Star The Fast-Food Syndrome: The Linux Platform is Getting Fat
Linked by Bob Marr on Thu 10th Jun 2004 05:48 UTC
Linux Consider these memory requirements for Fedora Core 2, as specified by Red Hat: Minimum for graphical: 192MB and Recommended for graphical: 256MB Does that sound any alarm bells with you? 192MB minimum? I've been running Linux for five years (and am a huge supporter), and have plenty of experience with Windows, Mac OS X and others. And those numbers are shocking -- severely so. No other general-purpose OS in existence has such high requirements. Linux is getting very fat.
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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.