an AMD K6 233. It is usable in 64Mb (Which is a lot but we're hoping to actually bring that number down in future) A typical Syllable system is running the appserver, the Media server, the Registrar and the Dock. With a setup like this, you can play media from WAVs to XVid MPEG-4 video.

Syllable has low overhead because we've tried to make it that way. We're mindful of increasing memory usage or anything that might slow the computer down. We don't introduce large dependency trees which require tens of additional libraries or applications to be loaded to support another application (which is quite possibly Linux's biggest problem) I fail to see why modern Linux distributions can't do the same things.

Let met guess, it is a LG CD-ROM drive? The Mandrake hardware probe in 9.2 kills LG drives due to some LG firmware bug. This can be fixed, just search with google, afaik LG released a firmware update that solves this...

There are a number of small fast distros that boot right off a cd with great hardware detection and install easily, some of them suprisingly small and light! Search on distrowatch.com or Google and you'll find them. I should warn you though, you likly won't find a perfect fit, and may have to roll your own based on an existing one.

I know I'm going to get martyred for this but the article is right, sure its not Linux itself but the include apps that are the problem. As much as I like Linux I will not deny that ever since I started using it I kept wondering where I was supposed to find all that extra speed everyone was talking about.

In my case I've found KDE 3 to start apps faster then Windows XP home but in KDE I use Konqueror and KMail and in Windows I use the Mozilla suite which is heavier (more features) then Konqueror and KMail and therefore an exception can be made for the extra few second it takes to load.

I can't say anything for Microsoft office because its been a long time since I've used it but Corel WordPerfect Office in Windows has a lot more features then OpenOffice.org and starts up faster (albeit OO.o is also available on Windows, Linux and MacOS).

I know how miserable it is to try and install any Linux distribution (except for the antiquated Debian woody) on old hardware never mind run it because the minimum requirements have been increasing so fast, using an old distribution isn't always an option because those don't meet the software requirements for running new apps any more so the only two options now are either to use source based distributions or buy a new computer every two years.

IMO Linux will survive for a long time to come because of the $0 price tag on most distributions and the free developer tools and KDE of course but something does need to be done to resolve the minimum requirements issue or the next free OS with free developer tools that comes around is going to outperform Linux and get all its users.

I get the impression that a lot of the people who commented either didn't bother to read the entire article or didn't bother to read it at all, there is mention of source based Linux distributions being a possible solution but as the article said how is a newbie supposed to manage installing a distribution like Gentoo (yes newbies do end up having to do their own installs, they don't all have a seasoned Linux veteran to turn to).

Its getting to the point now where it would be more worth people's time to buy a used copy of Windows 95/98 off eBay and use that with free tools like Zone alarm, Grisoft AVG and Spybot Search & Destroy rather then use one of the latest Linux distributions even if a lot of them are free.

quote:
I'm not talking monster programs either. I'm talking about FireFox, Total Commander, and maybe something like Azereus. The disk thrashing on 512M is HORRENDOUS in XP Pro. By comparison, FC2 on the same machine is many times faster and more responsive.
endquote:

My xp box is just fine with the apps you mentioned except azureus. Azureus is my favourite bt app but bogged down on either platform due to java.

But this article hits what I've found right on the head.

My box is a 1.6 ghz but only 128 megs of ram and most things run like shit to put it bluntly. I'm running deb unstable and using XFCE4. XFCE4 is light but things seem to pile up quickly. I switched to xfce4 from icewm as I wanted to try and have a uniform desktop environment using mainly gtk2 apps.

Before I used to just go for speed exclusively, but ended up with a mishmash of apps with all these different toolkits and looking ugly as sin and interoperabilty issues with copy/paste etc. So I went gtk2 and things aren't much better. Mozilla, and a few other apps open and it's not responsive at all. And as one other pointed out, you can't seem to get it all with one toolkit, so I use k3b instead of gtk2 offerings and that brings with it alot of kde's bloat.

My gf says to me everytime she uses linux that 'LINUX IS SLOOOOWWWW". I respond with I'll tweak it but can never seem to get good performance from this box. I compile my own kernel with just the bare minimum things I need for this hardware platform. I'm on the latest 2.4 series, I've tried 2.6 series several times and always run into swap issues with 2.6. I don't think 2.6 handles minimal ran too well at all. I've exchanged several emails with andrew mortan on the swap issue but nothing resolved so far.

I would be happy if most developers went into a feature freeze for 6 months and just optimize the shit out of their apps. Maybe not the most exciting thing for a programmer and might make linux look a little dated on some fronts but I think it would be worth the effort. Besides the next windows has been delayed for awhile yet so there is a good window of opportunity.

Think about it, 3 big selling points for linux (ignoring open source of course) was speed,stability, security.

XP gives people the speed and now the stability that previous versions of windows didn't have and microsoft is heavily working on security with the next version. And we can laugh off windows and security, but they don't stop on something until they have it. They might be slow as hell getting there but they will approach a much higher level of security than they have today all the while still providing their EASE OF USE that is sorely lacking in some areas of linux. And don't give me the crap it's just what people are initially used to. Cause with millions of people out there the desktop is what counts and if they have to go to a xterm once, you've failed.

Look, I'm not a windows fanboy. Far from it. I actually would like to see them whither away but I gotta call it like I see it.

I don't know what exactly is your definition of "comfortable." I have a pIII 700mhz laptop 128mb ram, XP Pro runs with acceptable speed. This laptop also has a Slackware 9.1 installed (with a 2.6.6 kernel) and it's quite a bit slower. It is still usable, just noticeably slower. Have a couple of Firefox windows open along with a konsole (or gnome terminal) and I'll see lots of disk swapping.

KDE does deserve some credit because the upgrade to 3.2 makes things a lot faster although still eats up a lot of RAM. But Firefox is getting annoying. The Windows version is acceptable but it's pretty slow on Linux.

May be you should try running XP and Linux on a low end machine first before saying people are spreading FUD just because they have a different experience.

(Btw, if your Opteron with 512mb RAM takes a minute just to flip between windows, may be you should check whether there's something wrong with your hardware or your XP installation. Even my XP PRO on my laptop can do better than that.)

I use Mepis on a P3700, 384mb ram, 32mb Viper AGP card. Dual boot mepis - Win2000.256mb memory is the MIN. in todays world, if you dont want to add a little memory, stay with what you have. On this machine Mepis runs at 99% the speed of 2000 in loading programs, stability, etc. When I had a Permedia2 8mb AGP video card, 2000 ran great, Mepis ran pretty slow. ALL of the distros I have tried in the last 3 years have ran much better with a better video card. Built in sucks, PCI was much better, but the AGP slot speed everything up in both 2000 and Mepis. As for bloat, 2000+ WordPerfect + MediaPlayer9 + dbPoweramp + ZoneAlarm + AVG AntiVirus + AdAware = 3.74gig on my HDD. Mepis, which includes everything I need, 1.93gig. To me Win2000 is bloated, and a security mess to boot. I'll take my bloated Mepis anyday. If people want to switch the will just have to learn, just like they did when the started using windows.

Actually I would Have to disagree with this article. I guess Bob Marr has never tried VectorLinux. it is VERY Lightwieght. It doesnt require 128+ Memory. People have used vector on machines with less than 128 and used gnome/kde on it just fine. It may seem wierd that its based on slackware and still is EASY to use. Check it out sometime. Http://www.vectorlinux.com It even boots far fater than anydistro that I have tried, and I have tried more than my share.

Sorry, saying that XP Pro needs at least 1G is simply not true. I was forced to use it on an old notebook (Thinkpad TP600) with 128MB and 233PII processor. It was not super fast, but definitely usable - with such applications as MS Office, Outlook etc. On my current machine (PIII 900 notebook with 256 MB) XP performance is better (the difference is not astounding but noticeable) than Fedora Core 2 (for the same applications - for example Firefox) - while running KDE, Gnome is much slower. And XP Pro is way faster at booting - 3-4 times faster in fact.

I must agree with the article author - but I also think that not only the speed is becoming a problem - general quality of applications is getting worse (perhaps because the apps are getting more complex - gone are days of simple, text-mode only apps not depending on complex libraries). The OS kernel is probably still more stable than - say - XP kernel, but I would say that the entire GNU/Linux OS (as perceived by a user - including desktop environment, applications etc.) is much less stable (speaking about "standard" distributions such as Fedora, Mandrake, Suse etc.) than Windows XP. And this is *very* frightening...

Blah blah blah, lots of anecdotal evidence which doesn't amount to anything.

Programs do more than they did X years ago. They require resources to do so. So if you want to run some program today at the same speed the same program ran X years ago, you need more resources (this obviously only holds for mature programs).

No, you can't run the latest and greatest with all the fancy stuff on your ten year old Pentium 90MHz with 24 MB RAM. The latest and greatest will always require more resources than what some people have.

Try interpolating between the requirements for Windows XP and Longhorn and then plot those requirements listed for FC2 on the same graph. I don't think it looks even unreasonable.

...to be slashdotted and OSNEWed (200 post by tomorrow morning), and Google NEwed

This is exactly the problem with the Linux desktop, developers mean well, but I don't feel they have considered how many CPU cycles there programs take. Maybe it is also a syncronization problem in their program too.

Bob Marr wrote: "Why should a 1 GHz box with Fedora be so much slower than a 7 MHz Amiga? Sure, the PC does more - a lot more - but not over 1000 times more (taking into account RAM and HD power too). It doesn't make you 1000 times more productive."

Couldn't agree more. Plus, you could buy three books for the Amiga platform and knew everything about it. Free software movement needs to organize, this is getting nowhere.

Any tips people have for optimizing linux (and I mean the platform and all that entails not the kernel).
I don't think saying go the gentoo way because I was excited about that but I've read many comparions where a gentoo distro was any faster than many other popular distros.

So any tweaks anyone knows of post em.

I don't believe all what you say, not one bit. I use XP on a 256 MB machine as well as many others on an Athlon-XP 1.3 GHz and it runs great. Either your installation is hosed, or you blatantly lie.

Typical response of the astroturfer. "You must be doing something wrong." It's not Windows, it the user. Your other choice is just downright insulting. If you can't defend the product, attack the consumer. The system is as described, it is properly installed, and I don't blatantly lie.

Anticipating another attack, the drive is a 7200RPM 120G ATA133 drive with 8M buffer. It's been recently defragmented. I didn't say it ALWAYS takes a minute to flip windows, but that it CAN take that long. I've found that rebooting the computer every other day clears that up pretty well. The longer the computer is run without rebooting, the worse the thrashing gets until it takes more than a minute to just pull up menus. XP has bad memory fragmentation issues that get worse as the system is used, particularly if you use multiple programs.

It is an unarguable fact that hardware continues to improve at a torrid pace, and that minimum shipped hardware on systems, for example RAM, continue to increase. To argue that this should create an acceptance for inefficiency in software, that people should just expect the requirements for running software to increase drastically, is completely illogical. Good programmers like Steve Gibson, Robert Szeleney, the people at .theprodukkt, as well as others, prove that good programming practices result not just in excellent functionality and pleasing appearance, but do so without prohibitive performance hits.

It is also true that todays computer users expect more from their computing experience nowadays, than when the "P200" was the standard. More features and abilities added to a program, done well, and given the abilities of todays computers to number crunch should justifiably increase the footprint of software, but just barely compared to what we're seeing. ESPECIALLY should this be true of an OS, which is to be the middle-man between a user and the hardware. It is pure marketing hype and an attempt to keep technology sales up to suggest otherwise.

If everyone applied the same standard to software as they did to hardware there would be far more accountability for poorly written software, and security failures. If a machine, or a part on a machine breaks down people take it back on warranty, they not only complain, but expect something to be done about it. If software fails, or causes serious problems, unless it affects the hardware, there is much complaining but less action demanded, because we are indoctrinated to expect problems or bloat and inefficiency.

This article addresses a gradual trend that IS a problem, and not just for Linux, but for software in general.

My main machine is a 1.1GHz Athlon with 512 MB RAM running IceWM on Slackware 9.1. I like it this way.

I also have a 1.2GHz Celeron with 256 MB RAM running Windows XP.

I find most of the 'I have (tiny box) and it runs GREAT' and 'I have (monster box) and it SUCKS' to be a little hard to believe. I have a mediocre box and XP runs in a mediocre way.

Before the drive died, I had a second install of Slack on the Celeron and it easily outperformed XP.

But almost everybody seems to be missing the point: the author specifically states that Joe User probably *isn't* going to want Slack and Ice. He wants a GUI distro and Gnome and/or KDE. In other words, MS makes one system. Ipso facto, it's their best system (allowing for differences in 'home' and 'pro' and 'server edition' and blah blah that Joe User doesn't care about). So Joe User also wants the quote-unquote best Linux system, which he takes to mean the latest and greatest most user-friendly distro with the IDEs.

No kidding storage and core is cheap. To many citizens of industrialized nations. But if you're a dude in a third world country who can't afford to *feed himself*, upgrading hardware is *not* cheap.

The author's point was that Linux is blowing an opportunity to put first class systems on second class boxes in third world countries (or on poor Americans' boxes or whatever).

If the reaction is defensive and making excuses, Linux is truly screwed. If 'bloat' isn't a problem, why are so many Linux users so dismissive of Mozilla and hyped about Firefox? (I use Mozilla, thank you - have to pick your battles and Mozilla is just too cool to mess around with any LightningPanda.) We know bloat is a problem but when somebody else points it out and for far better reasons than 'My FPS in CS sucks' he gets insulted for it? Weird.

Even if there were no other reason than pride in clean efficient code, that should be enough too want to keep things as slim as possible.

Hi THere!

I have a Celery 900MHz Desknote with 256MB RAM 10 GB 5400 IDE HD, and a dual PIII 450/384MB 36GB SCSI LVD Matrox G400.

Galeon, Evolution, Gnome-terminal (GNOME 2.6 Debian Sid) load on login on seperate virtual desktops, and both machines are quite perky. All the apps are GNOME, and use Gnome shared libraries, thus reducing RAM use. Open Office takes a while to load, but once there is pretty fast. Totem plays back DVDs flawlessly on the dual PIII with out even a skip, and is so easy to use! Couldn't do that under Windows on that hardware!

Nautilus in 2.6 is FAST, and I like the new browsing modes. Much like Mac OS 9 which I have played with and like.

Just my 2c - Mandrake is definitely slower due to a whole lot of plug and play smarts it seems.

RAM, as pointed out, is cheap. I run Fedora Core 2 on the slowest computer in the house, a K6-2 350 BUT it does have 448 MB of RAM. I noticed quite a peformance boost between Core 1 and 2, and that's due to good programming. IE GNOME 2 is now very fast, KDE 3 remains as fast as ever, both are only getting better. Comparitively I used to run Windows 2000 on this machine and it was sluggish. I finally get the speed I used to from Windows 98 in Linux. All you need is more RAM, you can keep your old computer.

Well with all this disscussion about rewriting gnome in java or c# to make it a more devl-friendly platform, its definatly going to get a performance hit.

linux is getting bloated, just like everybody else.

i remember clearly the days of red hat 4.2, the very first linux I tried. it ran comfortably at 32MB, and was serving like 70 simultaneous FTP users (MP3 downloaders!) over an E1 (2.048Mbps) line. i remember upgrading to 64MB and things were still fast even if there were 200 simultaneous FTP users on board. and it was a cacheless Pentium 133 MHz. to think that Slackware users then were telling me that RH4.2 was "fat."

i just noticed that given around 128MB of RAM or less, Windows (Win2K; haven't tried XP with this little RAM) performs better with its GUI and Office than Linux. Of course, once the RAM reaches 512MB or so, Linux performs better than Windows even with slower CPU machines.

Nothing new. In 1995 Niklaus Wirth has written this article that explains a lot:

http://cr.yp.to/bib/1995/wirth.pdf

br
Marko

everyone here is moaning about not being able to run gnome or kde on really old memory constrained systems....

installing linux on an amd 233 with 64mb ram, but kde runs too slowly ?

emm, did the pc not have win9x installed before ?

why do you not want to use icewm ? it is basically a linux version of the win9x interface. and it will run faster than the win9x interface.Oh, and OO will run on it too.

No-one with even a bit of sense would try to install win2000 or xp on that machine, so why would anyone try a DE ?

I totaly agree with the writer. The huge potential of spreading linux on the win98/winNT machines is there we need to grab it.
There is no excuse for creating fancy apps which consumes a lot of RAM.
Developers pls have efficiency as a goal as important as functionality for your apps

Up until about a year ago, I had a friend set up on a PII 300Mhz with 192MB of RAM. Unfortunately the harddrive died, but when the machine was still alive it ran SUSE 8.2 and subsequently Fedora Core 1 very well. This was with KDE in SUSE 8.2 and GNOME in Fedora Core 1. The machine ran very well. It was left on for a whole semester basically. My friend wrote papers, chatted, browsed the web - even did some basic GIMPing - very comfortably. I don't think that 300Mhz with 192MB of RAM is outrageous for a distribution made in 2003. On my computer right now (which is a very nice computer, AMD 2600+, 512MB of RAM, 7200RPM harddrive), I have FC2 with GNOME 2.6. I have eight virtual desktops filled to the gills with applications - including the GIMP, OpenOffice, Inkscape (several windows with 1.5MB SVGs in them), Scribus, Epiphany, Gaim, gedit, Evolution, Muine, shiny Crystal icons, Straw, and about a dozen Nautilus windows. I can flip through the virtual desktops as quickly as I want and not feel a bit of slowdown. When in XP, however, clicking the start menu typically results in a 3-4 second wait, subsequently hovering over "All Programs" causes another long wait, and opening more than 4-5 programs brings the system to its knees and an inevitable crash. Linux makes me far more productive.

I think memory footprint and CPU requirements in a lot of FOSS are a problem at the moment. But I think it is starting to get better. Optimisation is hard, takes time and you shouldn't do it during the main part of development - it's something you do afterwards.
For example - KDE now has a kde-optimize mailing list dedicated to speeding up KDE. Large amounts of work is going into profiling and optimising the environment. That's why 3.2 is so much faster than 3.1. With the next release of the next Qt, things will get better still.

Decius raises a few interesting points.

First of all, I agree completely with accountability and poor quality of software. I never understood why a software company can't be held responsible if their product causes damage.

Yes, programs were written to be more efficient previously. There is a reason for this: computer time was more expensive than human time. This meant that it made sense to spend lots of manhours making something run faster or use less memory.

But that is no longer the case. Computers are dirt cheap compared to human resources. Today it makes good business sense to increase the productivity of the programmer by letting him write in higher level (and slower) languages at the expense of requiring more computer time.

I for one am not going to sit around and handoptimize assembly code to make it run faster. A clever programmer can always do this, but it takes a lot of time, it will likely introduce some new bugs and it hurts portability.

Programs can be written much faster today than they could only a few years back. They may also require more resources and that is exactly the tradeoff we're seeing.

really? your 512MB Opteron cannot run Firefox on WXP Pro fast enough?

either you've got the wrong/unoptimized drivers, or maybe your system is loaded down with spyware and viruses

i tried using a Pentium III 500 (the one with 512K L2 cache that runs at half the CPU speed) with 256MB with WXP Pro and it was fast and very very usable.

There is no discussion about rewriting GNOME in C# or Java. There is discussion about allowing core components to be written in C# or Java. Big difference.

M$ is evil and does bad business practice, but the suerly know how to make polished user experience. I can't help it but XP feels somehow faster than Linux + KDE. It's more responsive, and it's easier on XP to turn of the goddam eyecandy.

And I noticed that Linux's software developers tend not to give a shit about backward compatibility, a thing that always seemed to be a primary focus for M$ developers.

There are known places to cut out bloat. The way stock icons are handled is inefficient, causing apps using libgnomeui to load the icons into memory several times. Metacity has some "low-hanging fruit" type optimizations that Havoc Pennington (who is a very talented coder - that was a lame troll thrown in by the author; the reason that GNOME terminal is slow on some machines is pango, the text renderer, which does receive very good acceleration from X at the moment) has recently published for those interested in optimizing the WM. The biggest GUI speedups are going to come from the new X technologies - most of which are already incorporated into X.org CVS. For true legacy machines, however, the author paints too bleak a picture. There are usable options that use far less RAM - the best being XFCE. OpenOffice, in my opinion, is the biggest bloat problem at the moment. Abiword and Gnumeric are great alternatives for most tasks, but there is a need for a lightweight powerpoint presentation. Perhaps OO.org 2.0 will help to solve this problem.

XP, in my experience, only appears to boot faster. I have a very reasonable boot time with FC2. And more importantly, when it looks like the boot process is done, it actually is. Once I see those panels in GNOME, I know it's ready to use. In XP, sure, I see the desktop pretty damned quickly, but then the system tray (many times invisibly) is loading who knows what for another minute or so before I can actually use my machine. While this way of doing things may seem better at first, it often times confuses the user and compels them to open an app too early, making the boot process even longer as the system struggles with all demands placed upon it.

Well, I'm running two boxes at home at the moment;

Main: XP, Athlon 2.8, 1GB DDR 400, 200GB HDD (ATA133 2x 7200rpm disks), Geforce 4 4800.

Secondary: Mandrake 10, Duron 1.2, 256MB ram, Geforce 3, 1 x 80GB 7200rpm disk.

Mandrake 10 is dramatically faster than the 9.2 I was running on there before, and in general, it is faster than WinXP for normal application. Internet Explorer is an exception, because it is pre-loaded, of course, but pre-loaded Konqy is not too far off. One thing I do find, is that Mandrake is faster to respond to activity than XP is in many situations, because XP is always doing stuff in the background, even while idle. This can lead to several second pauses between clicks and click registration. Sometimes the thing just gets plain busy and takes a while to redraw or sort itself out after a large memory-grabbing application like Photoshop closes.

Honestly, it is faster to me, but these things do vary between systems. My Athlon 2100+ laptop feels a lot slower under XP for some reason (still 512MB DDR and dedicated graphics), which I assume is the hard drive spindle speed coming into play.

Oh, it is isn't fair to suggest that KDE is actually becoming slower or more bloated with each release; it is actually becoming faster and more lightweight in memory terms, thanks to a lot of optimisation work being done, ultimately thanks to the joys of valgrind KDE 3.2 will substantially out-perform 2.2 on the same system, which is a good thing

Both winxp and linux+gnome/mozilla is really bloated for low end machines.

With linux you can choose to use lighter windows manager. If you go deeper you can turn off unncessary daemons and trim down your kernel as well. In extreme case you can just f@ck GUI at all.

With winxp you are bloated all the time and there is not much you can do about it except turning off some services.

I use fedora2 on P166+128MB ram, and i am pretty happy about it. Winxp on such a box is pretty much useless, even too slow to play solitaire.

1. A couple of years ago we heard all this about GNU Linux being secure...

Now we all know that ain't true, that's what BSD's are for (and in particular Open BSD)

2. GNU Linux is userfriendly

This one is actually heard every now and then, however we all know that it simply isn't AS userfriendly as XP nor BeOS or Skyos etc...

3. GNU Linux is so efficient.

Well it's getting fat, speed is devoted to BeOS and alikes, slim desktop systems..

4. Linux is Free

LOL, yah right!

I hate to bring this back up again, but it has to be done. I can't remember where I read this, perhaps in Tanenbaum's Operating Systems book, or perhaps online, but what he preaches seems to be right on the money. I think alot of things in linux suffer from this problem. "Perfection is reached not when there is no longer anything to add, but when there is no longer anything to take away". I think kde 3.2 has taken a step in the right direction, and has admitted that bloatedness had been a problem in the past. I think alot of the problems with linux today have occured because of the addition of new features, and I question how useful they truely are. I remember using linux 5 years ago on the same machine I have today, and I remember being able to do everything I could do today, while my machine didn't lag behind trying to keep up. As more and more code gets written, I believe, more and more code has to be audited, optimized and reviewed. The easiest way to speed things up isn't faster hardware, it's code review. The level of complexity linux is reaching is on par with windows systems, which is extremely hard to deal with.

Well I don't believe you. You said,
I'm not talking monster programs either. I'm talking about FireFox, Total Commander, and maybe something like Azereus. The disk thrashing on 512M is HORRENDOUS in XP Pro. By comparison, FC2 on the same machine is many times faster and more responsive.

I get the exact opposite behaviour on my AMD k6-2 450 Mhz with 384MB RAM.

Try the following registry tweak, although I should say that it didn't thrash before the tweak. The first tweak keeps more stuff in RAM, so there is less paging to the pagiing file.

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESYSTEMCurrentControlSetControlSession ManagerMemory Management]
"DisablePagingExecutive"=dword:00000001
"LargeSystemCache"=dword:00000001

I've noticed that XP has a lot higher swapiness than linux. It starts using its page file immediately on my machine (512MB RAM) whereas it really is a struggle to get Linux with kernel 2.6 to just actually start using its swap partition.

it probably partly explains why XP is faster on low memory machines.

I dont know if many of you are aware of the recent trend Redhat has taken in compiling their distribution, the reason the memory requirements are up but on the reviews you hear that FC2 is really snappy (which I agree with) is because the main and biggest software packages such as OO and Moz are compiled with prelinking support, this means that the libraries are loaded when the machine starts up, and so the requirements are quite steep especially seeing as many uneeded services are also fired up on a default install. I might recommend doing some homework before wining about RAM requirements, because to end users, you just see the requirements go up and dont understand what is happening in the backend. At least thats what I understand the situtation to be, Anyone feel like correcting me?

As far as interface design goes, I think GNOME has your minimalist attitude pegged . Seriously, though, we're always looking for optimizations. I can think of several proposals for major optimizations floating around the GTK community right now. The community is definitely looking to speed up performance. One of your other statements though, that you could do everything you can now five years ago, is ridiculous. There is now near 100% MS Office compatibility - for all major applications. There is real desktop integration. There are high-quality raster and vector graphics. There are advanced music playing applications like muine and rhythmbox. There are photo management apps like F-Spot and Gthumb. The GNOME project was started only seven years ago and wasn't usable for a year or two after that. Things have progressed a lot. In fact, I've found the rate of progress stunning.

The author is right. The problem is that, for most developers, software performance is not a focus of their efforts; so long as that is the case the problems described in the article are only going to continue.

But they don't have to. When developers put their efforts into optimizing for performance real results are possible: for example, Apple's efforts have made Panther (10.3) noticeably faster than Jaguar (10.2) on the same hardware. This article talks about how Apple did it:
http://www.kernelthread.com/mac/apme/optimizations/

I'm afraid the open source model may have more trouble getting people focused on software performance than, say, Apple or another corporate developer. I'm not trying to knock open source here -- I'm all for it -- but it isn't clear to me that anyone (or any group) has the incentives to take responsibility for optimizing overall performance in many open source development projects. I think it's probably fair to say that about bigger projects like KDE or GNOME. Anyone disagree?

The biggest cause of bloat in Linux seems to stem simply from sloppy programming.

* Memory leaks. Because Linux (the kernel) catches these, you can get away with this to a limited extent with desktop applications which are opened and closed frequently.

* Scripting Languages. I'm getting sick of these. Starting a single gdesklets application takes up 36 MB of ram (this is taking X server memory into account) to display a simple weather status application. Rather than being 'glue' to hold various applications together, these languages are being used for entire applications. Do it properly, or don't do it at all.

You could've told him to switch to AbiWord, Firefox and XFCE4 if he wanted speed.

... Or Gentoo.

I disagree. Firstly, the core developers aren't all volunteers anymore, so if that was the premise of your argument (that volunteers don't want to hack on something as boring as optimization) you're off. In fact, many developers are paid and full time. I know of several instances where performance has been the primary focus of application development. The 2.6 kernel saw preemption added, the CFQ scheduler, etc. These are all improvements to speed desktop performance. I remember recently seeing that Miguel de Icaza was pushing Larry Ewing to find out why the icon view in F-Spot was slower than in some other app. And there are the other recent optimization discussions I've referred to. Secondly, volunteers in many cases do care more about optimization than employees. I lot of open source hackers take great pride in writing efficient code. That will never change.

What the author is referring to are the ones that are bringing Linux to the world.
The world doesn't care if some hippie down the street can run OpenOffice with just 32MB RAM (exaggerating here). The world knows Linux as what the enterprises are portraying them, say IBM, Redhat, Novell etc.

<p>PastyHermit: You mean preloading, not prelinking. Prelinking is the process of pre-resolving all the symbols in shared libraries, which can improve performance for programs using lots of shared libraries.</p>
<p>Preloading seems a pretty poor way to improve subjective loading time for me. Instead of waiting longer the first time a program loads, the user is forced to wait longer on boot, even if he never wants to use the app.</p>

At Edward:

Oh, so if people can't code applications so they conform to your high standards, they can't make applications at all?

I am sure lots of people enjoy the gdesklets regardless of them being written in Python or not. I don't use them myself as I don't look at my desktop background much. Please don't assume that just because you don't like something, nobody will.

It's not like you're losing something because someone codes something you don't want. If people code free software, you can only gain from it.

I don't think so. Whilst fixing problems my 2.6.6 kernel, I had the opportunity to boot back and forth between 2.4 and 2.6 and kernel 2.6 is really faster ! The next thing I will do is use kolivas patches to autoregulate swapiness and use the staircase scheduler.

kde 3.2 also brought speed improvements as did oo.org 1.0 and 1.1. Whilst taking part to cooker testing, I immediately noticed than mandrake 10 was faster than 9.2.

It is true that the priority of the last few years for linux apps was to do a features catch-up but performances have definitely improved and now than kde and gnome are quite feature rich, I am sure these guys will continue optimising.

And lastly, it's always been my experience that linux remains usable, whatever the load (kernel compile, cd burning and so on) whereas Windows (XP included)priviledges the heavier apps, making the system hard to use whilst ripping CDs for example. I'd rather have applications taking 6 sec more to start but then being usable with heavy background activity rather than the other way round.

All these full-time developers at Novell, RedHat etc. have top of the line machines and don't notice the slow down.

It's not like you're losing something because someone codes something you don't want. If people code free software, you can only gain from it.


True. However, I'm very worried at the way perl/python is becoming a general programming language for applications that are meant to run all the time. I've always felt that scripting languages are for binding two seperate programs together, or simple programming of uncommon tasks (say, gTweakui), rather than writing a text editor.

--

Interesting note, I just fiddled with the themes in my GNOME install. Switching from a Pixmap theme to an XFCE theme made huge differences in the 'usability' speed of the system*, and dropped ram usage from 289 MB by around 100 MB for a fairly small app load (epiphany, system monitor, nautilus and beep-media-player). I wonder how much of Fedoras speed issues are caused by an over-abundance of eye-candy.

--
(* For reference, System is K7 XP 2000 w/h 768 MB DDR on GNOME 2.6/Debian)

Brad Griffith made a good point. Reason that GNOME terminal is so slow at drawing chracters is Pango, and Pango in turn uses RENDER extension. Read http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=5453 . Interesting quote:

A big bottleneck right now in GTK+ performance is the poor performance of the RENDER extension drawing anti-aliased text. Even without hardware acceleration, it could be tens of times faster than it is now. I'm hopeful that the X server work currently ongoing on freedesktop.org will result in that being fixed.

So they are aware of it. And it is not Pango's fault. Pango may look bloated if you don't care about internationalization, but it does much better job in placing East Asian AA texts than (say) Qt. And that is very important to me.

And the miracle-working Apple optimizers mentioned just a little bit ago are using Lisas, right?
What the employees use doesn't effect a corporation's need or lack thereof for optimizations. And, to emphasize that volunteers are most certainly interested in optimization, I know of many independent GNOME developers who run very modest machines. Ross Burton (developer of Sound Juicer for GNOME) needed a hard drive donated to him so that he would have enough space to do a build of CVS GNOME, for instance.

Unlike Windows XP, you can run something like fluxbox and gtk+1.x apps and still have a snappy desktop on a P166 with 80 meg of ram.

Really, the only missing component for the minimal hardware desktop is for dillo to be just a little bit more complete.

As others have pointed out, it's not linux that is the problem, but the desktops and their associated monster libraries, along with X which is quite speedy but still takes a sizeable chunk of ram.

I could see some of these newer hobbyist OSs that have a stricter development path taking a chunk out of the low-end linux market, which would be pretty ironic.

I totally agree with this article. Even I have a story which surrounds speed of applications on linux(linux desktop).

My story is like this:
I have a celeron 433MHz , 32 mb RAM at my house. I run Mandrake-Linux 9.2 and Windows 98 on it. I am happy using linux on it, but not as happy using Windows 98 when it comes to speed.

I was using blackbox as the window manager before. But was quite happy when I saw Xfce and started using it. But still all the gnome/kde applications are very slow.

Mozilla and open-office are unusable. Whereas I use IE and MS Office very happily on Windows 98. On Xfce I have only 2 desktops. It becomes very slow if I go beyond 2.

Its very painful using the gnome terminal. I still stick on to rxvt. Even tried using 2.6 kernel, but found that it performed very poor when compared to 2.4.22.

At my work place I have a 1.4 GHz, 256 MB machine running Debian(Sarge). All applications work slightly better here. But still have problems with application speed. When I login my machine in the morning, It takes about 2 minutes for all the windows to redraw. If I keep running Mozilla continuously for a week or a two, the machine slows down. It takes about half a minute to see the splash screen of open office after starting it from the command prompt.

Conclusion:
I hope the application developers give imortance for the performance of the applications, rather then keep on adding features. I agree that linux means the kernel, but not the desktop environment. But a normal computer does not know anything about the kernel and desktop environment. He/She would like to use it, to get their work done quickly. I hope importance will be given to speed and efficieny of the applications in the near future.

I think the author is trying to say what linux distro's need to stive for this way they could take over some windows installs in the business arena. I think he just fails to realize that it just isnt possible. He says how linux used to be so fast and everything, the reason for this was because it didnt have nearly the features it does now. Before your only options were these very slim apps that he even mentions but now there are better things out there. Its called progress so get over it. If he want blazing fast speeds like those of the old linux days then just stick to the command line and no gui at all. Everything you need can be worked from a console from IM to web browsing to document editing.

Also there is no reason why a user cant upgrade his hardware anymore. Just think about, A user could buy Windows XP Professional for around $250 and have it work decently on his older pc or he could buy 1gig of ram for his computer for about $100 (search pricewatch.com) and then use Fedora core 2 at a cost of $0. You will have $150 more in your pocket plus 1 gig more of ram in your pc and a far better OS on your hard drive. Also if you were going to use XP you would have to buy a hardware firewall plus antivirus software just to have a usable system. And believe me you do need a hardware firewall. A software based solution is as week as the OS it runs on case closed.

I'm curious to how smart the linux linker is. As in, how smart is it when it bringing in code from libraries. I remember an article sometime back about how certain linkers were very agressive in just taking out the exact code that was needed from a library for an application.

No he mean't prelinking.

Beginning with fedora core 1, redhat introduced for their distro prelinking. This is the reason you may sometimes see CPU usage go high while your machine is idle.

Although it said C++ apps like KDE actually benefit from this whereas GNOME does not.

I am just going by stuff read here at OSNEWS. I am not an expert in the matter.

eg. http://freshmeat.net/projects/objprelink/

Don't be silly. Havoc writes great codes. It is just that he is a little ahead of time. :-) Pango and Metacity use either under-optimized or not-very-well-supported-on-network X extensions. And X will improve.

To that! Remember the C64 and the astounding things developers could achieve with so few resources by todays standards, the limitations of the platform forced developers to be careful about what they wrote. Ignoring memory and cpu limitations usually ment your creation would simply crawl.

On the contrast, todays bigger faster machines impose no such limitations, developers are free to write any old slop and get away with it, and it really shows! If it runs to slow, you have to get a faster machine.

As an ex BeOS user myself I am all to aware of what a well designed OS should feel like.

IMO the biggest problem with Linux is Linux itself. Its monolithic design is comming back to haunt us and as time goes on its only going to get worse. You can only speed hack it so much, not to mention the usability issues that seriously impact it widespead acceptance. (Can you say drivers?)

When it comes to the perception of speed a better X would certanly make a world of difference, but that will do nothing to address the deeper underlying problem. Lack of developer concern for tight light code.

Your 433 Celery isn't a speed demon, but isn't exactly chopped liver either. But that 32 meg of ram is killing you. Since you mentioned that you have a job I would advise for you to spend $10 and pop in another 64 meg stick at the very minimum.

IMO the biggest problem with Linux is Linux itself. Its monolithic design is comming back to haunt us and as time goes on its only going to get worse. You can only speed hack it so much, not to mention the usability issues that seriously impact it widespead acceptance. (Can you say drivers?)

You are clearly talking out your ass. The structure of the kernel has sod all to do with the way the applications are structured.

(If having a monolithic kernel was slower, then I wouldn't get better fps in Enemy Territory in Linux than in Windows would I?)

I'm running FreeBSD 4.10 loaded with GNOME 2.6.1 (with some 2.6.2 components) and I could never understand why the terminal was so crappy. This is on a K6 550Mhz, SIS540 Graphics chip, 256MB Ram and a 60gig 7200rpm hard disk, and yet, the responsiveness of the gnome terminal is though I have 1000 users logged onto my machine leeching resources left, right and centre.

Please, someone fix it up, I don't see it in KDE on the same machine so why does it exist in the GNOME terminal? Please, my kingdom for responsive GNOME terminal!

I have a machine running on 64MB RAM and a 233mhz CPU as well as a 2GB HD running Windows XP.. below the requirements....it runs fine... just as slow as windows 98 or 95... a gnome desktop redhat 8 couldn't keep up with it. Very incredibly slow and kept freezing.

Funny, I haven't heard many complaints about the speed of the Linux kernel. In fact, it seems the server market is drooling over it. And the Apache web server - not really known for bloat and loose heavy code. The platform is developing really well. A faster X will make a huge difference. Other improvements have helped desktop performance a lot - CFQ scheduler, kernel preemption. Linux adoption is increasing exponentionally. And the platform is improving faster than any other as far as I can tell.

(If having a monolithic kernel was slower, then I wouldn't get better fps in Enemy Territory in Linux than in Windows would I?)

99% of the dual-boot rigs out there get better fps in windows than in linux. Linux has closed the gap, but windows invariably runs games better.

Just curious - what graphics driver are you using?

KDE 3.2 is nice and snappy on my 266 MHz with 160 MB RAM.

Of cource, it's running Gentoo...

It's pretty amazing that something as heavily used as Gnome terminal could be so sluggish, even in comparison to the already slow Gnome platform. And these guys are using straight C. Just think if they went to C# or Java. Oh, the horror.

...unless they already know Unix and/or Linux.

Have you been paying attention at all? The GNOME terminal performance issues - which occur only with certain drivers that have very poor RENDER acceleration. If a better X is developed - as is happening very quickly now - those problems will be gone. Many key components in GNOME - metacity, pango, etc. - rely heavily on the RENDER extension of X, as they should. It has nothing to do with the language or the code. It's the architecture, which unfortunately, until now, has not developed in order to support the technologies in GNOME.

> Also there is no reason why a user cant upgrade his hardware anymore.
No there is.
My toshiba satellite 4090 can't have more than 128mb of ram...
It's a nice notebook and it rocks.
I never had an hardware issue with it.
Yes it's old, 1999, but the LCD is very fine and it is working fine with my NT4.
Trying to use Thunderbird and Firefox my fan runs often, continuosly I'd say, with SuSE9.1, with NT4 rarely.

What have I have to do ?
Still using the unsupported NT4 or sending to the trash because modern GNU/Linux distros can't run on it at an acceptable speed ?

99% of the dual-boot rigs out there get better fps in windows than in linux. Linux has closed the gap, but windows invariably runs games better.


I call major bullshit on you. If we discount crap like ATi drivers (because the drivers just plain suck. They suck on Windows, but they suck even worse in Linux), and talk properly ported games (Quake and UTx engines, rather than Wine(X) emulation), it's pretty common to get 10% to 30% better fps in Linux.

Hell, my Windows drive has the bare minimum of hardware drivers and Direct X on it, just for playing games, and yet, my overly messed with, half broken, more than slightly borked Linux drive still gets better frames in UT2K4 and ET.

Just curious - what graphics driver are you using?

Just the standard SIS driver that comes with XFree86 4.3.0 (XFree86 4.4/XORG 6.7.0 isn't in the ports tree yet), I have 16MB dedicated to it (its a crappy onboard video card). Even in all its crappyness, it should be *that* crappy when it comes to graphical processing.

This is an important call to arms for those who are able to make those lightweight boxes run again - on Linux. We know it is possible, but we need those LiveCD's to quickly install that GNU/Linux environment with the needed (Open?)Office, browser, email and media player apps. Possibly with XFCE, or IceWM?
But this article is not an attack on 'Linux', and there is no need to defend it. We do want those old machines -so many of them still around- to be usable under Linux in an easy-to-install way. It's a challenge for those who can - the author is hitting a nail on its head here, let's listen.

It's not "graphical processing" in general that is the issue - rather, the question is whether that SiS driver has decent render acceleration. I'm not personally certain about that specific driver. Maybe someone hear has more info on it (?). If not, hopefully the soon to be realeased x.org improvements will help you out. The current situation with Pango and RENDER does irk me, too, but it is being worked upon. Thankfully, with my Nvidia card and the nv drivers, I get very good performance.

Dude, if you're going to flame somebody at least be informed.

Gnome-terminal is not slow, VTE the terminal emulator widget itself is slow, which was written by Nalin at Red Hat, not Havoc. And VTE is mostly slow because it's doing a lot of work processing unicode (Pango, written by Owen Taylor) and rendering text to the screen using XRENDER (written by Keith Packard).

So, really you just make yourself sound like you've done no research at all with such a comment.

About system requirements: people have the code. People know where the bottlenecks are. They aren't getting fixed fast because most people don't seem to care, it's fast enough and those who want it to go faster are bitching about it on OSNews instead of writing the damn code.

Its not that I dont want to upgrade memory of my machine. I am unable to find RAM for my machine. My machine requires a 100MHz SDRAM and its not available in the market. If I have to upgrade one component I have upgrade my whole machine. I think this is what the author of this article tries to convey. We need applications which give a better performance on a low configuration machine like mine.

Windows 98 (1998) min req 32mb ram right?
Windows XP (2001) min req 128mb ram right?
Fedore Core(2004) min req 256mb ram right?

You mean Fedora has higher requirements than XP 4 years later? say it isn't so!

Anyone who has run XP on a 300mhz machine with 128mb of ram knows that is full of it, You can open apps sure, but if you use it for more than e-mail and a browser you're not going to like it. Everyone knows 5-600mhz and 256mb ram is the reccomended requirment on XP for a mosly full functional system.

Microsoft offices min requirements are just as much as fedora's if Windows bundled office as linux does then linux still runs on par with XP which was made four years ago.

Anyway point is by windows standard Fedora should double XP's specs every 4 years and it hasnt even done that yet, there is no story here unless you went to sleep in 2001 and just woke up.

Summary of the arguments presented in this thread:

- My X yearx old computer with Y MB RAM is slow with the latest Z Linux distribution.

where 3 < X < 6,
and 64 < Y < 256,
and Z is an element of the set of full-fledged Linux distributions like Fedora, Mandrake, SuSE, you name it.

The meaningless conclusion is: "Linux is getting very fat".

How the author jumps from his anecdotal evidence to his meaningless conclusion is clearly fuel for a long thread, seeing as this thread is growing fast...

Here ya go:
http://www.zipzoomfly.com/jsp/ProductList.jsp?ThirdCategoryCode=011...

I believe that all PC machines sold in the last 5 years can install at least 256MB RAM and that currently costs no more than $60 (less than the cost of pretty well any commercial XP piece of software).

Hence, what this article is about is that someone is either trying to run the full Linux desktop (GNOME/KDE + several large apps) on a machine that's either more than 5 years old or came with 128MB RAM and they won't spend a small amount of money for a RAM upgrade.

In other words, the article is an utter waste of space. You cannot *buy* a PC now with under 256MB RAM (and 512MB RAM is becoming the norm) - clearly if you insist on running Linux on less than that, then will you have to adjust what you run (don't run GNOME/KDE - pick a lightweight window manager - try some of the more lightweight packages alternatives as well e.g. Abiword instead of Open Office and so on).

Apparently, this author thinks that apps shouldn't be large and shouldn't require more than a few MB's RAM to work with. And yet hardware is increasing rapidly on the "baseline PC" - more hard drive space, more RAM and much faster CPUs. You might think this encourages bloatware, but in fact it just improves the user experience and allows more complex packages to be made available that need more resources to run.

IMHO, Things are starting to catch up to users in this community for userland applications. A friend always tells me that just because computers are getting so much faster doesn't mean we should ignore memory usage of an application. These issues are still very important.

Also, I think part of the problem include developers using the wrong tool for the job. For example, openoffice was mentioned a lot here. OpenOffice is a Java based application, and I'm sorry to say it but Java is *not* a good language for GUI things. Don't get me wrong, it is a good and powerful language, but it is not suited for these things. People will think I'm trolling or what not, but I do know what I am talking about, and when I set up a system I take under consideration what type of application it is and how it was written.

The projects that do pay attention to these finer points are the ones that are getting through just fine even now.

I have to say, it saddens me when an application gets tied to closely to one of the desktop environments. Because all that means to me is bloat.

I'm not 100% sure about this, but I believe the Java part of OO.org are optional. The version with Fedora Core 2, for instance, does not use Java at all, as far as I know.

I like the comparison of current computers with the Amiga, but as you said, a well tuned Linux distro run fast, as the tuned Workbench ran fast on its specialised hardware.
The only device in wich I recognize the Amiga usability speed is my PALM pda :-)

Computers are a lot more complicated than before, we have AGP, PCI, USB(2), Firewire, ATA, serial ATA, scsi, WIFI,..
We are used to process 1GB files and instead of 880k D7 on my Amiga, I use 4.5GB DVD-R to store my data, it's 5000 more but a P4 3Ghz is *only* 500 times faster (if you want to count in MHZ, but not a good computing).
So, ok, Linux is slower than the Amiga Workbench but it does a lot more.

Anyway, I use Gentoo on a AMD XP 3200+ with 1GB Ram, KDE and Gnome are very usable but booting is slow. When I switch to the beloved Windowmaker, things are way faster and memory usage is down.
Did you ever tried to play divx with an old AMD K6-3D with 32 or 64MB at 300mhz on Windows? But with Movix on the same hardware, it works, no need to tune, no need to install, just burn the cd.
Linux + Mplayer is the lightest thing that can be run on an old PC for playing movies.

The *free* Linux OS can be used as a desktop OS, a generic server OS, a GRID OS, a home multimedia OS (movix and so).
It as the potential to be very fast, your article is right for KDE, GNOME, OO and distros using that tools but I disagree for Linux *THE* OS.

Maybe the dev. need to make a choice here, quickly provide applications or provide fast applications in a slower cycle,
it is not a Linux particularity, it's true for all the software industry, it is a major issue in software and hardware world and that's why most people are "afraid" of electronics in cars or washing machines.
But if we do not want Linux to follow the Beos way, we need working applications asap more than hyper-tuned applications tomorrow, even if it not optimal, the code can be tuned later, we can already see this in the latest KDE release.
I like to tune code at work, maybe it is time for me and other code tuners to help the Linux community..

"Perfection is reached not when there is no longer anything to add, but when there is no longer anything to take away".

With this quote Brian hits the nail on the head. I personally like linux because I can tweak it. Most of the people the `big' linux desktops/distro's are meant for, don't even know what "tweaking" implies. They sould not have to, because tweaking something to perfection should be the Sein of the coders/hackers[/i], not the users.

Stability, Usability, Speed and Security aren't just slogans, they are what makes an OS or piece of software better than good. I think these four will forever be on the horizon, but shouldn't we at least try to attain them?

Someone here wrote: "I would be happy if most developers went into a feature freeze for 6 months and just optimize the shit out of their apps." I couldn't agree more. Kill your darlings, dear hackers! Slim and trim down, think again, find The Beautiful Way*. A laurel Crown to her/him who creates the slickest, leanest piece of code! Good luck and happy hacking!

*) "When I am working on a problem I never think about beauty. I only think about how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong." -- Buckminster Fuller



P.S. As to comparisons between XP/win98, linux, BeOS or whatever, not to mention the specs flying around in this thread: who cares? Arguments from example are almost never useful, because one can always find a counter-example. Your teachers should have told you that.

Hi there,
I run FC2 on my PIII550MHz, 512MB RAM, GeFo2 without any problem.
I know I'm a patient person so I don't mind waiting some seconds to get my apps open, and I understand this might be an issue, but let's face it: running a 2004 distro on a 2000 computer needs hardware boosting. If I were to run FC2 on the original 128MB RAM, TNT2 and horribly slow Seagate HD I would have probably the same bad experience.
Oh, and I must say also that I make a strong use of gdesklets and bulls**t like that, so I guess my system could be much faster!
Win2000 on my actual machine runs just slower, even slower than KDE3.2 booted from knoppix!
It's just a matter of personal experience, but sure some Linux apps are just getting out of hand. Anyway, I still like it a lot more than Windows.

Why swap is important:

Swap is the virtual memory on secondary storage where applications and modules go when they are sleeping to free up more main memory as necessary (simplisitc but covers teh basic points). Swap effectively increases your available memory at the expense of extra IO operations to page data in and out of main memory.

Windows uses swap, Linux distro's use swap.

The actual physical memory required to run an application is the total max active memory required at any time during the life of that application. Mostly, this represents the maximum memory required to load the application and its associated libraries.

An example, FC2 with KDE, Gnome, and Xorg plus basic system services, can run on 512mb of main memory with no swap. The largest application is Xorg itself, consuming at present approximately 30-50mb in its image and data. Thus after starting Xorg, approximately lets say 40mb of main memory is used, Xorg tends to reside in main memory as its libraries are shared and always in use by various applications that may be running. On a 128mb system, this leaves approximately 88mb of main memory for applications. Of course, a slice of this is used for caching - something most distro's do to increase system performance, this cache will decrease in size as less and less memory is available until it doesnt exist - a hit on performance naturally, but nothing unexpected. It's used for caching all sorts of IO, libraries etc. If this is 20mb on 128mb system after loading X, then 68mb of main memory approximately remains - but that doesnt include the kernel, so we'll take 2mb off for that. 66mb.

At any given time, most of the applications and services on a computer are sleeping. Linux distro's completely swap these out to disk when more main memory is required, and in general, the less active a process or library, the more likely it will be swapped out.

What this means is that you can load any application that does not exceed 66mb in image and data, at any time.

Most applications in modern distro's use shared objects adn dynamic linking, meaning that if a library is already loaded, it can be used by any other applications that require it, without loading a new instance of that library. This really optimizes memory usage. Windows uses DLL's for dynamic linking something similar, but im not sure whether they are shared, anyway, im concentrating on Linux distro's at the moment, to explain system performance.

When a large amount of memory is required for an application, a lot of pages need to be swapped out to make room for it, if this application requires so much memory that libraries it uses wont fit in as well, something known as "thrashing" occurs - that is, the application itself is pages out, the library call made, then the application paged in, and the library paged out, the application then makes another library call, gets paged out etc. This is very detrimental to system performance, as you are probably aware.

Thrashing can only be prevented by choosing applications with less maximum memory requirements, or increasing available main memory. Low end machines will often trash on 3d games, due to the size of texture ad sound files and complex scene hierachies.

This is why dynamic libraries are such a good thing, as static linking increases the actual image size of the application.

There are 2 main bottle necks in any IO operation:

1) The speed that the cpu can transfer data over the system bus

and

2) The speed that the IO device can process the data

Possible fixes for 1) - faster cpu, faster bus, direct memory access

Possible fixes for 2) - faster IO devices

DMA means basically that the device is told what memory needs to be transferred, and can access that memory itself, freeing the cpu up for other work, otherwise the CPU has to manually move the data from main memory to the device. PCI video cards for example, do not to my knowledge support DMA, AGP cards do (AGP = accelerated graphics port, and basically means DMA for video, with a higher bus speed). Likewise, IO operations for non busmastering DMA capable hard drives will be inherently slower than for those with such drives.

If you are going to do a large amount of paging, you should optimize your paging system by having fast, efficient drives with DMA access, and a good bus speed on your motherboard (newer motherboards are obviously better).

What it comes down to is in any OS, memory is not the only concern to system speed, and in fact, if you have 128mb you can run pretty much any major application without slowdown, provided you arent running multiple large applications (this goes for ANY OS, not just Windows or Linux distro's). Other things that play a part are the size of your swap partition, the speed of your system bus, drives, cpu, and main memory and whether you are using DMA enabled devices or not. This really can play a crucial part in over all system performance.

FC2 with Xorg, KDE, Gnome, a handful of system services, Konqueror, Sylpheed, Kopete, OOWriter, konsole, sshd, and a number of other services, WILL run wihtout any swap at all in just 512mb of memory. I did this for weeks before I realised that my swap partition wasnt being mounted.

What this means is that all those applications fitted together in just 512mb of memory total. At any given time, only 2 or 3 applications or services will actually be awake, the majority are sleeping (inactive pending being woken by some event). If those applications and associated libraries were paged out to swap, FC2 would run nicely on 128mb of ram, with about.. 400mb of swap. There would be some slowdown in switching between applications if the applications were paged out, but thats to be expected.

The reason Gentoo is so slick, is that as a source based distribution, you can compile everything as dynamic/shared, without worrying about what libraries you have on your system.

once upon of a time i thought linux people paid more attention to the number of CPUs it could run on.. rather than optimization. when i installed fedora i reveresed that.

I believe that the great problem can be closed in a word: fragmentation. Linux has a great potential, given by the fact that's free, and anyone can work or discover & create apps. But taking a part from a place, another part from another place and so and so is giving a huge weight to the distros. That chaos reign can be a serious task for linux and can bring it down.

I'm running SuSE 9.1 prof on a Compaq Presario 2700 (256 Ram) and sometimes it gets really slow, expecially when compiling or tarzipping, so i sadly agree with the article. Don't tell me "hey, suse sucks use xxxx", 'cause distros war is a war of the poors, extremely dangerous to the entire linux community.

My personal hope is that major distros will concentrate on putting the various apps al togheter, linking them well, tweaking them, just to buy a solid os with integrated solid apps.

"I'm not 100% sure about this, but I believe the Java part of OO.org are optional. The version with Fedora Core 2, for instance, does not use Java at all, as far as I know."

Recommended dependency, but never tried it myself. Then again, point is OO isn't the only one, just a good example Another is Eclipse (the development tool), Yada, yada.

The new wave of tools emerging won't help the speed issue. Those being C# and mono.

I still maintain that it is essential for developers to use the right tool for the right job. But, then there is the problem of knowing the tools that exist!

Using the right tool for the right job is very important, I agree. But I disagree with your example of Mono and C#. I've been very impressed with the responsiveness of mono-based apps - I'm primarily thinking of Muine and MonoDevelop. Load times are fine, responsiveness is good - nothing like OO.org.

"My personal hope is that major distros will concentrate on putting the various apps al togheter, linking them well, tweaking them, just to buy a solid os with integrated solid apps."

This is a good statement, but I have to say again that it is a difficult process. There are those who do work on these things, but it takes time and there are so many applications. It is not trivial to put all the pieces together.

When people say that Linux (distros or kernel) is kept together by hacks and patches, I cringe and only wish if they really knew how things get done within most of the community. [Not directed at anyone, just a general comment].

The mono devs haven't even begun to work on optimization. I've heard that they expect significant performance boosts shortly after the 1.0 release when they bunker down and optimize everything. Apparently there is a lot of room for improvement still.

"I've heard that they expect significant performance boosts shortly after the 1.0 release when they bunker down and optimize everything"

In comparison to what though? I have dealt with it only a little, so I can't offer any hard data, but I hope that ya keep and open mind and make sure that it doesn't take you in the wrong direction. I know I will be And I love to test out the new tools!

If a better X is developed - as is happening very quickly now - those problems will be gone.

That was good for a laugh. But KDE never seems to have these problems.

But only....one day....in the future....some years from now..if we only had a better X. Any more comedic relief?

You said,
The GNOME terminal performance issues - which occur only with certain drivers that have very poor RENDER acceleration. If a better X is developed - as is happening very quickly now - those problems will be gone. Many key components in GNOME - metacity, pango, etc. - rely heavily on the RENDER extension of X, as they should. It has nothing to do with the language or the code. It's the architecture, which unfortunately, until now, has not developed in order to support the technologies in GNOME.

What hardware config would give me better speed?

"But I disagree with your example of Mono and C#. I've been very impressed with the responsiveness of mono-based apps - I'm primarily thinking of Muine and MonoDevelop. Load times are fine, responsiveness is good - nothing like OO.org."

Doh, working backwards here... sorry. Last I used it I was not impressed, but I will say that I have not heard good things as of yet. Again, I wait until the day so I can judge for myself, and hopefully I do gain another option for my development platform.

In comparison to what already seems like a very nice platform for GNOME application development to me. As I said, I'm very impressed with the responsiveness and stability of apps like Muine and MonoDevelop. If you're referring to the patent issues ... I think we will make it through with the ECMA core just fine. The cool part of mono - for developers like me at least - is the Mono-specific, not ASP, windows.forms, and friends.

Well, either you're the typical fanboy that will lie through his teeth to defend Linux with his last dying breath or you're about the only person in the world with a dual-boot rig that has games that get better fps in linux. Take your pick.

I don't play commercial games, so I don't really have experience with this, but do you have any numbers to back up what you're saying? If not, maybe you shouldn't be so rude.

Firstly, Red Hat is not Linux, i.e. it is a Linux distro., not the Linux distro..

Now, I'm not saying that modern desktop distros should work on a 286 with 1MB of RAM, or anything like that. I'm just being realistic -- they should still run decently on hardware that's a mere three years old, like my friend's machine. (from the article)

My machine is very nearly three years old, was mid-range at best and is twice the spec of your friends machine (256MB RAM, 1.4GHz Athlon). IMHO 256MB of RAM has been the norm on new machines for about 4 years (except for bargain basement machines, which are never good value for money).

So when people talk about 10 GHz CPUs with so much hope and optimism, I cringe. We WON'T have the lightning-fast apps. We won't have near-instant startup. We thought this would happen when chips hit 100 MHz, and 500 MHz, and 1 GHz, and 3 GHz, and Linux is just bloating itself out to fill it. You see, computers aren't getting any faster. CPUs, hard drives and RAM may be improving, but the machines themselves are pretty much static.

That is the age old paradox. User and developers generally don't want faster software they want more features. Additionally, if people never needed to upgrade, they never would, hardware sales would drop and either pace of development would slow or prices would increase (or both).

IMHO Fattening software could enable the fast startup and instantaneous response the author wants. It could encourage the hardware to fatten along with it, then the software could be put on a diet.

I don't play commercial games, but I don't have any experience....

Thanks for the laugh again there brad. I mean you don't play any commercial games, but you thought to chime in anyway.

Well, I have played Quake I, II, III, UT2003 all on linux and windows and invariably they run faster on windows. Most of the time it's not even close, with the closest being Quake III. Of course I know that either Edward has seriously screwed up windows drivers or he's just plain lying because the UT engines always run faster in windows with proper drivers on the same rig. UT is especially optimized for windows.

Anyway, you and Edward can go ahead and defend linux, Gnome whatever all you want. I'll continue to laugh.

If you ask me, linux is more prone to bloat as an application developer has a wide range of API's to help him do what he wants to do. Also, there is no one desktop to produce appliations for. So, when a good application is created it can use interfaces such as ncurses, qt, gtk or custom. Lets look at my installation. Apps i used most are

firefox (custom interface + gtk)
thunderbird (as above)
dselect (ncurses),
xmms (gtk)
mplayer (gtk),
centericq (gtk)
xpdf (gtk)
blender (custom?)
worker (custom)

You can see that in windows or MacosX all versions of these applications where created using standard API's for those platforms, but there is not a standard for linux yet and there may never be. There are so many choices, but then thats what makes it so great.

I recently purchased a new machine and i dont really like the bloat of gnome (most things can be done with a good shell) but i knew firefox, thunderbird and games i'd be able to play now with a good gfx card may take up a bit of RAM. So i bought 1Gig. And im very happy

BTW - I didnt RTFA

Oh, so you've been basing this off the experience you've had on your box alone? What kind of graphics card do you have? I don't play commercial games, but I've done some OpenGL development. I'm chiming in because you seem to be arrogantly applying your personal experience to disparage other people on the forum - and you always seem to leave out actual helpful info like your hardware/software during these "tests." Just thought I'd double check to see if you had any basis for your rudeness.

It takes about 10 seconds to start OpenOffice and Mozilla on either of my computers. I prefer the leaner faster Textmaker word processor instead. It is full featured and starts up in only about a second. The same company also sells the Planmaker spreadsheet but, neither are not free. For my browser, I used Mozilla Firefox instead of Mozilla because it is much leaner and faster. Firefox does not include an email program so I use a seperate e-mail program.

Slackware 9.1 it recommends 64 MB of RAM for X-Windows. That is not bad but, Slackware does come with a wide choice of kernels, window managers and other options. I wonder if they expect the user to make lightweight choices when using more minimal hardware? So anyway, Slack would not the best choice for a newbie unless perhaps a more experienced user installed it for them.

Vector Linux and Gentoo Linux probably also have more minimal hardware requirements but I have never used either. What should we recommend for a newbie with an older computer? I hope that being bloated is not a problem with all distros and all Linux applications? The Linux community needs to find or create a good leaner faster distro for those who need it.

Lumbergh:
Drivers are whatever the latest reference VIA , SBLive, and nVidia drivers were of about a month ago. DirectX is also the latest (9.0b IIRC). If those are 'screwed up' then I have even less respect for Windows than I did before.

Given that people on irc.enterthegame.com#linux report similar results to me (Linux faster than Windows for native games with Q3A/UTx engines) almost all the time, I'm going to guess that it may be the Mandrake/Redhat/SuSE etc have default configurations that aren't receptive to playing games. Given that I run Debian, and most people who report such values are running Debian or Slackware (with a handful of FreeBSD and clueful Gentoo users as well), this wouldn't suprise me.


kaiwai: The SiS driver 'works', but it's never going to be great. Unless SiS changed their tune very recently - they don't and won't release info to write drivers. From what I've gathered, it's a miracle of reverse engineering that you can use even vaugely accelerated X with SiS chipsets at all. Sorry. See following link for more info;
http://www.winischhofer.net/linuxsisvga.shtml

Brad, I'm with you on this one.

Personal experience on my side: 3d games run about 8-13 fps faster in linux than windows.

Of course I'm using a 2.6 series kernel with preempting, plenty of swap, and 512mb of ram. All my HDD's are on Ultra DMA 100 and have the correct cables too. Card is a geforce 2 gts pro. Soundcard is emu10k/Sb Live 5.1

TMK the only major 3d game that was developed in windows, is UT/Unreal which was developed with VC++, Quake I, II and III all developed under linux and ported to windows. I beliebe UT2k4 was also developed under linux and ported to windows. BF1942 was developed in windows, ported to linux I think.

But anyway, what defines the speed of the game generally is not whether you play in windows or linux, but whether you have good drivers, a decent supported card and a good motherboard. It's all about bottlenecks and streamlining.

IME Linux memory management is a lot more efficient, and the memory caching runs faster. I wouldnt recommend running 3d apps with less than 512mb of ram on either linux or windows, due to textures and sound files.

Lemmingburgh seems to me to be a simple, run of the mill, troll.

Mandrake 10.0 is slow, though not unbearably. I have a 550mhz with 128 megs of ram. I can run kde 3.2.2, with a dozen apps open, and several servers. Granted it can take a minute to load Open Office, but it is very usable.

when i ran Mandrake 10 it did seem slow. My solution? use the latest knoppix to due a hard drive install of debian. configure, and make sure synaptic is installed as well. Very easy to do.

It's not just me, it's about everybody else out there that plays games except for the fanboys that think that linux is the holy grail. But since you don't play commercial games, you're the expert on how well they play on windows vs. linux, so by all means chime in again.

But hey, you're the graphics expert with your opengl experience. Maybe you should be working on that non-existant X server that needs to catch up with the Gnome guys work.

Or better yet, work on the replacement for the disaster that is Bonobo.

I'm sure Edward appreciate you sticking up for him though. Fanboys must stick together.

Oh forgot to mention that im using NVidia's binary driver adn GLX modules, not the distro supplied ones.

1gb swap partition.

I run both windows XP and Linux (2.6 + KDE etc) on many PCs:
PII 266MHz 256MB
Crusoe 800MHz 128MB
Via 600MHz 256MB
AthlonXP 2500+ 512MB
P4 3GHz 256MB
Linux is pretty slow on lower end PCs, but it is not painful: i know exactly that it takes X seconds to start app Y, and Z seconds to boot, I can live with that. Windows can be very responsive, but also extremely slow, for reasons that are totally unknown to me. (It's not fragmenting nor an antivirus, nor fonts)
Also, with Linux, as you get better hardware, you get better performance proportionally. I cannot figure out why, but Windows does get slow even on high-end PCs.
Also, you can easily use linux as a server in text mode on anything.

Man, all I asked for was some numbers and info about what hardware and drivers you're using. Two linux users have provided that info now, which makes them seem a lot more credible to me. We still don't know what version of Linux or Windows you're using either. Just calm down a bit and maybe we can figure out why you're getting different results than these other people. Bonobo seems a little off-topic at this point, but so you know - the XServer work is well under way and a lot of good fixes are already in x.org CVS. Driver support does suck for some graphics cards right now in Linux - the best drivers coming from NVidia, in my opinion. Things are improving though. Just calm down a bit.

*sigh* Some ppl in here complain about programs being poorly written. How easy do they think optimizing is? Whereas I can understand what they're trying to say, it's just not like that. If ppl haven't tried programming to some extent the word 'optimizing' is more or less analogous with someone just magically pushing a button "Optimize program" and it's superfast and uses -5MB ram.

It's just not like that.. as jbmadsen pointed out in #60 (or around) he hit the problem 110% correctly. Today we use higher level languages to build applications faster. We do all the exciting parts of adding functionality, being creative and innovative and leave all the more mundane jobs to the compiler/IDE. So productiveness naturally suffer from efficiency. I know one(!) guy who has a fairly decent understanding of assemblylevel coding. And he can indeed write small efficient programs.. The sad thing is that he just might end up taking 10, or maybe 100x as much time to write what another can write using a highler lvl language.

You also have to remember most ppl writing these apps do it for _fun_. Not for you, your grandmother or your dog. Try and tell a guy he is writing bad code and then inform him he should optimize it so it runs better, when the code has been written by him mostly for himself and then released to the public, so _you_ can use it freely.

Simply, if u don't like where linux/gnu/apps are going, write your own damn code, optimize existing or use DOS. There is no stopping evolution in this; it'll progress like it has always done.. so either join the ride, do something actively about it (instead of just b*tching) or use/do something else.

Hmm, are you talking abotu games that have been ported to linux, or just ones that are win9x/xp based, and have to be run under winex or the like?

See, I know starcraft runs brilliantly under linux using winex, wine or the starcraft fork of the wine codebase. I also know there is no problem whatsoever with any of the UT/UT2k4/Quake I-II-III etc games (they run fine for me, as previously expressed, including between about 7-13 fps faster).

I have to boot windows XP to play SIMS though, as it uses soley windows API's and DLLs that arent quite complete in wine/winex yet. I bet windows doesnt play tuxracer real well though.

Technically, the Linux kernel memory management and scheduling seems to be superior to that of windows xp, but then, its also a lot newer too.

Quake I, II and III all developed under linux and ported to windows. I beliebe UT2k4 was also developed under linux and ported to windows

Well since you are clueless about how these games were developed I guess we should definetely believe you to be credible on your performance claims.

Both Carmack and Sweeney both use VC++ and have so for a long time. Since at least quake II for Caramack who has never developed on linux and since forever for Sweeney. They were not "ported" to windows from linux. In fact, porting to linux is always a money loser and the only reason the quake or the unreal series were ported was for the good karma.

You fanboys can keep up your linux myths though. I'll continue to laugh.

I bet windows doesnt play tuxracer real well though.

Haha, TuxRacer, the jewel of linux gaming. Good one.

This is from my own machine. Perceive it as how you'd like it to. The Windows installations was tweaked moderately for performance.

Machine 1:
P4 2.8E (3.265GHz OC on stock HS)/512MB PC3200/Maxtor 160GB 8MB Cache/ATI Radeon 9000 Pro 128

Machine 2:
Cel 2.2E/256MB PC2700/Maxtor 120GB 8MB Cache/ATI Radeon 9000 Pro 128

Machine 3:
P3 1Ghz/512MB/40GB HDD/nVidia GeForce2Go 16MB VRAM

Boot Time (OS: Machine 1 / 2 / 3)[s]:
Boots to usable GUI (logins are skipped on WinXP)
WinXPPro(JPN): 19 / 25 / 35
WinXPPro(EN): 14 / 22 / X
BeOS5PEMax3.0: X / 16 / 17

*NIX OS Boot Time (Boot to shell + startx)
FC1: 24 + 11(GNOME/Bluecurve default) / 26 + 10(GNOME/Bluecurve default) / X
Slackware9.1: 30 + 4(fluxbox) / X / 46 + 6(fluxbox)
FreeBSD4.10: X / X / 34 + 6(fluxbox)
FreeBSD4.9: X / X / 33 + 6(fluxbox)

There. Come on flame me.

Optimizing is not that hard as you claim it to be. Especially not for extremly bloatet programs.

Its hard to optimize to a certain goal, but its quite easy to optimize a program to be say about 20% faster. When you write your code without optimizing in mind you should be able to get that 20% just by rechecking your code for bottlenecks and then optimizing those. The more you optimize the code, the harder it gets to optimze it further.

So optimizing code for the first time is very easy and should result in a huge performance gain, where of course it is hard to squece more performance from already heavily optimized code.

i agree wholeheartedly with the author. its is silly when the asoundingly fast and big hardware is not enough to do simple tasks such as wordprocessing, extracting tar files, without wasting resources. remember 5 years ago - how big were machines then? tiny compared to today. and the OSes ran better. WinNT4 has a high capability for its ability to runout of a feww hundred MB on disk and in 32/64MB RAM.

most software which is bundled into linux distros is bloatware. i used to be bale to just load up a light window manager and use the tools i wanted. but alas, the fat is seeping down into thelower level tools now... kernel, modified standard commands, etc etc ... this is why i prefer BSD now after many years of linux distros. you are guaranteed a base install which is fully functional and its susually within a few hundred MB on disk, if not less.

keep it small, keep its focussed, do it well. let the users buidl big things out of small tools. do not make the users try to break big tools into smaller ones.

inflagranti, you are correct. But the point is that, usually, OPTIMIZING IS NOT FUN. I, as a free software user, have no right to dictate where hobby developers should spend their free time.

The recent release of GNUstep LiveCD uses Morphix hardware auto-detection and it contains light-weight apps that are good for low-end computers. Wmaker is pretty and fast X environment, only it's very different from Microsoft-style GUIs so one needs some time to learn it. Once you become familiar with it, the GNUstep/Debian combination is, IMO, one of the best available solutions for low-end machines -- just what this article is calling for.

My main box is a dual PIII with 384MiB of ram and SCSI disks. I bought that box in 2000 and haven't felt the need to upgrade it yet.

Before my SGI-branded Sony monitor died, I used my trusty Indy as X term to connect to my box. WindowMaker ran fine, KDE ran fine. Gnome 2.x was completely unusable. There's something in the way GTK 2.x and nautilus do their stuff that prevents it from being used comfortably over a network connection.

Now I have a 17" monitor and use my PC with a local display. I've had Gnome 2.6 on both FreeBSD and NetBSD, and finally gave up and returned to WindowMaker. It takes 1/10th of the time to load and I didn't use any gnome app anyway, so it's not a big loss. I'm running Arch Linux now since I wanted my 3d acceleration back and didn't want to compile programs (moz and OO.o for example).

GTK 1.x was fast, was incredibly fast. GTK 2.x is awfully slow. Hopefully it will be getting better, but it makes me wonder if I should shop for alternative toolkits, even though I do love the GTK+ API.

One think I'd like to comment on is why the reviewer thinks Evolution is any better than Sylpheed. I know it has the calendar thing but, for basic e-mail/news use, Sylpheed is way faster and works very well.

yup. that's the major annoyance. that's the reason why i have 1/4GB ram on 200MHz cyrix and 1/2GB ram on 733MHz via c3 and use woody almost everywhere (one remaining hevaily modified zip-slackware instalation)

:)

Yes linux distributions are getting fatter, but so is modern PC hardware. If getting fatter means taking advantage of this ever-increasing-in-power modern hardware, then does this necessarily have to be seen as a bad thing?

My specs are P4 3.2 ghz, 1 Gig of ram, ATI 9600 Pro.

I'm running Gentoo and XP Pro.

Now on games up to UT2k4 (quake I, II, III, UT2k3) the difference is meaningless from the perspective that the game is running fast enough so you don't care, but invariably everyone of those games runs faster on windows than linux. Especially something like UT2k3. The unreal engines have historically been "let's get the windows version done right and then maybe worry about linux/mac", where the quake engines have historically had crossplatform in mind. Mouse control has always been somewhat of a problem under X until recently without a ton of tweaking of X parameters and even then it never quite felt right.


Note, phonetic is totally wrong about what platforms all the quake or unreal engines were intiially developed on. They've never been developed on linux first. Sweeney has always developed on windows and actually Carmack did use NeXT machines at one time(I think maybe Doom and possibly Quake I), but Quake II onward he's developed using VC++.

I've played some of the older quake engines on older machines and the difference between the windows and linux version was much larger, but linux has improved in recent years.

Listen, linux can be a good gaming machine, but when I see people saying that they're getting better fps on their linux partition than their windows partition I'm going to get suspicious because it starts reeking of fanboyism.

Are you sure bootup is a good measurment? Linux doesn't care about fast boot as much cause its not suppose to turn off that much, it waits for things like the network, it doesn't pass it then load it in the background while something else takes the cpu cycles.
Network usually takes about 8-10 seconds for me, sometimes more and it has next to nothing to do with cpu speed.

Windows has a fast bootup cause after a system lockup or new program installed we're told to reboot resulting in silently talking to ourselvs about how much windows sucks until we see our desktop again.

but sticking to the subject,

1) The Linux kernel is not specially fat.

2) Some everything-but-the-kitchen-sink GNU/Linux 2004 vintage distributions could be called fat. They are designed and marketed as such.

3) Not happy with a 2004 fat Linux distrib in your 4-year old Duron with 128MB RAM? Good, stick to a slim one.

Pass on, people, nothing to see or read here...

Windows XP does *NOT* feel good in less than 256 of ram. I've been using gnome in 256 MB of ram and it was not _that_ bad. Now, if you're executing evolution and/or openoffice....openoffice takes 60 MB of ram easily. That's half of the ram on a 128 MB box. Yes, office is *much* better and faster...and the windows window manager is really light.


And yes, gnome and kde are bloated. That's no surprise, xchat takes 12 MB of RSS usually in my box, where mirc through wine eats much less RAM. X doesn't takes too much memory IMHO. 23 M of RSS right now is not that much for the beast it is. I guess it could get better. icewm right now is eating 5 MB of RSS, less than fluxbox once you *really* start using it.



IMHO this can be fixed with a bit of tuning. It'd be worth of it to get a set of kernel sysctls tuned for desktop.

I had a friend who wanted to load Linux on an old Pentium MMX machine with 48MB RAM. Windows 98 ran perfectly content on it, but Debian with XFCE4 was too much for it. I dual boot Debian (with Gnome) and Wndows on my Athlon XP 2400+ with 448MB RAM (after 64MB is taken out for graphics) and it goes blow for blow with Windows if not performing faster than Windows, but the minimum requirements keep creeping up. It seems strange to me. It doesn't feel any bit slower than Windows on my machine. In fact, most of the time it feels faster, but on an old machine it won't even run (a machine that can capably run Windows). I just don't get it. Code that is too inefficient for an old computer should run slowly on my computer. I'm sure the answer is something like 'it uses more resources to make it faster' or something.

In the end, I have to disagree with the author. I don't think that the hobby OSs are catching up to GNU/Linux. It takes a lot more that what they have to make an OS that competes with GNU/Linux. Sure, they're fast, but they don't do nearly as much stuff as GNU/Linux does. That makes a huge difference. The question is whether they will stay this fast. More importantly maybe, are they faster than GNU/Linux was at that stage in its development?

Wow, what a reasonable post. Thank you. I would like to point out, though, that ATI driver support isn't that great. It's quite possible that the guys with NVidia cards could be getting better performance in Linux. Anyway, lets bury that argument because no one seems to have any kind of authoritative benchmarking - I know I've seen some around somewhere. But, well, it's 6:30AM and I haven't gone to sleep yet. I'm done with my work. This thread is out of control. Good night/morning.

XP soooo slow that, we'v installed it on 3 machine in out network , all p4 with 256 ram, 1st week it runs fast after that, it become really slow, even startup time is too long, i mean after it show the desptop and begin loading start menu etc, it take too long time, no need to tell how it'll be slow after applying SP or other patches.
so i just installed win2003, guess what, with few step tweaking ( performance,disabling undeeded services etc) it really run faster then XP.
but like all windows systems, i have to reboot the system after 24-48hourse.. u know why .. it will be tooo slow.

GTK 1.x was fast, was incredibly fast. GTK 2.x is awfully slow. Hopefully it will be getting better, but it makes me wonder if I should shop for alternative toolkits, even though I do love the GTK+ API.

It's quite painful to run gtk 2.x apps on older hardware. Apologists will say that it's X's problem, but imo that's no excuse to say, "hey in 5 years X and the hardware will finally catch up with us" .

These are RatHeadish products.
Just check requirements for RH 9.0.
Then compare them with those for Slackware ;-)

Hmm.. just poking about in the history of quake.. You are right on one thing, and wrong on another

Yes, Quake (all incarnations as far as I can tell) were ported to linux from DOS at first, but then windows. So you were right there, thanks for the correction.

However, Quake is not specifically or exclusively optimized for windows (in any of its incarnations) Carmack and Id in general develop in pure ANSI C/C++ and assembler. Carmack in particular refuses to use microsofts DirectX offerings, instead coding his own rendering routines pretty much from scratch (he's a technological purist).

Its important to note that while they are not developed as far as I can tell, on a Linux platform, Id games ARE developed FOR linux platforms.

This is a trend that is increasing, and all I can say to you, ya immature sod, is SO NER!

Yes I'm a linux fanboy, and damn proud of it. I'm proud of the motivation and principles behind FOSS, and I support it whole heartedly. Unlike the average window user, I keep myself aware of the developments and intents of the proprietary software world. It's not most proprietary software companies that worry me, just a few, unfortunately, windows fanboy, Microsoft is one of them.

Likewise, I support AMD over Intel, because I am aware of the relationship between Intel and Microsoft and the plans for the future. Things are going to get a lot worse, before they can start to get better.

That makes me an AMD fanboy too.

Sure, I'm not saying everything about Linux is better nor is everything about AMD superior to Intel. I'm a fanboy just the same. On the other hand, I hate and despise Microsoft who have done nothing for the good of anyone. Who continually and deliberately engage in dirty, and unhanded, unethical and downright immoral activity for their sole benefit and in the process harmed developers, families and nations.

Yup, I'm a Linux fanboy, and sometimes that means making sacrifices to support my principles. Don't that worry you though, at least you get to play more commercial games while supporting an evil and detestable software giant. I'm sure all the extra wasted hours soothe your troubled or nonexistent conscience just fine.

Right, and what advantage are you talking about, then?

BTW - We *all* remember how *fat* (in terms of RSS ie: real ram used) went gnome2 when comparing with 1.4. I'm wondering how a debian woody default install (gnome 1.4) feels when compared with typical distros

"Just for the record, I have just booted into KDE, and started only aMSN, Firefox, konsole and kdict. Memory footprint:

774680 TOTAL
263724 USED
17096 BUFFERED
124584 CACHED

That's 260MB used already.
"

Yes, but 140 megs of that memory are not allocated to processes. Your processes occupy 121 MB of RAM.

A couple things:

First off, Carmack does use DirectInput and DirectSound for win32. Download the quake I or quake II code and see how he just abstracts out the OS specific calls. He's always used Opengl for video hardware acceleration.

As for fanboyism. All I can say is that when I get involved in social activism it's a lot more meaningful than just software. The problem with you people is that you take software way too seriously. If you want to be an activist, be an activist in something that really counts.

Anyway, this is way off topic and it's very early on this part of the planet.

Brad Griffith is right. The ATi driver offerings for Linux really are complete pants when it comes to 3d. My brother has a laptop with a 'supported' chipset, and despite six months of on and off fiddling by both of us (he's just as much a 'fanboy' of Linux as me), we've completely failed to get anything even approaching decent OpenGL performance out of it. Crack-attack is playable, but that's about it.

I also played all those games under xp and linux, and I disagree with you.
it was a 50/50 split as to which had the better framerate. like you said UT3 is better on windows, but what about the rest ?
and the machine I tested on had one of them ati cards... you know, the ones linux support is supposed to be rubbish with ?
but indeed, please refrain from spreading FUD unless you are prepared to back up what you say with proof.

btw - what about enemy territory ? meet me there and I will kick yer ass into next week

My Dell Inspiron laptop has only 128 MB Ram, and FreeBSD 5.2.1 runs like a champ. I have the heaviest possible install of KDE 3.2.2, with the Arts sound daemon, and many services running in the background, since this is a development machine: CUPS, Apache/PHP, PostgreSQL, Sendmail, plus standard system services. And I am running with ACPI for power-down and battery notification.

Now, I will admit that I have tweaked performance a little bit, with the following startup parameters:

sysctl kern.ipc.shmmax=67108864
sysctl kern.ipc.shmall=32768

And, I have reduced the standard number of ttys from 7 to 3.

But that's it. I am running the standard base kernel, not recompiled for efficiency, and all the cool desktop stuff. Very rarely do I get a windows lock-up, and I think that is because of the buggy IBM display driver (apparently, XFree86 3.4 is supposed to fix that, but packages are not yet available).

I will say though, that Slackware properly configured ran almost as well on this laptop. I wouldn't even start to try Fedora, Mandrake, or Suse on this system, though. Nor would I even begin to run Gnome... no thanks.

Yes, I would like more RAM, and sometimes I run WindowMaker, if I want more performance for a specific task (such as Gimp), but overall, it is quite useable; I often run Mozilla + many Konsole sessions + Kate + Gaim + Xmms + other various programs concurrently with no problem at all.

I do not know if someone already posted something comparable.

Windows XP was designed and optimized in 2000/2001 for Computers from those years and even earlier. Fedora Core 2 was released 2004. The computers of 2003 and 2004 usually have more memory und faster CPUs. In my opinion it is ok for developers to optimize their software for this hardware.

I have been on a MS conference recently (shame on me as a FreeBSD and Linux user/developer owning a Powerbook with Mac OS).
They gave an introduction to Longhorn. For best performance and all details Longhorn will need an 128MB 3d accelerated graphics card - just for desktop use!
Longhorn will be released 2006 (or probably later) so it seems to be a fair assumption about the consumer hardware widely in use in 2006.

To me it is one of the important benefits of Linux/FreeBSD and open source in general that I can have an up-to-date operating system and applications any time.

Firstly I was a bit amazed that the writer was surprised a modern day OS required at least 192MB of RAM.

256MB is default for any XP-machine, and you will need it when you run more than 2-3 apps at the same time. We order PC's with 512 now (Windowssoftware are resourcehogs too)

Quote : His box, an 600 MHz 128MB RAM system, ran Windows XP happily

I cannot quite imagine that because if you start E.G Word on a machine like that, XP starts swapping like hell on the harddrive.

What makes a machine snappy:

- CPU
- Enough RAM
- speedy harddrive

A PC with an older CPU can react pretty snappy when it conatins a fast harddrive and enough RAM, A new PC, low on RAM and a slow (5400RPM) hardrive can feel like an 486.

RAM-modules and Hardrive are dirt cheap these days. Barenones aren't expensive either.

If you need performance stick to older OS's and software otherwise buy a faster box. In case of Linux you can always try one of those slimmed down distro's.

Next to that it's up to the user to decide what's fast or what's slow. Some don't even notice their machine is as slow as hell :-)

Nah, boot-time is not everything, but is something to refer to. All systems was configured to achieve at least fast gui responses on normal uses (nothing bigger than firefox + ooo running back-to-back + alpha).

One point I should say is that FC1 with default BlueCurve/GNOME and no boot-time optimizations, takes a century to boot, and I'm not even close to be impressed by the GUI speed. My FreeBSD/Fluxbox works just fine and bloody fast on the 1GHz laptop. I'd stick to it for as long as it lasts. I really am not that sensitive to GUI consistency, as long as I don't find it that much counter-productive. And I fell in love with FreeBSD for some time now(almost 2 years).

I think that the desktop-oriented hobby OSes will make a big change in computing the near future. Free is not everything. The same applies to open source.

This is fast approaching 200 Posts.
http://www.osnews.com/comment.php?news_id=7324&offset=30&rows=45#24...

Anyway remember this excellent OSNEWS interview.
http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=5215

Havoc says better profiling tools will help to speed things up.

Well KDE used valgrind, what about GNOME?

OpenOffice is a Java based application, and I'm sorry to say it but Java is *not* a good language for GUI things.
Not it isn't. If you check the sources, you'll see it is C++

And may I add that my WinXP machines experiences 30-40days uptime, with no performance hit, except for one thing: Explorer sometimes eats up the memory upto 100MB+. Solution is to kill explorer and restart it. I'm really proud with it, since I use it casually and for gaming(mainly Lineage2). It also runs Apache/PHP/MySQL and Mercury Mail Server in the background everytime, and I still have an average of 400MB free phys memory with those running. WinXP is stable and also flexible. I like Win2003 better, but can't afford it.

I'll just pray that BeOS will once again become feasible.

Choosing a toolkit (GTK or QT) and sticking as much as you can to applications that use this toolkit helps. I'm not surprised when the author tells that the combination KDE/Mozilla/OO eats memory. They all use different toolkits, so more libraries have to be loaded in to the memory. I only occasionly use GTK apps (Gimp and Sodipodi) and try to use as much KDE (QT) applications as possible. I've got 256 mb of ram and have no performance problems whatsoever.

Blaming Linux is useless, because the source of the problem are the bloated DE.

I love BSD and I love Linux. Real "geeks", like myself and thousands of others can use BSD or Linux without a GUI. I think CLI is great and talk about low memory foot prints.

:)

Troy

I would ask that everyone take into consideration their demands before getting too worked up over RAM requirements.

Talk lately has for the most part been about features. Everyone wants features. They want translucent windows. They want wicked visualizations. They want desktop integration. They want hardware integration. They want little graphical thingies on the desktop that tell them how much hard disk they have left.

The developer community is, for the most part, pursuing adding these features that everyone wants. But that takes a lot of work. And it takes directing programmer focus on those tasks. So you have to take your pick, many times, between running the software on a faster computer, or having cooler features. Or of course, you can personally open up the source code and optimize it yourself.

>troy banther
Nice one! But watching movies in ASCII is no fun (well, not always )

>Alan
I think they should audit and optimize first, then add features. And the suggestion to have a periodic feature-freeze and optimize/cleanup is really cool.

Wether or not Linux is getting fat isn't the real issue here. Speedups is a good thing anyway, and needs to be a priority.
There is indeed a good reason why I stick to Fluxbox. The bloaty DE's loadingtime is longer that LOTR. Firefox is damn slow to load too. Its a shame.

You can watch movies in the CLI with full graphics.

Gentoo with gnome 2.6, bmp, nicotine and epiphany (10 tabs) takes 166 MB here. it runs very smooth, although there's no comparison to BeOS.
But i totally agree with the author, this is all getting way too heavy, and i will have big fun installing GNU/Linux on my brother's celeron 433 with 96 MB RAM (on an i810 motherboard, means 96 MB for the OS, graphics and sound). i installed mandrake 9 on an similar system (64M) back when it was new (mandrake 9 of course, not the computer), and it was crap slow, windows didn't redraw, some apps failed to start. you couldn't even get continuous sound playback.
I love BeOS, still using it when i only want to listen to some music or watch videos. This is what you call snappy. And if you don't believe me, do a stress test, open 10 videos at the same time, and then start moving windows around. If it wouldn't lack a decent word processor, i had already migrated all my family and friends who want that their computer "just works".
And i will have to try FreeBSD. I installed 5.1 a year ago or so, but X refused to work on it so i deleted it.

Hmm, I'm an activist for many things, mostly while I'm not studying I'm working to raise funds for Kidsmart, a program run by the bluelight council to educate and protect young children.

If you think software is innocuous, you should think again, and learn abotu what is going on and how it will affect YOU in the not to distant future.

Anyway, most of this is moot, I gave my experiences, you called me a fanboy. You were right, still, you meant it in a derogative sense, which makes you the one in the wrong. Just like deriding Islam over Christianity, or Christianity over Islam is wrong. I'm a Christian, but everyone has to find their own path. Again this is OT, but I hate trolls like you who mosey in, start a fight, then declaim all responsibility.

FYI, I picked up that linux was the development platform from a textbook on 3d programming which actually was a waste of time. I didnt just jump to the conclusion.

Your claims that every game runs better on windows have been refuted by 3 people now, and noone I see has stood up to support you. Perhaps they run better for you, for whatever reason.

But then, I don't even know why I bother responding to you, you are so obviously a troll.

I think that being afraid of antoher OpenOS (like BeOS) taking the place of Linux is foolish. The fact is, that linux 2.6 kernel is VERY fast thing. What makes linux box slow, is the X and QT/GTK. If other systems like BeOS were to be faster, they would have to use their own GUI and develop their own GUI apps. What we need now, is to make X faster, and then take a closer look at QT and GTK.

But I think, that this has already began, kernel 2.6 is MUCH faster than 2.4 and so is KDE 3.2 over KDE 3.1, so I guess we're on a good way here.

"Typically, open source hackers, being interested in tech, have very powerful boxes; as a result, they never experience their apps running on moderate systems."

bullllllllsh*t...without any hard numbers my guess would be the exact OPPOSITE. When I read blogs of developers and they mention system specs they are often between 600mhz to a 1gighz. Why? Because there are very few games that push someone to upgrade to the bleeding edge.

Oh and complaints that XP works on a system but not FC2...you are out to lunch my friend...XP is what...3 or 4 years old? FC2 is weeks old.

Get a grip.

How about this. Have a performance preference from the OS level that should be referenced by apps to optimize for the specific hardware. ie. have numbers like, 1 being sub-100MHz pentiums, 2 being <250MHz p2, 3: <600MHz p2 ... and these numbers is considered to set the default settings for apps(OS/DE/heavy-duty apps etc) . Then we will have a common argument ground to compare or have a reasonable performance by default.

Pardon my English.

Finally someone graps the issues at hand. I've been saying and thinking what this article talks about for years now and it's refreshing to see that there are other sober people out there.

If anything, usage seems to be going down for some things.

My PowerComputing PowerBase PPC 603e Mac Clone with 48mb of ram could run KDE 1.1 very well. KDE 2.0 was dog slow. KDE 3.2 is also slow, but the applications are usable.

Wow, I was just out for a couple of hours to University... I left when there were like 12 comments, and now I just got back and its 190 :S.

But anyways, I think the author has a very valid point. Of course Linux runs great on older systems, but hey, I got a snappier interface from my Windows Longhorn Build 4074... And that's alpha stuff! It's just a damn shame KDE/Gnome eat resources like hell. And of course I could install Xfce (love it, really) but all the major distro's are Gnome and/or KDE based, and they all want the latest stuff.

Speed is no problem on my main machine. It is a problem on my laptop though (PII 366 w/ 64 MBRAM). I am forced to use Windows ME (*evil laughter*, as y'all know I ain't Anti-MS, but ME was just, well, a joke, a bad joke), because MDK just won't run on it. And since its "just" my laptop, I ain't gonna put hours and hours of tweaking into it.

Off-topic: anyone can recommend me a Xfce based distro that would perform snappy on this laptop?

Good, accurate article.

I think your article is excellent and try to open up some minds.

One of the propaganda that there is out there is that linux run on very very old hardware. But all of the distro more buisness-centric are huge resource eater. Red-hat, Suse, mdk, sun's jds, ...

if open-source doesnt produce more eficient code, it is save to say that this code is more secure than windows?

I remember comfortably running Red Hat 3.0.3 (kernel 1.2.13) with X windows (fvwm) and using LaTex to write papers.

Yelp is so much faster in Gnome 2.6 ShaunM must be a god!

The games I've played so far, which have a Windows and Linux port so far are Quake3, UT, UT2k3, Heroes 3 and Tribes2.
To be honest, especially in UT2k3 and Tribes2 I get not only better framerates, but also when I'm playing over a network (T2 singleplayer is a joke anyways), usually I have a much more stable and smooth game, connection wise. With Q3 and UT, the framerates in Win and Linux have been pretty much equal.

I wouldn't go so far as to say that Linux ports are generally better, but saying that they are worse is bollox.
I'm hoping for more native Linux ports in the future, but only Doom3 and HL2 seem to go that way :/

The beauty of Linux is there are many ways to improve the speed. The default install of any distro will install a generic x86 kernel. If the author really wanted to help his friend, he should have helped him learn how to recompile the kernel for his specific platform. I have an old AMD K2 running Debain unstable with KDE. Ever since I recompiled the kernel for that specific processor, it has performed perfectly.

when I first started using Linux, around 1998 with Red Hat 5.2, its system requirements were way lower then Windows NT or 9x. It was very comfortable on my Pentium 133 mhz with 48 megs of RAM, while either Windows was lesser so. What the hell happened? GTK? Gnome and KDE going feature-crazy at the expense of RAM? Its nuts...

Why don't you send Linux to /dev/null and install FreeBSD instead? Stop crying about Linux getting fat. If don't like the way things are going, switch for something else and shut up instead of waisting time writing about how Linux got fat.

I used to use Mandrake 9.1 on my old Pentium III 450Mhz with 64Mb RAM. It FLEW on it. It even supported 3d acceleration and I had a lot of fun with it. Heres some hints.

Disable any unecessary services.
Don't install both KDE and GNOME. Choose one
Make sure you enabled DMA on your drive
Don't use Nautilus on GNOME versions before 2.6, it sucked in speed before then.
Get OpenOffice.org 1.1.1, the 1.0 version was extremley slow.

I now have a Atlhon XP 2000 with 768 Mb ram. It absoloutley flies. It even outperfoms my brothers 3Ghz PC running XP.

I still run SuSE 9.0 on my Duron 800mhz laptop with 128Mb. A hell faster than Windows XP on it, plus it fits nicely in a 6Gb partition that was somehow "convienently" left empty by SONY.

P.S. Look at the requirements for the longhorn betas, you will cry!

Who says you need 256MB or more to run Linux? Unlike Windows XP or Windows 2000, you can remove parts of Linux and install whatever you want.

Recently I built up both RH 9 and FC1 with bare minimum settings on a Pentium III 850MHZ machine with 384MB RAM and on an Athlon 2000XP+ with 256MB ram. Stripped it down to the essentials, upgraded the core components, then installed only what I needed or compiled it from source code.

I do agree that Linux is getting more and more disk intensive but you can still control it.

my mother needed a machine to check email, chat with friends, and read her old corel wordperfect files. i bought her a "new" p2 350mhz with 128mb RAM, 4GB HD, and a 4MB Rage Pro card for $10. She already had a 15 in monitor from her old computer. after reformatting the hard drive i installed xp and the latest wordperfect. threw some extra tweaks in and it runs great! i mean i was suprised. now i could never had done that with a linux distro and expect her to know how to do anything. i wonder why everybody else is having all this "disk thrashing" they are talking about with old systems and xp.

>Don't use Nautilus on GNOME versions before 2.6, it sucked in speed before then.

This is again a good point. pre-2.6 Nautilus did MIME sniffing instead of looking at file extensions. I am sure you could turn off MIME sniffing in pre-2.6 Nautilus though... But it was not the default.

This article is speaking from the newcomer's point of view. When you look at Windows XP, are you thinking of Internet Explorer? Likewise with Linux, A newcomer's point of view is the "Total Package" even when it's clearly not. To adopt GNOME/KDE, U must adopt Linux in some way shape or form. So in actuality, Linux IS getting FAT. I love the Bells and Whistles of KDE and Gnome, But let's face it, Those WMs are a Pure Hog. And for Linux to make it in the Desktop realm, there really have to be work done on X, and The Big 2 WMs. Or... Have an Indie come out with a brand new WM that embraces all of those features and tehn some, but not being such a Pig. Or just break out De Ole Serial Port and have some good console luvin.

This article was well written, well paced, relatively typo free and balanced. I am greatly pleased by the article in both form and content. I myself have felt that Linux was slower than it should be (as is Mozilla) and I fully agree with and support every thing this author said. I notice that there are over 200 comments posted already so I assume there is an amazing amount of religious argument going on. I will have to check out the comments when I have time (I hope it isn't a waste of time - I sometimes find myself wondering why I bother).

I hope a great number of developers seriously consider this article's points because they are valid. Not just valid: right on target.

I bet this will be the first Osnews story ever reach 1000 commnets.

...that all those swearing by Fedora Core have 256 MB of RAM? This makes me feel out of the loop. The older Linux distros work fine for me on the desktop (that's what FC is aiming at, apparently). There are also tons of drivers for these older distros. I see no reason for FC to be taken seriously for a corporate desktop - it placed itself out of the market by such steep requirements.

This made me so frustrated, because Linux != OS. Linux is the kernel, like kernel32.dll is to Windows.

The FC2 *Distribution* is slow, yes, I agree. Especially on older hardware. But that's because it loads GNOME and a ton of other things in the background. So I wrote this short counter-article:

http://www.livejournal.com/users/punkwalrus/13900.html

I know many of you have upgraded your hardware to 128MB or 256MB, and a minimum 500MHz CPU, but wait, let's review the points that this article points out. The author means there are still tons of people having their 200MHz with 64MB boxes staying home and cannot upgrade no more because it is not worth to upgrade, so what's the alternatives of os because windows are not working very efficiently on those boxes even Win98 with modern apps. How can you satisfy with running 4 apps only with 128MB and an os without anything included? When did this RAM-hog revolution started? 4 apps and 128MB? Even linux, I am not saying linux is bad, like someone in the posts saying that it's the apps problems, not linux itself. IMO, he's so right because I was running Debian with 2.4.22 kernel with KDE 3.0 on a Duron 600MHz with 128MB, without KDE, if I run ICEWM, and something else, it's lightning fast, if I run KDE 2.1, it is still quite fast, in terms of fast, I mean I run KDE 2.1 with xmms, amsn, gaim, mozilla 1.5, openoffice and 3 or 4 Kate running for debugging my codes. Seriously, if I have a 1GHz CPU with 128MB RAM, I would expect to run maximum 4 apps smoothly in XP Pro, but at least 10 apps in Linux without problems.

Someone pointed it out already but I would like to mention again. After I installed Debian, it was booting fast enough, it doesn't boot anything that I don't really need, but SuSE 9 and Mandrake 9.2, they are loading tons of background that I don't really need them. And they are booting very very slowly comparing to my Win2k box. This is ridiculuos. I really appreciate the performance of Linux, I wish I can contribute to the improvement, wait for me guys, but it may take more than 50 years...haha

Featurewise, the Linux desktop (particularly under KDE) does more than the Windows desktop. I'm thinking of io-slaves, advanced theming, better security, and greater scope for user-scripting (DCOP/DBus). This takes more clock-cycles and more memory.

Since 2.2 KDE has been using less and less resources. This is from developers, who know a lot more than how to run "top". Qt4 will be speedier still. I don't know about Gnome, so I won't waste time with uninformed conjecture.

X isn't actually as big and bad as many people like to think, particularly with regard to memory, and once the X.org clean-up gathers momentum, it's going to be even less of an issue. However a lot of toolkits don't use X in an optimal way (there was an article on OSNews about this a while ago).

I remember using KDE 0.99 on SuSE 5.2 in college back in '98, the only decent browser for Linux was Netscape 4.7 (or possible it was 4.65 back then) and it took up about 30MB. So don't get started on Firefox's usage, particularly given that it's a dramatically better browser.

The fact is people wanted more features from the Linux desktop, and the devs delivered. It quite probably takes up more resources than strictly necessary, but not significantly so in my opinion. Windows XP may not be as much of a resource hog, but frankly the bits and pieces we hear about the Windows OS family doesn't give me a lot of faith in the development process that led to that performance.

Barring the lack of configuration tools, with a bit of tweaking (e.g. creating a KDE desktop shortcut to "system:/" called "My Computer"), Linux offers an extraordinarily nice desktop experience which betters XP's in several respects. Things such as multiple desktops, easy mime-type editing, tabbed browsing, spellchecking in web-forms, popup blocking, secure worry free email, document previews in file-managers, printing to PDF/fax/email, easy inline compression and encryption and the IO-Slave (or VFS) architecture are all things that add value to the user.

As for the need to cut down, the devs already know this, and are working on it. In the last year, KDE has reduced it's resource usage, a ton of work has been done on desktop responsiveness in the kernel, and Qt has announced performance enhancements for Qt4, not to mention lots more. If the article were a comment it would be marked as flame-bait. Instead we get as sub-slashdot run of whinging and trolling.

Wait a second, since when is one distribution considered to be all of Linux? Isn't Fedora the distro being reviewed here? Why in the world would someone make an all encompassing statement like that?

Why don't you take a look at Gentoo or Debian or Slackware. I personally use Gentoo and I know that it runs circles around Fedora in terms of speed.

So please, lets remember that Linux is still nothing but a kernel. If Fedora folks decide to fill it with bloated software, then lets acknowledge that instead of saying that Linux is getting fat!

Looking at the upcoming Debian Sarge on the mailing lists, the following requirements are needed

Processor : 2Ghz
RAM : 512MB
Hard disk. 5 Gb min install, 25 Gb full install
Comes on either 13 CDs (all mandatory), plus 30 "Extra" cds or 7 DVDs. They even plan to sell 250Gb hard drives with it pre-installed to lighten the load.

I also cringe at the upcoming GNOME 3 that will be due in 2005. This is their answer to long horn. It will need at least 768Mb (1.25Gb to run comfortably and up to 3 to run at full potetial). It also requires mandatory 64-bit processors with at least 2500Mhz. Thats only currently avalible on highlyl overclocked opterons or the new G5!

For Debian and GNOME. It is going to be huge! I hope someone knocks some sense into those idiots.

I'm here to tell you my brothers FC2 install on a 1800+ and 512 MB ram with some cheap mobo and slow hard drive is faster than my Gentoo install on a 2200+ with nice hard drive and expensive mobo... this is because i cant prelink gentoo correctly i believe... but his is still faster.

It's all so ignorant, between blaming "Linux" or "X"...Has nothing to do with either. Run "top" and see what is using the memory. KDE and/or GNOME are the "problem". Sort by memory usage with a capital m in top to see this.

QT and KDE with KDE/QT 4 are getting between 15 and 25 percent smaller memory footprints, so if you are too stingy to upgrade and you want to use KDE, then just wait. Otherwise, use Windowmaker, Fluxbox, IceWM, Blackbox, etc. etc. because Gnome/KDE are not shrinking anytime soon.

Besides, this "Special Contributor" is just plain wrong.

1. Memory is cheap. It might be slightly more than at this time last year, but go back 5 years to 1999, and consider the difference. I honestly don't understand why anyone runs any OS on less than 512 MB of Ram. 512 is the sweet spot wherein your PC starts happily pushing and pulling bits out of memory, instead of having to spin the HD up to hit virtual memory all the time. A gig or higher is cooler yet for us power users (My x86 box is at 1GB, and as soon as I have the $$, I'll be at 3GB, My Mac will be up to 2.5GB here ASAP as well).

2. Most modern programmers are lazy, and have never learned, nor had to learn due to the nature of modern hardware, how to wring the last few cycles our of a CPU.

Back in the days of the Amiga (No, not this swan song called OS4, but the real Amiga), and early x86 days, it was every programmers duty to get as much as possible out of the hardware. This meant that they had to know the hardware as well as the software. This isn't true anymore (unfortunately).

Todays programmers learn to program using established IDE's, and they do so using modern, "make it easy" type languages. Most programmers couldn't handle assembly if they needed to, nor do they know the ins and outs of the CPU and associated hardware.

Thus code is optimized as much as their compiler knows how to do so. They don't go "outside the box", so to speak.

To be fair, the advancement of PC technology has been so brisk these last 10 years, it'd be hard for a lot of people to keep up with the changes in technology. The comodization(sp?) of todays programmers is largely a result of taking all these advancements, and leaving it up to a select few to understand them. The rest will simply use the development tools that these select few code for the world.

The long and short of this is that todays code expects to be run on a modern PC, loaded with a fair amount of ram. I've always argued that 128mb is too little for anything over Win98, and people have always been amazed at the increases in speed, as well as the overall increase in stability that 512MB or more brings to the table. Anything less is simply crippling the performance of your PC.

3. Linux is not an island. All of the above also applied to Linux. Sure, Linux enjoys a higher percentage of "geeks" that do know the hardware well, but the majority of your applications are being put together by those same "cookie cutter" programmers. The fact that they've chosen Linux as their platform of choice is good, but along with the genericism of the programmer comes bloat and higher PC requirements.

I agree that there are many instances where a program or OS is simply too bloated, even when considering the above, but complaining about needing 512mb to run a modern OS in todays world is just being unrealistic.

Welcome to the 21st century friend! By a halg gig of memory for your friends 600MHZ box for about $50-60, and you'll be amazed at the difference!
Instead of complaining about it
3.

It's a shame that so many of you think this article is a troll, some very good points are raised. The fact of the matter is that modern Linux desktop environments are slow as hell. I love Gnome, but I wouldn't even concider running it on anything less than a P4 with 256 megs of ram.

However, there is hope. The beauty of Linux is choice. Fluxbox and XFCE4 do a great job of doing a lot with few resources.

There are three things that can happen now.

Outcome 1: KDE and Gnome can keep adding more features and bloat with little to no consideration of performance. Mono or maybe Java will be integrated into these DEs to make rapid development possible with a tremendous performance hit. People who don't need all the fluff will switch to a distribution which offers an alternative desktop environments as the default. Gnome and KDE will lose popularity.

Outcome 2: KDE and Gnome will reach a "feature plateau" where it is comparable with Longhorn and then buckle down and do some serious optimizing. With Novell backing Gnome and trying to replace Windows in a corporate setting, this is looking more and more likely.

Outcome 3: People get fed up with this "Linux thing" and BSD becomes the trendy OS du jour. FreeBSD is looking very tempting right now for my server.

Although you might not be able to tell from this post, I love Linux. My 1 GHz laptop with 384 megs of RAM runs Gentoo and Gnome 2.6 great with all the bells and whistles. My server, an old 400 MHz PII with 192 megs of RAM runs Gentoo with Fluxbox adequately.

Then "don't do that" (load the latest and greatest distro). _Fall back_ a few versions - damn - even RH7.3 is not a disaster...can't be worse than MS security-wise.

I agree, technically, that the well-known GNU/Linux _distros_ (I consider the kernel a separate component of the whole system) are cramming more and more software into their offerings and the leading desktop _environments_ (GNOME, KDE) 'seem' slow to me no matter what hardware I run them on. I can say, after many years of using and admin'ing PCs and networks that _speed does count_. Users appreicate _far more_ that things work fast and are "usable" (which includes app response times) than whether the machine is i486, i586, P4, etc., or even what version (OS, Office) of this-or-that is running.

Keep in mind that "slow" and "fast" are very subjective experiences to the user. Only hard benchmarking (would we all agree that apps that start up with subsecond responses to be "fast" ?...what, exactly, is your "fast"...?) I've worked in terminals for years (VAXen, HP3000, *NIX, IBM360, etc.) - to me, ANYTHING that responds in greater than 3 seconds is "slow"...but that's my _subjective_ (collective) experience. I will not wait more than two seconds for an app to respond. I use the GNU/Linux Distro/WM combo that gets me the _response_ times I want. I will tweak sometimes, but try to avoid it.

I've tended to stick with Slackware as it seems easy to install and is flexible. Swaret for updates works well. The "all packages" installation for Slack only recently moved onto a second CD (for GNOME and KDE). To me it's still the best "tightest, all around, runs on anything" distro. There are other good ones though: Vector, College, Arch, DamnSmall, etc. Then, there's always the BSD 'family' of OSs...

My current main machine: Dell Latitude Xpi, 133Mhz; 40Meg RAM, Slackware 9.1, Fluxbox _and_ wireless networking (!) via Lynksys (orinoco) PCMICA card. Xterms load in 1 second (as many as I can fire off), mutt loads in 1 second, gvim starts up in two seconds. I've done NO tweaking to this unit - it was 'install and go'. I web browse with Lynx (starts in a second). Mozilla and XMMS actually WILL run on here once started, but do not respond to my liking overall to my liking...but again, that's me). I can't get DOS or W98 to respond like this on this LT or the apps aren't there, so for me GNU/Linux is truly a "step up" and is using this machine to it's fullest.

My take is that we _stop worrying_ about _converting_ desktop users from Windows to Linux - do you think for a minute that Linus cares or is worried about it ? - go after the other _billion(s)_ (of) people who don't have a machine at all. You don't switch a friend or relative to free software OS's to prove what IT 'chops' you have, you do it because (and ONLY when !) it's easier, faster, less expensive, etc. (i.e. the "right" reasons). If GNU/Linux is not a _step up_ from MS software then there's no reason to move to it - isn't that, ultimately, what you're getting at ?

"Why don't you take a look at Gentoo or Debian or Slackware. I personally use Gentoo and I know that it runs circles around Fedora in terms of speed."

If you actually read the article, you'll see the writer discuss that. Gentoo, Debian or Slackware are NOT suitable for newcomers. We may be able to use and tweak them, but newcomers are going to get a bad impression from the "friendly" and ultra-bloated distros.

"Then "don't do that" (load the latest and greatest distro). _Fall back_ a few versions - damn - even RH7.3 is not a disaster...can't be worse than MS security-wise."

It is worse though. Red Hat 7.3 is unsupported (the as-yet unproven community legacy projects aside). Meanwhile, Win2k is still supported.

You can buy an OS from Microsoft that only requires 64MB: Win2k. It'll be supported for a while yet. With the friendly desktop distros, you can't do that; you install SUSE/Mandrake/Fedora and it requires more resources, and won't be supported as long.

This is a problem facing Linux

i don't understand why someone expects distribution released in 2004 work with hardware of 1999?

run os from 1999 and you will be fine. stupid "article"

quite long from the day i have used *nix as my entertainment, here we ve read a good writing like that. and almostly it s true.
thanks for the warning of obesity of linux codes. Keep the core of programs as classic as possible.

"but complaining about needing 512mb to run a modern OS in todays world is just being unrealistic."

No it isn't! You think everyone in every country can just buy sheds of RAM like that? You think laptop users aren't restricted in what RAM they can add? You think businesses want to keep buying more RAM for 100,000 boxes to run this Linux thing, which we've advocated as better than Microsoft?

The author made a good point: there are millions of 32 and 64MB boxes in companies around the world. Linux should be providing them with an opportunity! But they can't run KDE/GNOME/OpenOffice/Moz because these apps are so bloated. A market for Linux lost.

"By a halg gig of memory for your friends 600MHZ box for about $50-60, and you'll be amazed at the difference!"

Why should I have to? Why can't programmers actually THINK about performance and elegant design? Is that too much to ask? This is the point many people on this thread are making. Chucking more and more RAM at a problem doesn't make it go away.

"i don't understand why someone expects distribution released in 2004 work with hardware of 1999?"

Why is that so much to ask? Videos from 2004 work on 1999 video players. Music CDs from 2004 work on 2004 CD players. Fuel from 2004 works in 1999 cars. It goes on and on and on.

Why SHOULDN'T software work on slightly older machines? Yeah, there's no need to make it cater for old 386 boxes, but telling people to upgrade every five years is terrible. And it's bad for Linux against Microsoft. Win2k works fine on 1999 machines, and it's STILL SUPPORTED. All the Linux distros made at that time are NOT supported now.

As has been said, this bloat is causing slow takeup in the corporate space. Now companies are forced to upgrade 100,000+ machines to run Linux, just like they have to with Microsoft. That's APPALLING.

troll? What an apt name for you. Debian Sarge minimul install 5 GB? Please, don't write such a blatant lie. I have GNOME, KDE, XFce, Mozilla, OpenOffice.org fully installed and it is under 2 GB here.

Yes, Sarge will be 13 CDs. But only the first CD will be mandatory. Debian has been always installble with a single CD.

True, Linux is kernel and not OS. But talking about distros, Red Hat/Fedora, Suse, Mandrake all are getting bloated. I had P3 866 Machine, 128 Ram and Red Hat 8 was slow on it and 9 was almost unusuable(after turning off all crap). So was Mandrake. BSD was fast only without DE. I currently use Vmware and run Linux on it. But to my horror, most distros are slow to run on Vmware as well no matter how much mem I give to them. Only option seems running Debain/Slackware on it. Unfortunately, I have not been able to Install debian on it. Can anyone point me out how to install debian on Vmware?

is just the insane memory requirements. 2.6 is even worse than all before. :/

>>BeOS wasn't cool for no good reason. BeOS can make 6 year old hardware feel fast. <<

Not my experience, not by a long shot. I still have my boxed beos 5.0 pro editon. No only did I find that it wasn't any faster than windows, the setup was absolutely awful - primitive even for it's day.

Been a long time, but as I remember, everything was centered around floppy disks. I had to make all of these floppy disks, and I had to reboot constently. Also, I think I needed windows just to install beos.

BeOS didn't feel any faster than windows 95, or windows NT 4.0, to me. When I read posts raving abpit beos, I just have to scratch my head.

I guess I won't be getting invloved in this discussion. Is this the most amounts of comments on an OS News story ever?

Maybe you did not have accelerated drivers for your graphics card? Makes hell of a difference.

*cough*AOL*cough* ;-)

In my experience, this is very snappy, and takes way less than 100mb of hdd space to install. Add ms-office-97, and you have a very snappy system, that can do about 100% of what most office workers need to do.

Still the linux zealots carry on about how linux can you leverage your old hardware.

Since when did memory get cheap?

Did I miss something?

Sorry, but this is my first ATI offering. It's fast on linux too - none of those crappy open source drivers. I've been using Nvidia since the Riva 128 days. Riva, TNT-1,2, Geforce3. The quake series were always faster on windows.

I've been saying that for the past 2 years: Linux IS ACTUALLY very fat! At least as an average user might see it. Your article is objective addressing this point! Congrats!

As someone pointed already, it is true that Linux is about only the kernel, but that does not mean a thing when it comes to normal users. Actually, it means nothing even to advanced users, for we can do nothing with ONLY the kernel!

When I started with Linux, I runned more friendly distros, like Mandrake, Conectiva or Rad Hat. Yes, they were extremelly low and bloated! I kept asking myself why in hell would this OS come with so many text editors!!!! In Mandrake I could count 9 of them just out of the box!!!

Those kind of problems made me move to Debian, so much lighter, i wouldn't know why. I got used to hack into scripts and read logfiles. So I stick with Debian since then and my desktop is 100% Debian. But I must say it is powerful enough: even Debian is slow in low-end machines! And don't expect average people hacking stuff or wanting to learn this nerdy stuff. They just want their OO.org to open in about 2 secs, not those 5 min I have already seen!

It doesn't matter how fast new hardware is coming out, or it spec's. It doesn't matter how cheap 256 MB of RAM is.

I've got a stack of PII's here at work after our recent rollout, and it's a pain to install recent disto's on them. I want to show my boss the value and older hardware and linux, and spending a week tweaking out a distro or buying hardware upgrades, no matter how cheap ain't going to do it.

The most absurd thing is the installers. I can run SuSe 9.0 on some of these (with a fwwm or something), but the fancy-dancy installer doesn't like less than 128 MB ram. That's just silly.

Outcome 3: People get fed up with this "Linux thing" and BSD becomes the trendy OS du jour. FreeBSD is looking very tempting right now for my server.

Switching to FreeBSD won't make much difference if you are after a workstation. Your choice of window manager/desktop environment will dictate how responsive the computer feels on old hardware.

I can relate to this article. I have recently installed Fedora Core 2 + gnome and kde on a vaio notebook with 128MB of RAM. It wasn't pretty. I was hitting swap very often. Windows XP was more responsive on this configuration.

I have since got rid of FC2 and installed FreeBSD + windowmaker on the notebook. It feels much faster now, mostly because I am now using a lighter window manager.

Well, I can relate to that myself. I had a quite good little system set up on NT 4 and Office--150 MHz Cyrix with 32MB RAM IIRC. It was quite usable. But the only place you can get NT from these days is "some guy" or eMule... Actually I just did a Google and found some places actually sell it, but £92 seems a bit steep for a computer worth half that.

Outcome 3: People get fed up with this "Linux thing" and BSD becomes the trendy OS du jour. FreeBSD is looking very tempting right now for my server.

What a stupid plug. You were complaining that KDE and GNOME are too bloated. They will be just as bloated if you run them on top of BSD instead of GNU/Linux. And what the heck does your server have to with this discussion?

Yes, Linux (particularly the windowing systems) are now more hungry than Windows. I'm glad it's being recognised at last.

I have an old Pentium 100/128Mb which runs Windows 2000 and XP - slow, but usable for my kids. I've tried both SUSE 8/KDE3 and Redhat 8/GNOME and both are unusable.

"but complaining about needing 512mb to run a modern OS in todays world is just being unrealistic."

No it isn't! You think everyone in every country can just buy sheds of RAM like that?

In every country, no. But I still feel it's unrealistic top expect a modern program, on a modern computer, to provide optimal performance with less. If you have to run on a low end PC with less ram, than use older software that's optimized for that architecture!

I tried to explain why in my 1st post: Todays programmers simply are not focused on optimizing code for older PC's. They are not taught this, and with new PC's costing $300-$400, there's not a lot of reasons for them to locate an old, underpowered box just to optimize their code for. Sorry, but that's the facts. I'm not saying this to upset you, just stating the way that it is.

If you must run old hardware, then use more forgiving softare. People printed books, magazine, solved problems, and generally lived their lives around such software as Win98, Photoshop 5, PageMaker 5, and so on. You can't expect the newest software to run on the oldest hardware, so why not just face it and buy software that is optimized for your system? If you need to do more than this type of software will allow, you need to buy a new PC or upgrade your current one. Programmers around the world aren't going to just change their methodology because some of us refuse, or aren't able to upgrade. Complaining about it won't change that fact, so you must either adapt, or change.

Or learn programming yourself and show us all how it's done!
It's amazing how many people will complain but won't step up and try to solve the problems for themselves.

The author made a good point: there are millions of 32 and 64MB boxes in companies around the world. Linux should be providing them with an opportunity! But they can't run KDE/GNOME/OpenOffice/Moz because these apps are so bloated. A market for Linux lost.

We disgree with this point: There is just no way that you are going to get an X display, in addition to a GUI as robust as KDE or Gnome, as well as a modern app such as Mozilla or OO to run in 64mb's or less of memory. Forget it... It's just not do-able.

I agree that a whole market of hardware may go unsupported, but if you're running 32 or 64 mb's of ram, you just have to face the facts. If you go to any major tech. school and say "I need you to start teaching all of your students how to program so that their software runs on this 200mhz PII, with 32mb of ram", you're going to get laughed out of the place!

I understand your point, but the world doesn't stop advancing just because some of us can't or choose not to advance with it. That's just being unrealistic.

Look at cars: They don't stop developing new technologies and parts just because they can't be retro-fitted to my old 1978 Old Cutlass. They expect me to upgrade to a newer car if I want such modern features as air bags, anti-skid brakes, an on-board computer and such.

I either live with the old Cutlass and it's shortcomings, repairing what breaks as it breaks, or I bite the bullet and buy a newer car.

The same goes with old PC's. There's a wealth of older, albet unsupported software out there which was used by millions of people around the world when it was considered modern. Learn to use it, or upgrade so that you can take advantage of the newer technologies that are now available.

Why should I have to? Why can't programmers actually THINK about performance and elegant design? Is that too much to ask? This is the point many people on this thread are making. Chucking more and more RAM at a problem doesn't make it go away.

You're right; Throwing more ram at it doesn't make it go away.

But doing so is the cheapest and best option you have if you refuse to upgrade.

Or see my programming item above. Learn how to program modern applications on older hardware, and perhaps you'll make a small fortune.

My guess though is that those who aren't willing to spend $50-$60 on a major ram upgrade also aren't willing to pay you enough for your optimized software to make it worth your while though. And that's yet another reason why programmers are not focused on older, out-of-date systems: There's not a lot of money to be made by doing so, when compared to selling to those who can afford that $50 memory upgrade, or that $400 computer.

This whole debate is like a bit c*ck waving contest

"oh yeah! I run Slack on a 286 with 4 megs of ram"

Geez...

Linux always felt a little slow to me, but I'm running SuSE 9.1 on a 450 with 256 and it seems acceptable compared to my Windows 2003 server on a 600 with 300+ megs of ram.

windows on pre 1999 hardware looked crap
but you expect the same hardware to run either kde or gnome with all bells and whistles ?


ICEWM is what you should use on hardware like this, simple as that... it will look like windows, but will run faster...

also, cut out services you do not need to run

sort yourselves out !

NEWS FLASH: has X plus *nix apps (feature set vs feature set) ever used less ram then the windows, beos or apple DE's?

Users are guilty of bloated software because they are lazzy to learn command line and they like cosmetic features not needed.

Exemple ? I can use mv, cp or even mc to copy and transfer files in linux, but "joe" users prefer to use konqueror or nautilus, that are bloated because they are web browsers, preview files and images, etc. This is nice but it is not necessary. The same occured when Internet Explorer was merged into Windows. Windows 98 and subsequent windows are much more bloated.

Stop with this insanity of trying to make multiuse applications. A filemanager doesn't need to be also a browser and a browser doesn't need to be an email client. I say the same to Windows developers !

My Win XP Pro needs 40mb Ram after booting.
With mIRC and IE it gets near the 64mb mark.

FC2 would be unuseabel on the laptop i have, because with 192mb it is at it's limit. And XP runs like a charm on this 600MHz/192MB pc.

So, seems (almost) everyone sees some kind of problem. Out of the box, on all but the very most recent and expensive hardware, it seems that no 'noob' is going to get a happy Linux Desktop experience.

What is the solution?

How to motivate people who donate their hobby efforts for free to keep an eye upon being careful with resources as well as competing with Windows and OSX apps for featuresets?

General awareness and the praise of those who write neat stuff efficiently might help?

Someone somewhere famously described perfection as 'when there is nothing left to take out'. How to arrange for developers to 'take out' and improve new stuff instead of add new stuff? Awards for those who do to be an example for others to follow?

I'm a software developer and I've been using computers as far back as the Apple ][ days and I must agree, it seems current desktop environments are getting too bloated.

I'm a staunch supporter of Gnome (as can be seen in my previous posts), but I was so dismayed to see how slow its subsystems ran (menu, starting applications) on a Celeron 600 machine with 128MB RAM and an i810 video subsystem. I remember Windows 95 and X with Windowmaker running on a P2-400 with 128MB of RAM which was snappier than that. And from the base install of the Gnome DE on FC2, what functionality was it offering that wasn't in Win95 or WM? Not much. And yet it was molasses slow on a faster machine.

The point is, even if those two DEs are different, for what they do, they should be comparable in speed. In a stripped-down configuration, Gnome is still slow compared to those 2 previously mentioned DEs.

I haven't tried KDE, but this is not about Gnome vs. KDE. It's about Gnome vs. Gnome (or KDE vs. KDE).

As a software developer, I'm very well aware of the need to balance Speed, Size and Simplicity (the 3 axis). Speed, I'm afraid, is getting ignored. Perhaps it's difficult finding ways to speed things up, but one thing that shouldn't be denied is that for all that horsepower (Celeron 600 with 128MB RAM) and relative to what current DEs do, Speed has been left on the wayside.

has X plus *nix apps (feature set vs feature set) ever used less ram then the windows, beos or apple DE's?

X is not fat/slow. If you simply want to run X you can do so on a 286 with 4m ram.

Gnome (in the 1.x days) was wonderfully fast. Many times faster then its Windows counterpart. KDE 3.x started faster than KDE 2.x and has actually gotten even faster as time has gone on. Gnome 2.x is an embarrassment. Its slow, getting slower, AND reducing features.

brockers

Well, since this discussion is going nowhere, here are my top tips for today!

Find your init script, in Arch this is /etc/rc.sysinit. Comment out:

* /sbin/ldconfig
For some strange reason some distro guys think you need to 'update shared library links' every boot. Removing this presents no problems and cuts a few seconds off boot time. Maybe you should run this manually after an upgrade or something ;-)

In your shutdown script, on Arch /etc/rc.shutdown:

* /bin/sleep
After SIGTERM and SIGKILL is sent to all processes, I have to wait 3 and then 5 seconds. Really! I'm an impatient person. I don't /care/ if some lazy dangling process gets killed in the middle of shutting down. Any applications which were accessing data important to me have already been closed anyway.

From your list of servers, cut them down! (DAEMONS in /etc/rc.conf on Arch) This is of special interest to commercial distro users, such as Mandrake, Red Hat, SuSE, which normally come with quite a few useless servers enabled by default. Nobody I know needs cron on a desktop, or inetd/xinetd or any internet server for that matter (maybe sshd?). For example, I have only lisa and kdm.

Keep a copy of your init scripts just in case an update clobbers them.

Another thing: If you know how to compile and install your own kernel, grab the latest from kernel.org, configure with only the drivers you need, and compiled-in rather than modules. Now you can comment out the module loading code too (and 'updating module dependecies' /sbin/depmod). On Arch remove the kernel26 and kernel24 packages so that your custom kernel doesn't get overwritten on update!

Still though, this doesn't make KDE or GNOME any faster :-(

Good post Mr Banned, even though we do disagree. I can see your point though. However, I think you'd be spot on if the bloated apps really did NEED all the resources they consume. That'd be fine. I don't have a problem with resource-hungry apps when they're necessary - eg heavy-duty scientific work and games. They make use of resources for a reason.

However, gconfd taking up 12 megs (resident) is just sloppy programming. GNOME needing 128M to run comfortably is equally bad. It's possible to create integrated, smooth and friendly desktops in a 10th of that RAM, and the features and 'productivity' GNOME provides doesn't match it.

I can understand an office suite needing 64M. I can understand a browser using 32 (with lots of tabs/windows open). I can understand the desktop using 16 or possibly 24. But in the case of these apps, they're all using a lot more for no real gain. If GNOME used the 128M it needs with some incredible stuff, that'd be worth it, but it's barely any more advanced than, say, Win2k's desktop, and yet needs more.

That's what I'm getting at. Munching resources is fine when necessary, but it's bad when it's down to lazy coding.

It's not Linux or the distributions as such. The applications and/or the underlying libraries (X, KDE, Gnome etc) are what eats memory. I have on a 1/3 GB machine the following top ten memory users:

SIZE RSS SHARE COMMAND
61372 52M 21756 galeon-bin
39648 32M 15092 evolution
109M 27M 5160 X
17052 15M 9080 rhn-applet-gui
12148 11M 1372 mdmpd
12964 10M 3796 emacs
15760 10M 8624 nautilus
11488 9M 8328 gnome-panel
8764 7776 6652 gnome-session
7908 7124 6460 gkb-applet-2

Galeon: 52M for a browser? Where's all that memory gone?
Evolution: It's a mail client, is it caching every mail I read?
X: Here's the biggie. Why does X take over a hundred MB? I have a simple theme, 5 windows open, 1280x1024... is it buffering like a madman or leaking like a sieve? I do not know.

The rest are more reasonable, as they share most of their memory (probably GTK/Gnome libs), but the top three are serious offenders. Even so, the machine feels pretty snappy, except when I've done huge file reads and everything is swapped out.

But what's up with X, Galeon and Evolution?

-Lars

"Linux is not getting fat. Fedora, or any other distro with those requirements are. Keep the word Linux in context with the kernel and we are a lot less troubled. If you choose to run KDE/GNOME2 and then add GDM, and all the bells and whistles (gdesklets for example)... expect to use some ram up."

"Fedora has some steep requirements, and suddenly the "Linux platform is getting fat?"

As a desktop OS, Linux needs an easy-to-use interface. GNOME/KDE are those interfaces. The point is, campared to the competition's OS interfaces, Linux's suck. You can try to twist it how you want. But that is the truth. Linux is nothing (for the desktop) without GNOME/KDE. And GNOME/KDE are way too slow compared to Explorer or OS X.(Period)

NEWS FLASH: has X plus *nix apps (feature set vs feature set) ever used less ram then the windows, beos or apple DE's?

Nope, and never will be thanks to so many bloated layers that comprise the gui of almost all unixes.

brockers is pretty much right though, KDE got the architecture right and so has been able to concentrate on optimizations, while Gnome stumbles around, seemingly always having potential, but continues to be slow and never knows in what direction it wants to go.

Of course KDE is not without its problems too. The interface needs trimming(much easier than coming up with a whole new component technology for Gnome), and it relies on QT which is a decent toolkit, but because of licensing issues will always be a non-starter for many people.

Things on the linux desktop could've been so much better today if certain historical events hadn't happened, e.g. QT was a community project, Gnome had never been started, we had one unified desktop for Linux. Oh well, you people got your "choice".

How about Outcome 4: You're a foolish boy?
KDE and Gnome will keep getting bigger, get used to it. But they will still be skinnier than Windows.

"Outcome 1: KDE and Gnome can keep adding more features and bloat with little to no consideration of performance. Mono or maybe Java will be integrated into these DEs to make rapid development possible with a tremendous performance hit. People who don't need all the fluff will switch to a distribution which offers an alternative desktop environments as the default. Gnome and KDE will lose popularity.

Outcome 2: KDE and Gnome will reach a "feature plateau" where it is comparable with Longhorn and then buckle down and do some serious optimizing. With Novell backing Gnome and trying to replace Windows in a corporate setting, this is looking more and more likely.

Outcome 3: People get fed up with this "Linux thing" and BSD becomes the trendy OS du jour. FreeBSD is looking very tempting right now for my server. "

There has always been the argument of whether throwing more hardware at the issues is a correct way to handle the situations. Personally as an avid linux user with years of tech experience, I tend to not like the idea of throwing more hardware at a problem but find myself doing just that most of the time. This slackware machine I type on runs x-kde. It's super fast. But then again I through 2Gigs of quality ram at it, added a 3+ GHZ P4 and recompiled the kernel specifically for the hardware. HTT, Highmem, etc..

While I find that it's true that the coding is getting a bit messy and bloated in certain areas, I also find that Linux in general will run fine on the requirements mentioned minus X and glamour packages. I don't believe that anyone has mentioned that Linux was ready to compete with MicroSoft Windows as of this date, so I'm taking it that all is a work in progress.

My conclusion is, you'll need to learn Linux to use Linux regardless of code bloat. Generic kernels in every distro are compiled with bloat. That includes slackware. A faster kernel helps speed things up quite a bit. With all the hardware requirements out there, linux distibutors have no choice but to compile generic kernels as they do.

I just hope that this article of yours brings some sanity in open source developers and they understand the gravtity of this situation. I have been using linux for over two years now. But everytime i upgrade it becomes slower and slower and then my inclination towards windows increases. Good article though. Someone had to take the initiative and tell linux not to bloat.

1) Is your X server using an accelerated driver, or the framebuffer device, or even the generic vesa driver?

2) If you are using an accelerated driver, which one? Some provide more acceleration than others.

3) Are you using anti-aliased font rendering? If so, did you check to see whether your driver supports hardware acceleration of the RENDER extension?

4) Did your friend disable unnecessary background processes, or did he just do a "full" install so he didn't miss out on any goodies.

Finally, users don't want fast machines that do nothing, they want machines that perform some useful task. For years, the calls were for "usable desktop applications", tools such as xpaint, xfig, midnight commander and Lyx + latex being judged as being "unsuitable". Well, now we've got the kind of fully-featured applications that were being called for, but in order to create them _in reasonable amounts of time_, and with a reasonably high level of reliability, reusable component architectures (e.g. GTK, DCOP, Qt, etc) need to be used.

As the motto goes - "Good, fast, cheap - pick any two" (where "good" in this case means "efficient", "fast" means "available now rather than in 10 years time" and "cheap" still means low cost). The mass market appears to have decided that it likes "Cheap" and "Fast" - just like with PC hardware, in fact.

If you think there's a market for "Good" and "Fast", go right ahead and try to make some money doing it.

How come people say Linux as a kernel
and GNU/Linux as a OS ??? Now people want to
be like Richard Stallman ???

And since when people run Linux kernel alone
by itself???

Where are you getting the memory figures from? If they include disk cache, then it is a little unfair. On Linux disk caches accumulate until the memory starts running low. It is quite alright for it to then deallocate big blobs on unaccessed disk cache to make room. I can imaging a browser may have a lot of its internet cache in memory, which is quite reasonable if the memory is not being used for anything else.

Erm, I'm not trying to apologise for big apps and libraries. It really does disturb me that kdelibs is a few hundred megabytes. I can't imaging how it is possible to write so much code.

"Secondly, why should users have to install Slackware, Debian or Gentoo just to get adequate speed? Those distros are primarily targeted at experienced users -- the kind of people who know how to tweak for performance anyway. The distros geared towards newcomers don't pay any attention to speed, and it's giving a lot of people a very bad impression. Spend an hour or two browsing first-timer Linux forums on the Net; you'll be dismayed by the number of posts asking why it takes so long to boot, why it's slower to run, why it's always swapping. Especially when they've been told that Linux is better than Windows."

Doesn't that just contradict the original point that the article was supposed to make? Let me explain something to you...

REDHAT IS NOT LINUX. MANDRAKE IS NOT LINUX.

I post this hapily from my work PC, running Slackware 9.1 and Gnome 2.6, with a P3 450 and 256 MB of RAM without any problems... This is a 5 YEAR OLD PC! 5 YEARS. Are you guys living with cavemen and their 486s? Go run frickin' BeOS which died years ago. Experience its fascinating "modern feature set" that paved the way for today's "multimedia platforms".

It's ridiculous and inane to think that a desktop in 2004 should run like Windows 95. The feature-set of Gnome greatly surpasses it.

Gnome 2.6 is no more "laggy" than Windows 200 or XP, the platform that you complainers wish for it to "emulate". Get a clue, and stop being cheapskates with hardware that is half a decade old. You should be forced to run some unusable thing like Blackbox or the x11 window manager in your Purgatory for being such fools.

If you want to troll with more idiotic OSNews articles, then be prepared to get trolled replies. I don't know anyone takes you clowns seriously. Linux isn't getting "fat" unless you consider the ridiculous Fedora Core 2 to be "Linux".

People who used to point out the lightweight nature of Linux didn't seem to realize that it was not an inherent trait but just the current state of evolution. There is a natural progression in development. It is healthy to occasionally forget about optimization and concentrate on functionality, even if that means lower end machines are left behind. Once the functionality gains have been made a consolidation phase can begin to reduce the overhead and solidify a new baseline. We're approaching a time where such a phase should (and will) begin. Windows is further along in evolution, but over the longer term Linux and open source will win.

Recently, a friend of mine expressed an interest in running Linux on his machine. Sick and tired of endless spyware and viruses, he wanted a way out -- so I gave him a copy of Mandrake 10.0 Official. A couple of days later, he got back to me with the sad news I was prepared for: it's just too slow. His box, an 600 MHz 128MB RAM system, ran Windows XP happily, but with Mandrake it was considerably slower....

Now, I'm not saying that modern desktop distros should work on a 286 with 1MB of RAM, or anything like that. I'm just being realistic -- they should still run decently on hardware that's a mere three years old, like my friend's machine.

Ok so who does he think he's fooling? I have a similar spec machine and it was from 5 years ago, and it was a low end machine then. To top it all off, I run Linux on it, and it's not really that slow at all. I use WindowMaker with sylpheed, firefox, rox, nedit, mplayer, and some aterms. I could load XP on this machine if I wanted to but it would be pretty slow. Bootup takes about 5-10 seconds. The init scripts add about another 15-20 seconds and then I can login. It doesn't bother me much at all. In fact firefox and eclipse are the only things that take a long time to load. It takes firefox like 4 seconds to load, and it takes eclipse around 10 seconds.

Redhat and Mandrake are not.

I run Gentoo + kernel 2.6.5 + GNOME 2.6 + OpenOffice 1.1.1 + Firefox 0.8 + Gaim 0.77 *at the same time* on my PII366 laptop with 192MB ram with no problem. Some time I watch DivX movie in full screen on it.

I did tweak the kernel and /etc/init.d/* to be fast and I did use ReiserFS.

But I still agree with the author that open source coders need to focus more in memory usage and cpu time than adding features.

109M 27M 5160 X
X: Here's the biggie. Why does X take over a hundred MB? I have a simple theme, 5 windows open, 1280x1024... is it buffering like a madman or leaking like a sieve? I do not know.

109M is including your mapped gfxcard-memory!

"Ok so who does he think he's fooling? I have a similar spec machine and it was from 5 years ago, and it was a low end machine then. I use WindowMaker with sylpheed, firefox, rox, nedit, mplayer, and some aterms."

Er, did you even read the article? Those apps are NOT the solution for newcomers. None of the major desktop distros provide them as default software, and they're not as familiar and easy as the larger counterparts.

The writer stated that he knows these apps exist; however, light apps exist on any platform. He's talking about the WHOLE PACKAGE that newcomers see -- and the apps being pushed as alternatives to Windows. Newcomers don't want WMaker, nedit and Sylpheed. They put in a Fedora/SUSE/Mandrake disk and want to use the familiar and featureful apps that are provided by default.

And these apps are getting extremely slow and bloated. That was the point. You're basically saying people should go back to Windows 3.1. Why? Why shouldn't newcomers be able to just use a modern distro without it being slower than WinXP? Why should they have to change the familiar desktop and apps into lesser-known and less-featured ones just to get it running at a decent speed?

Maybe somebody already said that but although I use Linux since Mandrake 7.x I have to agree with writer.
I personally changed my old PIII 800/512MB PC last November with a brand new PIV 2.6HT /512MB RAM, same ATA 133 Disks, 7200 RPM.
Well, I was disappointed. While Win2k/WinXp gained considerably speed, Linux was not. Not RH9, nor FC1 were able to go even cose. I use many apps at a time but no swap so far.
Only these distributions are painfully SLOW. I am a user. I do not even care what a Kernel might be, although I have compiled many w/o speed improovments. In my comparisons with the tears in my eye I have to admit that windowz plays better and faster. My Brand new PC is sad. The Penguin is not running with much difference speed compared to the previous one. Maybe developers are losing control on their creature, becoming too complex.

- Bye,
Paolo

"X: Here's the biggie. Why does X take over a hundred MB?"

Actually, it doesn't. That's the video card RAM being mapped. X itself is quite small; I've run XFree86 4.2 on a 486 before, and it's usable. It's the huge desktops and apps that are sucking up the RAM though, as you rightly point out.

There's nothing stopping users migrating from Win98 from installing RedHat 7.3. It's monumentally faster than newer Linux distros. The only sacrifices you would make would be some internationalization that has been added to newer RedHat distros and there would be a few insecure packages that you'd have to rebuild by hand.

However, these minor security concerns are dwarfed by those encountered when upgrading to 2000/XP instead of RedHat 7.3.

The writer stated that he knows these apps exist; however, light apps exist on any platform. He's talking about the WHOLE PACKAGE that newcomers see -- and the apps being pushed as alternatives to Windows. Newcomers don't want WMaker, nedit and Sylpheed. They put in a Fedora/SUSE/Mandrake disk and want to use the familiar and featureful apps that are provided by default.

And these apps are getting extremely slow and bloated. That was the point. You're basically saying people should go back to Windows 3.1. Why? Why shouldn't newcomers be able to just use a modern distro without it being slower than WinXP? Why should they have to change the familiar desktop and apps into lesser-known and less-featured ones just to get it running at a decent speed?

WHAT?

That's just ignorance on your part. WindowMaker is more functional than the XP shell in itself. It may not be as pretty but it does a hell of a lot more. On that same note, nedit is more featureful than the software included with KDE or Gnome. Rox and Sylpheed do everything you need them to do. Most people don't need Evolution, especially when they are just using it for email. Rox is fast, lightweight, and incredibly easy to use. Mplayer is a standard video player, so I don't know how you can agrue against that.

I read the arcticle, it was just stupid. How can you say, "The Linux Platform is Getting Fat" when you really mean, "Fedora with Gnome is getting Fat". Don't name articles something completely different than what the subject matter is, it's just inviting a flamewar. KDE on Gentoo with a 650Mhz processor and 128MB of RAM is perfectly usable, I know from experience. Every machine I have is 700Mhz or less and they all run Linux without a hitch. Windows was a mess on those machines. Sure they were fast out of the box, with WinME/Win98, but a few months of use made them dog slow. I don't want to reinstall an operating system because it can't even manage itself for more than a few months.

always forget there are countries that buy all ur first-world old hardware ; here 128 MB / 500 mhz its still normal for offices and homesystems - plus people dont have too much time to spend learning a new operative system

Just see that G boy... typical Linux user... idiot that is..

LTSP turns old computers with only 32mb of ram into zippy boxes. It can run FC2, Mandrake 10. Suse 9.1 etc. How do they do it? heh, LTSP turns old boxes into thin-clients. Check it out.

I love people's solution to this problem. Upgrade! Buy more ram! I thought alot of the market linux was targeting were computers that used to run windows, that no longer meet the minimum requirements with companies caring about the bottom dollar, not having to upgrade their hardware being a big issues. I don't expect a third world country to "go out and buy more ram", and I think alot of the companies out there that are thinking of switching aren't looking to do so either.

Does ReiserFS offer good performance as a Linux root partition vs. Ext3? I may consider converting. I heard it was good for small files, which are plentiful in the Linux world! Might keep my video partition as FAT32 thought ;-)

Lock this thread now. Please.

I think the OSNews.com staff should reconsider using a subscription model to post on OSNews.com :S.

But anyways. I still find it hard to believe people keep bringing up the "Linux is not an OS" thing. Of course Linux ain't an OS, but for the newbie, it is! Accept that damn fact, not everyone is as educated in using PC's as we... well, as some of us are.

Unbelievable.

"KDE on Gentoo with a 650Mhz processor and 128MB of RAM is perfectly usable, I know from experience."

Ain't that the truth. The box my father uses is a 533MHz Celeron Emachines(Yikes!) with 192 MB RAM & Voodoo3 16MB video card. KDE 3.2.2 runs quite well, with all eye candy turned off and light themes.

I don't think GNU/Linux system's Desktop Enviroments ie Gnome/KDE are slow due to programmer negligence, instead they are slow by implementation.

Gnome to render a typical application, most than likely requires Xlib, GDK, GTK, gnome, pango, and maybe glib libraries. A KDE application for a similar task, Xlib, Qt, and KDE libs.

Windows programmers, typically do not deal with this many layers of abstraction.

The X server technology is more than a decade old, hopefully freedesktop, with their new xservers and authority will cut down on these multiple layers of abstraction. With a newer cleaner Xlib design.

There was a time when my 40MB Compaq LTE5150 laptop would run RH 5.x or 6.x. I had 1.2GB disk and I could just pop the CD into the thing after booting from a floppy and fire up the install and I would have a decent Linux box ready to go. Oh, I did have the usual problems with X because it didn't auto config my Compaq display correctly, but other than that it worked.

I recently tried to load one of the more modern RH ( 8.0 ). First, I couldn't easily select a workstation install because once it selected all the default packages my disk was no longer big enough after configuring root and swap! I had 800MB of /usr space and it wasn't enough. Secind, once I trimmed down the installation and installed it, 40MB was just not enough. Hell, the X server was 38MB! So I can't use Linux on my old laptop anymore unless I revert to an old version distro or run some stripped down distro.

I think the existing distro companies are in trouble because of this. They obviously don't consider this an important aspect to their survival. I think its an opportunity for all the lean distros to get out there and provide a solution.

I agree -- this thread should be locked....way too many replies and way too much crap not to lock it.

Unfortunately, this article is not a troll, as some people seem to suggest. On my machine, an Athlon XP 1700+ with 256 MB RAM, KDE feels too little responsive quite often and starting OpenOffice also takes several seconds which is enough to make it feel "slow". And I'm running Slackware here. I have also done some tweaking in order to improve speed. I think it is about time that someone tried to unify all the different toolkits in order to create just one that could be used by _most_ desktop users and that all applications would switch to it eventually. I think it is a necessity in order to market "Linux" to the masses. Similarly to what several people wrote, I have quite often had trouble trying to convince people to try out Linux, after they saw how sluggish it seemed compared to windows. Also note, that places which would be really good for establishing a linux stronghold, such as schools or charities often have and use obsolete hardware - which won't run any modern Linux DE and be usable. I think improving performance is a technical necessity for linux nowadays. Even longhorn is going to have a "legacy" mode without all the bells and whistles allowing it to run on reasonable hardware. The guys at Microsoft do not want to commit suicide after all. Hope the FOSS movement doesn't either.

I have an old Dell laptop (233 P2 with 140 RAM) running windows XP and it runs just fine if you turn off the theme manager. I can run Winamp, Office, Firefox and Thunderbird all at once without a problem.

>I don't believe all what you say, not one bit. I use XP >on a 256 MB machine as well as many others on an Athlon->XP 1.3 GHz and it runs great. Either your installation is >hosed, or you blatantly lie.

>Typical response of the astroturfer. "You must be doing >something wrong." It's not Windows, it the user. Your >other choice is just downright insulting. If you can't >defend the product, attack the consumer. The system is as >described, it is properly installed, and I don't >blatantly lie.

I agree with the earlier poster though I'll be more blunt, you're a linux lier. We run Windows XP on 256MB without any issues. Have done since it came out.

@Brian.

"I love people's solution to this problem. Upgrade! Buy more ram! I thought alot of the market linux was targeting were computers that used to run windows, that no longer meet the minimum requirements with companies caring about the bottom dollar, not having to upgrade their hardware being a big issues. I don't expect a third world country to "go out and buy more ram", and I think alot of the companies out there that are thinking of switching aren't looking to do so either."

It is an option Brian, as well as learning to use Linux. Linux is designed to use memory. Some forget this. Even with 2Gigs of Ram on a machine you will find that Linux manages to use a majority of it in one fashion or another. Especially when loading multiple large apps. The more Ram you have, the merrier with Linux.

Some of the problems people have with this stem from their knowledge of the Windows operating system. Where an over abundance of Ram in was not necessarily a good thing.

I've converted this machine to a dual boot slack/winxp pro machine to test the responsiveness of WinXP and Linux with an above average amount of memory.

Seriously I do not believe that WinXP Pro is utilizing and managing the memory as it should and I fail to see true responsiveness gains from XP due to increased ram. On the other hand, with Linux I can say that I've seen excellent gain in both responsiveness and speed with an above average amount of RAM. Therefor, yes. Purchasing more ram for use with linux (this is kernel 2.6.6) shows a valuable upgrade and performance gain while Windows XP Pro does not on the same hardware. Which makes for a viable option if the funds are there.

The notion that Linux was designed to run on specific lower quality hardware, or a machine with a lower amount of ram is not accurate. Linux is moving. It's not stagnant. Of course Linux as it progresses will use more memory. That is inevitable as it is with any software on the planet.

I'm in no way saying that you need 2Gigs of Ram to run the linux kernel. But some distro's like Fedora may like it. Most machines I have have 512M or less and do well for the most part. But there are advantages with Linux and an increased amount of ram with the increaseingly larger package sizes. This requires a kernel recompile as it would for HTT etc....

I prefer the way Linux manages memory and has a "I'll use it if you give it to me" approach over my windows eXperiences.

These are just my observations.

Yes, ReiserFS is fast. It uses B+ Search Tree to manage files. Check this out for comparison:

http://www.namesys.com/benchmarks.html

Windows 2000/XP, in my experience, needs at least 256MB to
be really usable. I had to use a Win2000 machine with only
128MB of RAM, and the disk spent over half the time
thrashing while I tried to get some work done.
I finally complained to our workstation support, and
he was able to scrounge up 256MB more RAM, so now at
384MB the machine has crossed into the realm of "useful"
versus "throw out the window frustrating"

I built a WinXP box (Athlon 2000+) for my wife's
grandmother with 32MB onboard video and 256MB of main RAM.
I wish I'd sprung for 512MB, because I find this machine
spends most of its time swapping as well, but that's when
I'm using it - I tend to task switch a lot, and I spend a lot of time waiting for my new window to move from back
to front, and there are often inexplicable delays where
nothing seems to be happening.

My main home system and my work laptop run WinXP,
both ar P4 systems with 512MB of RAM, and both are
mostly responsive enough such that multitasking is
easy. I run WinXP on the laptop because I have to.
At home the WinXP system also boots Gentoo Linux using
kernel 2.6.6, and for the most part it runs KDE 3.2.x
for the benefit of my wife (I like XFCE4 better).

Apples to apples on the same machine, WinXP is somewhat more
responsive on application startup than Linux, but task
switching is more consistently responsive on Linux,
especially running kernel 2.6 versus 2.4.

My wife is perfectly happy using Linux with KDE
for her e-mail and word processing, though she
probably wishes OpenOffice started up faster.
I like some of the eye candy of KDE, but I tend
to gravitate towards XFCE4 because I'm more of a CLI type.

My other home machine is a PII 300Mhz with 288MB of RAM.
It exclusively boots Gentoo Linux with kernel 2.6. It
has KDE installed, which runs just fine, but once
again I prefer XFCE4 because of its light weight.

I tend to run shell based apps on the PII box, because my
wife is usually using the other machine, but when I need
something with a GUI like Opera or Mozilla, I tend to
ssh into the faster machine to run those apps. The PII
can run these apps just fine, I just tend to work faster
than the PII can react.

I also installed Gentoo with kernel 2.6 on my wife's
grandmother's old Compaq PII 233Mhz with about 128MB
of RAM. The system was usable, though
slow to load apps (due to _very_ slow hard drive).
If my wife's grandmother did not use AOL on dial up,
I would have saved her the $1000 it cost to build her new system and simply given her this system.

Because I have invested myself in learning how to install
Gentoo Linux, I have no need for the more newbie friendly
distros, even though I have installed them several times
to see if any can pull me away from Gentoo, but none ever
have been able to. I also keep a Knoppix 3.4 CD handy
in case of emergencies. If Gentoo didn't exist, I would
use Knoppix in a heartbeat.

The beauty of Linux is that it *can* be configured to run
on any hardware, but you have to know what you are doing.
The less people know what they are doing, the more
bloatware needs to be included to cater to their skill set.
Windows 2000/XP and the commercial distros fall into
the category of bloatware, currently.

The speed improvements in KDE 3.2 and the kernel 2.6
work that seems to be going on to address system responsiveness tell me that this is not going to be a
problem for the commercial distros for long.
Longhorn is another story.

I will be setting up my dad's old 200 pentium machine... 3 gig hd, 16 meg vid ati card... it has 32 meg ram. and it has 64 now, but on purpose i am trying to downgrade it. I want to make it a project box to see how to make it perform speedy. I will probably compile everything myself in gentoo. I will use twm, and only a very few basic apps. I will be exploring options that are the slimmest I can find. If anyone has ideas, please feel free to email me at xeys_00@yahoo.com. The idea is to have a window manager, 2.6 kernel, sound working(awe32), office suite, and a few other things.

It really had to be said, this is so true! WHat ever happend to tiny apps? Rember all of those great DOS games like Descent II and Warcraft? I've seen games with similar graphics run in SDL with a horrible frame rate on brand new machines, while the DOS counterparts flew on 486s.

The apps will run on that system, but they will be intolerably laggy. Compilation alone will take about 1-2 weeks just to complete.

You might be better off focusing your energies elsewhere.

To defend KDE:
I don't think I read a single review of KDE 3.2 that didn't say it felt faster than KDE 3.1. What do you want from them? To make it unbelievably fast and still provide a full desktop that even includes a sound mixer?!
You don't need 128MB of RAM. I ran (I've since bought more memory at the unbelievably low price of $15) a laptop with 64MB of RAM, 8 was shared to video. Yes, I did run floxbox instead of gnome or KDE, and something like xfce would have worked well too while being more userfriendly.I could work in abiword while browsing the net in firebird and talking on Gaim. Yes, it'd use 80MB of swap but it wasn't all that slow. It felt like a machine that was a bit short on memory, I also used it as a Win98 machine and it was certainly better off this way.
I run a PII 350 with 256MB of RAM. I must say that's plenty of RAM as the machine never seems to be low (I of course don't do graphics manipulation on it). Once again, I have extensive experience with the same machine on Win98, although it was one abused install, and it's much better now: It doesn't fill up the hard disk with temporary internet files.

You really can't complain about the memory use issue compared to XP as XP is 3 years old. Things will slowly use more and more memory, and I for one don't see it as individual apps doing it as much as it is users wanting to do more at once.
Your buddy could speed things up a lot by simply using konqueror over mozilla. Mozilla is a memory hog, I'll agree on that one. KDE sucks up a lot of memory, but it's tradeoff is that it's a complete environment that looks very nice by default. I would also hope that in the KDE setup he turned off all the fancy animations, like XP would have done for him.


I'm all about clean code, but I'm not seeing the overall problem you are. Things are going to use more and more resources, that's life. Linux can't run well on a 386 forever now can it? And 128MB of RAM was not a proper amount to install on a machine in 2000, and it's still too little today. Maybe you should blame computer distributers for being cheap on RAM? My store does it too, but I always get customers to upgrade their memory. It's important to have more than 128MB of RAM with Windows XP because it's ungodly slow with that amount of RAM. You expect a new machine to feel quick....

I'm admin for an school and I have for several years work towards linux at school. One off the arguments was longer lifespan of the computers. No need for upgrading the hardware, stable, free of charge. This year I get an "Go" from the managment and this spring we installed fedora with xfce. The result ? All the students say the same thing. "It so slooooow". And it is. Over the summer we probably fix it with an other distro, byt my students can't fix it on their home computer. Its a shame.

I cannot believe "His box, an 600 MHz 128MB RAM system, ran Windows XP happily, " : )

And I think FC2 should be optimized for 586,if not 686

...I get an "Go" from the managment and this spring we installed fedora with xfce. The result ? All the students say the same thing. "It so slooooow".

Didn't you even test the distro you were using on the computers before recommending it? Stay away from Fedora, please ;-) If you know how, knock up your own distro or modify one like Arch, Slackware, Debian, etc. What spec are the computers?

byt my students can't fix it on their home computer

That is a problem. Have your recommended that students install a certain distro at home? They might be better off sticking with Windows and give them Win32 ports of the apps they use. Or you could look around for less mainstream distros, there are a few around that work a lot better than the usual commerical dogfood.

Not really. If you buy a machine that is ten year old technology, use a ten year old OS with it, like Win95. That's what was meant to run on it.

FC2, XP and other modern OSs and distros have gained more features (like image previewing in file managers, XML file formats, WYSIWYG word processing/web design, high resolution 32bit displays and large-scale image editing, network transparent file access, accessibility tools, internationalisation support, etc.). We as people want these things ("What, my OS only speaks three languages, so my children can't understand it?", "I'm visually impaired, and there aren't any tools to help me use a computer?") and we've got them in modern systems.

These things are important and worthwhile. FC2 and others have added these features, and you can't expect hardware to support every feature that comes out, perpetually, without an upgrade.

So, in short, either upgrade the hardware, if you want the features, or be satisfied with the software as you are apparently satisfied with the hardware and stick with the OS that you've got.

"...an 600 MHz 128MB RAM system, ran Windows XP happily." That's complete bullshit and if the author had used Windows XP with that configuration then they'd know that. I've used Pentium 4s with 256MB RAM and had them crawling with a few IE (cringe) windows open and some office software going. If you believe this article then that must be a fluke because Microsoft's newest products are so amazing efficient.

It's certainly true that KDE and Gnome have gotten quite a bit bigger in recent years but Windows XP is freaking massive itself, even when it's just booted up without anything running. I'd also like to point out that my Pentium 3 at home which runs Gentoo starts up in noticeably less time than ANY machine I've seen running Windows XP (new or otherwise).

All I can tell from this article is that the author must be a Linux hobbyist at best. I've been using Linux for 5 years as well and somehow I can get a nice quick Linux setup with X going on my old P166 Thinkpad with 64MB RAM and they couldn't seem to figure out a decent setup for a 600 MHz PII/PIII with 128MB RAM. Maybe the problem is somehow Mandrake or Fedora...or maybe I'm just magical.

Maybe if so many people have these horrible performance issues that the author speaks of then they should just stick with Windows. I'll happily buy their old hardware for cheap and create more of my "magically" productive Linux boxes. Oh well, that enough of my opinions; hey, maybe I should write an editiorial too...

Well all im going to say is i think you should not be installing an up-to-date distro like fedora and fedora 2 on older systems (1+ year), if the hardware is older stuff then use a lighter distro or even an earlier version of the same distro, eg 300MHz with 64meg of ram would run fine on debian woody or redhat 7

my 2p

I definitly agree with the article when I first started using Linux it was great because it didn't have demanding requirments and definitly made my system feel faster than Windows. As time went on this became less and less the case. At this point they almost feel the same running on identical hardware. It seems as though to me Apple has done the best job keeping system requirments low as OS X runs great even on old hardware.

Right now Linux's problem is deffinitly the GUI. Hopefully it will become less of a hog.

"That's complete bullshit"

I suggest you read all of the comments (yeah, it might take some time now!). There are LOADS of messages from people who agree with the article. Your experience may be different, but do read the comments and you'll be surprised. Many, many people have found the increasing bloat to be intolerable, and WinXP nicer on such hardware.

Hey, it sucks that so many people are unhappy, but it's a fact we have to face if Linux is going to become more popular.

The linux kernel + some basic libraries + bash runs quite happily on 486 with 8mb ram ... even with modern distros.

What might cause the slowness and bloat: are there any unnecessary daemons (apache, mysql, sshd, exim ... etc ...) installed by default with mandrake? They might eat some RAM

Also, KDE or Gnome eats a lot of memory, if you want faster response under X, switch to lighter windowmanager (I personally use Blackbox, it eats about 2MB of RAM and is really fast even on 486 with 24 mb of ram - unless I run mozilla or similar bloated application of course). On newer ('bout 500 mhz or so) PC's start of X server and blackbox is about 2 second. Starting KDE takes at leas half a minute or minute.

So linux applications are the problem, not linux and you can choose to use less memory hungry ones (use blackbox, windowmaker, fwvm ..., instead of KDE or gnome, etc ...) ... or if you don't want, just buy extra memory, it's not so expensive

Is there going to be threading on commenting? There is no logical reason why there should be 320 comments spread over 25 some pages. How am I supposed to reply to a comment someone made 310 comments ago, without it getting lost in the shuffle? I am not even bothering to click into 31-45 comments, I am already tired of trying to find replies to me. Let alone the issue of seeing who is actually replying to ME.

This isn't a flame, this is a rationalization of the status of the commenting here. You cannot have this many comments totally unorganized and expect anyone to benefit from debate.

This is the BEST osnews article I read this year. I agree with the author 100%. What the hell is happening. I remember my Pentium 166 running KDE fine back in 1996. Now I have a 3200+ Athlon system, and gnome terminal eating up my CPU power.

Spend hours tweaking and hacking. Oh come on, linux can be what you want if you spend hours tweaking and hacking. Just spend a week or two downloading & compiling the apps. you want. KDE/Gnome needs all that, but you can run a distro on a 200 Mhrtz 64 meg of ram system.

Linux is fast on old pc's , I run Debian on a 8 year old p1 166mhz. I use it for chatting, email, browsing.
I don't feel any need to use a faster pc for those things.

It just depends on using the software that is designed to be fast (doh). There's Skipstone/backarrow/dillo to browse , sylpheed(/claws) for email, irssi/xchat for irc, abiword, gnumeric, scite , ted, etc.
The only weak point is the browser. Although Skipstone/Backarrow are good enough for normal users, they are not widely available as packages.

The guy said in his article he wouldn't let his friend use fluxbox. I wonder why as it's really easy to use.
And there's always XFCE, that one is enormously easy for newbies , and fast in comparison too Gnome/KDE.


GNU/Linux is about choice, there's no one solution for everything. The author of the article doesn't understand that.

That M$ has discovered the way to ruin linux by making their programmers develop linux applications to consume cpu/ram/hd like the M$ apps do? I think so!

It's free software, if you're that interested in its performance learn to program and make some contributions (and see how good your code is). And if it's not good enough try to buy something that's better (hey, why pay $50 for more memory when you can get the super-de-duper Windows XP for $250?!)

And for the last time, when you run top, and X appears at the top of the list, you need to subtract the amount of graphics memory you have from the amount X reports to get the amount of main memory X is using. And if you don't know what that means don't even think of quoting "top" in a message.

And if I see one more person on these forums use the word "bloat" again I'm going to heave this PC in front of me through the window.

Seriously, get a clue. Well done Eugenia on bringing in a nice big audience of sub-slashdot adolescents. Sure who cares about the quality of the site when you can get a lot of hits.

"Also, KDE or Gnome eats a lot of memory, if you want faster response under X, switch to lighter windowmanager (I personally use Blackbox, it eats about 2MB of RAM and is really fast even on 486 with 24 mb of ram - unless I run mozilla or similar bloated application of course). On newer ('bout 500 mhz or so) PC's start of X server and blackbox is about 2 second. Starting KDE takes at leas half a minute or minute."

Most sensible post so far. Absolutely right. That's the beauty of open source, is you can change GUIs, you are not restricted to using Gnome or KDE. You can switch a lightweight window manager, which is something you can't do with Windows. You are stuck with what they give you. There will be no mixing and matching, and only a little tweaking. People still seem to have trouble grasping the real value of Open Source is in its versatility. If you know how, you can damn near anything with it. With closed source, you only get to do what they let you.

Linux command line great stuff. Linux for a server great stuff. Linux for the every day guy not such great stuff. People have a hard enough time with Windows. As far as resposivness, drop X and your problems are solved. There needs to be a ground up graphics system developed to replace X kinda like the Y window system or Aqua on MAC. One common toolkit give and one common desktop to give the industry something common to work off of.

Honestly, I agree with everything the author said and think that it's about time someone actually said it. Thank you.

Quote:
Well with all this disscussion about rewriting gnome in java or c# to make it a more devl-friendly platform, its definatly going to get a performance hit.


The problem is not Java or C# (with JIT you loose little (~10%) over C code and could get an actual improvement if the JITers start doing a better job of optimizing for the current processor; something C compilation can not do for binary distributed code -- what normal end-users need). The problem is really poorely architected code (initially or not refactored often enough) and just plain sloppy code. You can easily achieve several hundred percent improvement with well written code and carefully selected algorithm.

Actually, OS-9/6809 still lives, 20+ years on. The Color Computer (and clones) still has users and an annual conference, the Nth Annual "Last" Chicago CoCoFest, where N == 11 in 2002. A group of Canadian programmers rewrote OS-9/6809 Level II for the CoCo 3 (w/ address translation circuitry) for efficiency, and to take advantage of the native mode of the Hitachi 6309. Today's serious CoCo users now typically have replaced the 68B09E in the CoCo 3 with an Hitachi 63B09E and run the rewrite, called "NitrOS9." The combination is fast. Very fast. Very very fast. Especially considering it runs on an 8-bit CPU! Observers are usually astonished, as the benefit of proper (ie, cleanly engineered) operating system design is not widely known, and certainly not widely appreciated, among users of the commercially dominant operating systems (eg, Windows and OSX versions of the MacOS).

Well I am not going to wade through the 300+ comments but I did check /. which seems to basically be mirroring most of it. (Note threaded discussions are much easier to follow.)

What I want to argue is it is not the "Linux Platform" that is getting fat, it is the "Linux Desktop Platform" that is getting fat.

You can run a console based server with a very low amount of RAM and make use of it. As an example I have a firewall/bridge running a 2.6 kernel right now and free reports 48MB used, 6MB as buffer, 29MB as cache, and only 12MB active. Now I grant you it is not doing much right now but it is a baseline.

As far as GUI interfaces Gnome and KDE are both no longer targeted towards older platforms, point made. But there are other choices that are available. My personal choice is Slack running FVWM2 with a heavily customized set of menus. Yes, I am aware that FVWM is a window manager not a desktop so they are not directly comparable. But not everyone needs a desktop (thus the heavily customized menus).

If you prefer Windows, use it. Linux is not in competition with MS, it is an alternative. Both sides have their zealots but I look at it as "use what gets the job done for you." Not "use what others tell you will get the job done." There is room in the world for both MS and Linux, and I don't think either are going away any time soon.

I mostly agree with this "rant". Footprint seems to be ignored by many in the OSS community, but I was pleased to see Mozilla & Opera pushing for less intensive implementations of a web forms upgrade. Mozilla Gecko was originally supposed to be very small and fast. They seemed to have lost sight of that goal for a while, but Firefox is an improvement for which I'm grateful. A modern, standards-compliant browser most likely will never be thought of as small or light...

I'm a longtime Linux/Gnome user. I used Redhat 4.2 through 6 on an old 200MHz Pentium with 96M memory and was mostly happy with the performance. I now run Gentoo on a Athlon XP 2100+ machine with 1.5G memory, but don't see a performance increase in proportion to the added horsepower.

What really scares me, though, is the comments from the Gnome community about switching their development language to something like C# or Java. You think Gnome performance is poor now? Just wait. I understand that many developers are more skilled in these modern languages than in C, especially given that a lot of OSS contributors are college students. But the thought running desktop a desktop written in Java makes me shudder (even though I make my living developing in Java).

I've been saying that Fedora and Mandrake are bloated for a while now. You think that just because you've posted an article about it that the fanboys will pay attention now?

Good luck.

At work I have to use Windows XP, but have Debian Unstable installed in VMWare and have VMWare running 24/7. I have many of the same applications running in both, OpenOffice, FireFox, Opera, Thunderbird, gaim, gimp, etc... I find Windows to feel QUITE PRIMITIVE compared to KDE 3.2!! KDE has a LOT of nice touches that Windows doesn't. Bloat? Maybe, but I feel much more productive with the ability to customize many more keystrokes, gestures, etc, etc. Many of those small touches make a huge difference in my user experience. I have almost all eye candy turned off in both OSes, though I have more turned on in KDE than in Windows.

That said, on this computer w/ a 3.0 GHz processor, 2 GB ram, WinXP as host and Debian unstable as guest (with 512 MB ram allocated) I started and ran each of the applications listed above, timing how long it took from clicking the shortcut until the application was stable and ready to use. In every instance I got nearly the EXACT SAME results in both OSes, even though Linux was at a distadvantage due to having 1 GB less RAM and running in a Virtual Machine. In some cases Linux was .5 second faster, and in some cases Windows, even with the same app.

Considering how much MORE eye candy KDE has, as well as those numerous "nice touches", I'd say that KDE is QUITE impressive.

The Linux kernel and core utilities (GNU/Linux) is still small, fast and powerful and is getting more so with time. XFree86 (and derivatives) is a monster software suite but it has made standard desktop systems possible. Recent moves toward XML style config files, CORBA style object management, scalable vector graphic images, chrooting everything and application/menu hierarchies exceeding 10 levels iserve slow everything thing down. All this trash is I/O bound making extra memory and cpu speed a waste of money.

I think we need to distinguis between Linux the lean, mean kernel and the fat, lazy applications that sit on top of it.

Commerical groups are interested in sales not software design. Open source project are the opposite. We must leave room for both groups to co-exist but perhaps not in the same room and certainly not on the same computers.

>Now that X is being developed again things might improve,
Yeah, until the decide to intergrate the cool stuff in the freedesktop.org server(giving transparnecy and the like..) vooom.. X uses twice as much memory. But it doesn't seem to consern anyone if you look at the mailinglists

I am not a Linux geek - I am a basic user of the platform for some fairly basic needs.

I had used Linux a couple of years back in a large scale trial of deploying used hardware in schools in India. The advantage that Linux had over Windows was that we could step up the performance of computers with older hardware. It was a very important consideration.

If it is indeed true that Linux's hardware requirements are going up to match Windows' (and there seems to be a general agreement on that), Linux is loosing an important raison d'etre in minds of people like me.

We want software that does not continuously place increasing demand on hardware - not only from an economic angle but also from the perspective of additional effort needed.

Listen guys! we need an OS that is usable, dependable, cost effective and hassle-free. If Linux cannot fulfil these needs, we will go else where, even to Microsoft.

i think the problem is that people are using the latest versions of gnome and kde on their old machines.
a PII 400MHz with 128MB RAM will run win98 and win2k fine, but winXP will be noticably slow. itll also run KDE<3.2 and gnome<2.4 (i dont use either, so i dont know what older version would be more suitable ^_^;;)

when you install windows, you dont automatically get XP and all its crappy bloat unless its an XP disc. when you install a linux distro, you get the newest (or close to) version of all this software.
you wouldnt install winXP on a P75, so why would you install KDE 3.2?
if you have a slow box and you keep it updated via apt or emerge, it will be slower after a year, simply because we live on the bleeding edge (compared to windows) of software development.

everyone wants the latest version. thats how MS gets businesses to buy WinXP even though they have Win2k throughout their office. linux software isnt getting too fat, people are just mismatching versions with their hardware.

Even if there are certain machine expectations for hardware, there is no excuse for writing efficient code. As open source goes, we can look at code and see what parts of it are inefficient and write the author of the software, or modify it ourselves and publish it. Also, we should appreciate the fact that a multitude of projects even exist.

It just keeps getting slower and slower. If I could, I'd go back in time to 1997 and throw Miguel into the path of a speeding bus.

I totally agree with the author. I use all three: linux, windows and OS X. Even by ditching Gnome/KDE for a light WM, you still run into the performance bottleneck with Openoffice and Mozilla. File compatibility with MS Office is necessary and Openoffice does a pretty good job with that, however it is a DOG to run. On my iBook G4 (800 MHz) Openoffice takes so long to open that I get pissed off while I'm waiting. I deleted it and use MS Office solely because it is much more responsive.

This pendulum swinging from one side to the other isn't getting anyone anywhere. "You have to look at this and that." "Oh, Windows takes up XXXX of resources." Everything he says is totally true - with the tools, desktops and hardware that he was trying to use.

No other general-purpose OS in existence has such high requirements. Linux is getting very fat.

Windows XP does need 256 MB if you want to get anything meaningful done and get it to run at a nice performance level.

His box, an 600 MHz 128MB RAM system, ran Windows XP happily, but with Mandrake it was considerably slower.

With Mandrake, I totally agree that he would have found it terrible with what he was using. Considering he was using GTK-using applications in Mozilla (cross-platform toolkit) and Evolution - no shock there really. And of course, we all know that Open Office is functionally good but it is an absolute dog to run. It wouldn't be so bad if it was a dog when you had many applications already open, but it isn't. It is slow to start-up whatever environment you put it in. Hopefully OO 2 will be better, because it is a big enough project to focus on getting that right.

I don't know why he didn't just use KDE applications to be honest, especially for web browsing and e-mail. They're all there, and that's what Konqueror and Kontact are there for.

If he wanted a fast desktop with pretty good hardware requirements he should have just used a 100% KDE desktop. I've ran KDE 3.1 and above on a few of P300s with 128 MB and it ran great. I'm not just talking about starting the thing up, which is how Windows requirements are calculated. I'm talking about running seven or eight applications all the time - e-mail, browsers, music etc. I think the situation has got even better for KDE 3.2.

Once you start using a lot of GTK-using applications, not just one or two, your desktop really grinds to a halt. I'm not really that surprised he found Gnome and Mozilla on Linux slow at all. I used Evolution for two and a half years prior to switching to Kontact. Features-wise it is a great application, but you could never run it and other GTK apps on a system with anything less than 256 MB of RAM. Using DDR instead of old SDRAM made a huge difference to the performance of GTK applications, whereas it made a moderate, but noticeable, difference to Windows and KDE as you might expect.

He's right and wrong. You could run NT4 or 98 in a business with 64 MB at all. I know, I've ran that amount of RAM and worked 9 - 5 with both, and that was five or siz plus years ago. Linux desktops should focus on working extremely well within the limits of 128 - 256 MB, and by that I don't mean that being the minimum requirements. KDE has proved that that is possible. You can get a pretty reasonable desktop in those limits, and it is not entirely unfeasible for companies to upgrade the memory in their desktops. In terms of eye candy there are is a lot of 3D hardware, most of it on board, that has never been used on a business desktop.

Listen guys! we need an OS that is usable (Depending on your choice of desktop, check), dependable (Check), cost effective (Check) and hassle-free (Maybe). If Linux cannot fulfil these needs, we will go else where, even to Microsoft. (If you want to run a current Gnome or KDE on older systems and can not get the performance you want I guess you will be better off in Windows, your choice. If (big if) you have the experience in running a large scale Linux deployment and prefer it, I would argue buying more memory for the systems and running your prefered Linux distro would be more cost effective and easier on maintenance then purchasing licenses for Windows.)

You could run NT4 or 98 in a business with 64 MB at all. I know

Above should read 'couldn't'. I have enough of typing today....

I can totally run mspaint.exe and Solitaire at the SAME TIME with only 128MB RAM and 384MB of swap committed. As long as I don't win at Solitaire, the thing is ROCK SOLID.

If you can get it to run on 300Mhz and 128 mb, how much faster will it run on 3Ghz and 1 GB?

I feel that legacy toolkits such as gtk1, fox and motif are to blame for the bloat. When you load up one these applications not only do they take up extra memory due the different libraries, they look ugly and unconsistant with the rest of your apps.

There are still a few applicatiosn using them such as xmms and gnucash. Major distros such as Fedora, Mandrake, Debian need to dump applications using these from their official sources and put the pressure on legacy applications to upgrade to gtk2.

When you are running 100% gtk2 applications in conjuction with XFCE, it is really fast and a there is lot less memory usage. The next step would be to re-write KDE in GTK, but that would probably be too much to ask than to simply not to use KDE applications.

The author proposes we go back to the dark age of software use and development:

* Small and efficient as possible code almost always means less portable which means software can cost more

* Small and efficient as possible code often takes a lot longer and is usually harder to debug than something written quickly, with basic efficiency, and generically

* Current software development and even hardware development is centered around the idea that the programmer should not have to micormanage memory or other resources, the base operating system or hardware should take care of it (a good example of this is how C# and Java pretty much do away with a programmer being directly involved with almost all memory allocation and deallocation)

* Software can be a lot smaller "footprint" wise, if we decide to all go back to using ASCII, having no internationalization support, and pretending everyone speaks english and uses a single measurement system. Support for multiple languages, translations, localizations, etc. all increase a program's "footprint". This is a huge source of "bloat" if you look at it that way in many applications.

* The "Linux Platform" (as the author sees it) could be a lot faster in many cases if hardware manufacturers were open about their hardware specifications. There are many advanced hardware acceleration features and bits of functionality that Linux users are forced to do without because their manufacturers refuse to provide that information. This is no one's fault but he manufacturer's.

Now to be fair, I do agree that it seemed like programmers used to be able to do a lot more with a lot less. But, let's put things in perspective. I think while many programmers that started programming in Assembly Language or plain C that now use a high level language like Java, C#, Python, Perl, C++, etc. may have fond memories of lower level language efficiencies and control, but very few of them miss the headaches and the large amounts of time wasted trying to debug or write in a low level language.

The author needs to step back and realize that hardware is more powerful because users always want more, and market realities demand that software comes to market faster and faster. To go back to the days of super efficient software would require many sacrifices, time being the main one, and time is money in this modern age.

The real solution to this problem lies within changing the expectations in the market, and I don't see that happening...

I've noticed it seems to be much easier to get properly architected, fully functional software to run fast than it is to get fast software to be properly architected and fully functional. Build it right first and trim it down after. The dekstop focus of Linux based software is new.
Give them time.

I'm verry impressed with Firefox. I think a lot of good work has gone into making it smaller. It would be nice to see similar work go into gnome, X, OpenOffice, and lots of other little Linux based apps that make up the desktop. It would be nice, but if it doesn't happen in a few years, it won't be an issue anymore. It would be nice if it happened. Now that they have things working rather well on the Desktop it might be a good idea to go back and spend a little time trimming things a little.

I'm very impressed with the results in Fedora Core 2 so far. I'm running it on 2 machines with 1gb and 512 mb of ram so the bloat doesn't bother me. It is a good idea to make Linux distributions work well on old hardware. I'm ok with them making it work well first and focus on the old hardware second.

http://www.amdzone.com/modules.php?op=modload&name=Sections&file=in...

I was at a local community college, and we were using these "ancient" machines. K6-2 ~400mhz systems. They installed Redhat 9 and, as expected, they were slow. Sometimes people would click a icon and the app would show up up to 5 minutes later (mozilla, OOo). Me, I installed ROX-Desktop. Kept MetaCity because OroboROX wasn't out. Instant speed boost. Even using Mozilla and OOo was possible. Now instantanious, not by a longshot, but they loaded in "reasonable" times (~30 secs). Still not by any measure acceptable, but it was "usable" for what I was doing.

At the end of the day, the problem (with the major DEs, at least) is that GNOME and KDE are not bothering to worry about the real problems they have. They toss everything into a large, monolithic design that doesn't scale well. They don't bother trying to keep things small, because the developers use increasingly beefier machines which even then don't load fast enough to be acceptable and can justify it under the false guise of "intergration." A user expects and needs a quick-loading, responsive and easy to use DE. If they worked more on compartmentalizing the various parts of the DEs, and less on "intergrating means everything is one app," they'd have more stable and faster DEs, less to debug, and using DBus or what have you STILL have easy integration among the various parts, only now it would only be the parts the user wants and needs.

Don't use fedora...
I started out w/ redhat and mandrake while I tried out a few
distro's a few years back but quickly moved on to slackware.
Now I use Gentoo and Debian but I've been tryin out a few
distros, one of which was FC2 because I wanted to revisit
RPM now that I know how to actually run a linux box on my own.
The only word that came to mind when I tried apt and apt4rpm
and yum was TERRIBLE. I was impressed w/ how the system
looked w/ the bootsplash and all but as soon as you actually
start messing w/ the system you want to puke.
Linux hasn't gotten fat, it runs just fine w/ a number of
distros. If you're the type of person trying to run linux
on a really old box then use debian, arch or another
stripped down distro... If you're a newbie and all you
have is an old box then use knoppix.

So I've gotten tied up doing my 9 to 5 thing, and when I get a chance to check this thread again, it's been infiltrated by some retard Linux guy with his friggin' W's and G's.

I've brought this up many times in the past (and been promptly modded down by Eugenia, which makes me wonder why her and her ego aren't modding down W/G boy), but OSNews needs a login/message model if it wants to play with the big boys. You can see here the damage that a public posting system can do.

In the same sense though, if you provide a such a login method of providing feedback, you can't immediately mod down everything you disagree with, or feel isn't pertinate to a discussion. Something that will be very hard to accept for some of our moderators, I'd imagine. I'm still seeing items modded down that don't need to be, and then threads that respond to those modded down posts are left intact, causing readers to wonder what the hell it is that they're not seeing that the person replying did. Not cool or professional.

But if you go with a login type system, be prepared to be a lot more open-minded than you have in the past. If you mod down the people who've gone out of the way to become a member for some ridiculous reason, you'll lose your readers faster than you currrently are with your moderation.

On a similar note, I've often wondered just why no one's invented a method for zapping people who purposely abuse boards such as this, with like 100k volts.

Alternatively, a button which provided the rest of use with a valid home address for posters like WG boy would also be very helpful. Then, when we got the chance, those of us inclined to do so could pay said morons a visit to show off our new bats and lead pipes that we're so proud of. Now that would be the kind of internet that I want to be a part of!

I came across this site a couple of years ago. Enjoy:

http://www.tinyapps.org/

the average user cannot just turn on gentoo or debian and be expected to use it...the average user doesn't even know how to run the automatic updates on winxp;) so what they are left with is either use xp or use one of the big three: mandrake, red hat, suse - all of which are bloated more than xp is at first boot. and like i said before, i have my mother's cpu (p2 350, 128 ram, 4gb hd) running xp just fine. she runs post-it notes, internet explorer, msn messenger with messenger plus, and wordperfect all at the same time just fine. sometimes she throws in websters dictionary and a game at yahoo.com on top...no problems.

i really dont know what ppl are talking about this disk thrashing or long load times and that. a bunch of crap if you ask me. the article was very good. it obviously brought out some good discussion. companies need to develop for older systems in mind - as well as the latest and greatest -to get the biggest exposure in the market. if linux distros that are easy for the casual user to use will focus less on bloat at first boot (and allow you to turn on features you dont really need later), then maybe they can penetrate the market where longhorn will fail: the older less updated market.

quit looking at this article and thread through your own geeky eyes...not everybody can run from a command prompt. look at what's best for linux as a whole. some ppl rather spend $50 on more important things than ram or other upgrades, you know?

I've got a 266 MHZ laptop with 192 MB ram in it that runs Win2k just fine. Current versions of linux with X, Gnome/Kde/even IceWM, and mozilla firefox as the only things running were unusable with several distributions

"The next step would be to re-write KDE in GTK"

Why not rewrite GNOME in Qt?

"Major distros such as Fedora, Mandrake, Debian need to dump applications using these from their official sources and put the pressure on legacy applications to upgrade to gtk2"

Wow, forced upgrades. That strategy sounds familiar.

Phew! That's the longest comments section on OSNews I've ever seen.
OSNews is turning more and more into a second Slashdot every day. Congratulations, Eugenia!

linux isnt getting fat, its those shitty ass distros that are getting fat.
fedora for example has what 5 different word editors, another 10 text editors, 4 spreadsheet editors, 10 different media players, a kernel with support for nearly EVERYTHING compiled in. Fact is, linux ISNT for novice users, if you cant tell what packages to install, what to compile in and what to not compile in the kernel, YOU SHOUDLNT BE USING IT. Fedora, mandrake, etc, etc are a joke, why even use them? Ive used slackware for years, has been better than windows always, maybe not for openoffice (admit it, i havent seen anything that can beat ms office), but when playing games, it has amazing performance. I just installed gentoo couple months ago, the performance is even better! Load times on UT2004 are 1/10 of what they are in windows. Literally it takes 5 minutes to load some maps on windows, those same maps in linux, 30 seconds! Why dont you think about your "silly rant" before posting something like this, just sounds like you dont know what the hell you are doing

The next step would be to re-write KDE in GTK, but that would probably be too much to ask than to simply not to use KDE applications.

I hope that was an attempt at humour.

Honestly, saying linux is getting fat because you have tried only the BIG linux distros is like saying "I broke the Internet" because your dialup connection is down. Don't pass judgement on ALL linux distros when you haven't even tried ALL linux distros. Have you EVEN tried any smaller distros? Even CDROM based distros like DSL (Damn Small Linux) or SLAX? Take a minimal PC, let's say one with under 256MB RAM......let's go even lower and say 128MB RAM.....then install VectorLinux on it.....then do your testing. Pass judgemnets based on fact....not opinion.

---Just my 2.46 cents---

Wait till they start using Mono or Java purely for desktop development.

The goal of Linux is to beat Win or OS X. First, of course, Linux should be applied on the present high-end box. Second, Linux should take the share from Win in the old boxes. I prefer a slim, beautiful and usable Linux, and so I still stay in Redhat 8.0.

my feeling about gnome is that almost each and every release have been faster than the previous. Gnome 2.4 is so much faster that previous Gnome 2. And Gnome 2 is not slow on a PowerPC 180 with 192 MB RAM. Drawing performance took a slight hit with antialiasing, some applications (such as gnome-terminal) are slow, but sorry, gnome 2 is fast. nautilus is faster between each releases. I really don't how people can be convinced that gnome is slow.

I tried RedHat 9 on my aging IBM Thinkpad 1720i (Pentium-II 266 MHz, 128MB RAM). It wasn't usuable. FreeBSD 4.8 on the other hand put new life into my box.