Linked by Bob Marr on Thu 10th Jun 2004 05:48 UTC
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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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.