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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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.