Star Miguel de Icaza: Rest of the World to Eventually Force US Into Linux
Linked by Eugenia Loli-Queru on Mon 10th May 2004 02:54 UTC
Novell and Ximian Last Thursday OSNews had the opportunity to meet Miguel de Icaza, founder of Gnome, Ximian and among other things leader of the much discussed, Mono project. Miguel is a talented and versatile developer but he is also a very intelligent businessman able to understand the industry on many different levels. Talking to Miguel guarantees that you are very quickly taken away by his enthusiasm and optimism and his thoughtful strategies and vision on how OSS will take over the world.
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RE: Wait a second...
by Eugenia on Mon 10th May 2004 04:31 UTC

I will have to agree with you, in part. I still run XP on my dual Celeron 533 Mhz with just 256 MBs of RAM, without a single problem. Installing Red Hat, Mandrake, SuSE or even Slackware on this machine, their desktop come to a crawl, I can't use Linux or FreeBSD on that dual Celeron machine.

When I started using Linux in the end of the '90s, a generic Linux desktop with KDE/Gnome *was* faster/responsive than Windows 9x/ME. Today, I don't find this to be the case anymore.

On the other hand, my Slackware will work fine on a 1.3 GHz AMD Duron machine with 256 MBs of RAM, which is a Linare/Walmart machine that costs about $220 USD (with 17" BenQ monitor ( http://www.benq.com/display/crt_p774.html ) for $80+tax). I think ~$300 for a full machine with Linux, is not that bad of a price even for a poor country's citizens.

Yes, it could have being better if these poor countries could use old 200 Mhz to 1 GHz machines for much cheaper with 64 or 128 MBs of RAM, but even with the above configuration running a modern Linux, it should be fine. I do agree though that the Linux desktop in general (both KDE and Gnome) need further optimizations. The overall responsiveness of the desktop experience is not optimal even on my AthlonXP 1600+ with 512 MB RAM.