Mate, thanks for that great site link. I am seriously considering a switch to Ubuntu from my current distro and did not realise that these daily live builds were available. (The FTP mirror I normally go to only has the “official” final releases.)
My laptop performs great using Gentoo and a -ck kernel… until it runs out of 256MB of physical memory and starts swapping like mad. A few nights ago I woke up in the middle of the night to the sound of my laptop’s hard drive continuously chugging. All of my memory was consumed and two processes were stuck in a state where each would take turns swapping their pages in and out of memory continuously as fast as possible.
The problem wasn’t GNOME, though, it was (and is always) Firefox. Firefox consumes so much memory that it almost makes GNOME’s memory usage meaningless. Regardless of whether I use fluxbox or GNOME, all my memory is gone with a couple terminals, a media player, thunderbird, and firefox. If I close firefox, half of my memory frees and my system gets a lot faster.
I have a system with 128mb of RAM and I was a bit tired with gnome2.10 of memory consumation (try to see how much the slow gnome-terminal, even clock-applet, consume).
It’s not acceptable.
What I noticed running free with 2.10 was that after closing some applications the swap and memory didn’t free too much.
With windowmaker when I close firefox for example I see a true reduction of swap and memory.
So I think it’s gnome-related and not firefox.
What about listening a CD ?
Okay my CD-rom drive is crappy, it’s old 1x I think, hey I have a notebook of toshiba, though.
Well I can’t listen music too easily, some pauses sometimes, under gnome with cd-player.
You know I downloaded cdcd from debian/sid and I’m using it to listen my music flawless.
Yes I have to use the command line, but I don’t care to use a graphics interfaces to listen some CDs.
cdcd
cdcd>play
>next
>stop
>pause
Also another example.
Suppose you are going to open a file on the internet and firefox ask you which program to open it.
Suppose I go to /usr/bin well I can tell you that directory listing in the dialog box of firefox takes few time with windowmaker, with gnome it took a lot!
You can try it.
That was my final decision to switch to windowmaker and to leave gnome to machine with big memories.
So my humble conclusion is that windowmaker is fine for my machine, gnome 2.10 is not.
I won’t try 2.12 just to be illusioned by some proclams aiming to improve memory management.
The facts to me has driven me to a frustating desktop experience.
So instead of putting my notebook to the trash, I like it’s LCD monitor, I’m using less resources consuming desktops.
I hate after some work with some apps to click on the Application main menu and have to wait up to 5 seconds or more to see the application menu list with Gnome.
I use Opera 8 on my 500 MHz PIII. Firefox is really slow on older machines. On pages with Flash the CPU goes up 100% and stays there. This does not happen in Opera
Right now infrastructure for advanced debugging has been integrated in gtk and glib 2.7.x. After 2.8 is released, reducing memory comsuption will be much easier.
Gnome needs a better build script so you can easily take the base install from Slack, Arch, Gnoppix, Deb, etc run the script, and have a working, vanilla Gnome desktop.
Garnome is too easy to break and not well-maintained anymore.
And JHBuild seems like its more of a development sandbox.
troubles with firefox, blame gnome. that’s not really clever. firefox has almost nothing to do with gnome (as do much other so called gnome apps). try the gnome webbrowsers (nautilus? ephipany?).
btw maybe some KDE fans should start a flamewar here, too, as some other gnomes did in the “KDE 3.5 alpha 1” topic. I have some fuell: drop gnome, its only advantage is it is slightly easier to use, and KDE is gaining quickly here. the primary reason gnome was developed was because Qt was non-free, it is GPL now – what is more free? KDE has a better architecture anyway – time developing gnome is wasted.
One would certainly hope so, considering this is beta2 of Gnome and KDE 3.5 is still at alpha state. Given the previous track record of the KDE team I would expect KDE 3.5 to be very stable when the final version ships.
I hope to see gnome get some of the below niggling issues out of the way before a ton of huge paragigm shifting changes come down the pike in Gnome 3.0.
Notice the ones that are marked from the roadmap as coming in gnome 2.12.
1. A menu editor (I know coming gnome 2.12)
2. Better network browsing (also gnome 2.12) — But will I be prompted for my username and pass when I browse into a host? Will browsing a windows network really work? Time will tell and I really hope because sometimes I don’t know the share name is I need.
3. Easy audio CD burning — Yes I am using it now with Rhythmbox .9 arch main branch. It rocks and so does tag editing and this is needed. Rhythmbox .90 released today.
4. Launch feedback for desktop objects (Folders and such on the desktop)
5. Disable doubleclick on panel applets.
6. Improved user level System Tools (coming in gnome 2.12 as a goal) — we cannot leave it to the distros now can we.
7. Beagle or Storage inclusion — prefer Storage as a more flexible solution personally.
8. Replacement of esd as a sound daemon — (gnome 2.12 unassigned goal)
9. Browsing into an archive — (gnome 2.12 possible uri-chaining)
10. Skippy, expocity or some other form of expose style functionality in gnome.
Here comes the big one. The one I would trade all of the above advancements for. Let me preface this. The next goal should be the biggest and most important goal of the project imho, period. Gnome has a slick, sleek and minimal appearance. This has one unfortunate side-effect for the end user. It looks fast. Users expect it to be fast but gnome is NOT fast without a ton of RAM.
Why do I focus on RAM. My laptop with 128MB is sooo slow I use XFCE now on it. On the other hand, my blastwave package loaded ancient Sun Ultra5 with 256MB is faster, more responsive and livable with gnome. With 512MB on a (I admit it) faster laptop guess what? Gnome is as fast as XP on the same box.
Speed and memory footprint reduction — Gnome needs to place speed optimization and memory reduction once again imho as a major goal and I am very excited to see that memory reduction appearing as a a goal with even some bounties placed on it.
Frankly, I think a noble goal might be to be almost as fast XFCE. It uses gtk but its lightning fast and designed for speed. I know the gnome team cannot possibly get it as fast as XFCE but as a goal to reach for I believe it is noble to try.
I really do hope that the gnome team can resolve all of these issues listed and I find myself also in higher spirits seeing a number of gnome developers wishing for a return and a new birth of a proper focus on a gnome office as oppossed to relying on the good will of the OpenOffice group. Maybe someone will become motivated to start working crawiaps or another project.
However, I seriously doubt that every issue I mentioned above can all be completely resolved in one release.
I prefer KDE to gnome…. gnome seems too dumbed down for me but some of the features of 2.12 really have me a little excited. I’ll always use KDE(gotta have massive control) but for a few of the people I administer I may very well end up putting them on the new GNOME. I think it’d work out better for them.
This is the sort of attitude we need more of. I’m sure that both projects have something to offer the other. Throw in compliance with freedesktop.org standards and it can only keep getting better.
Islam is not dissimilar to other religions, except in that its adherents seem to be rather conservative and violent after extended following. You know the type.
Christianity and Judaism have their disadvantages too though, so really Islam is not too different. Except that for some reason, Muslims have been unable to make a convincing case in favour of public acceptance. They haven’t been able to control their outhbreaks of violence, and their lack of success can only be explained by the negative effects of Islam.
This leads me to think that Islam is perhaps not as innocent as its advocates claim. If it was it would be nonviolent, wouldn’t it? But the incessant rage of the typical Muslim is a damning indictment of the negative effects of Islam.
>I hate after some work with some apps to click on the
>Application main menu and have to wait up to 5 seconds >or more to see the application menu list with Gnome.
This is the one thing I really hate. The delay when you click the menu after not using it for a time. You click the menu and nothing happens, so you click it again and closing it while opening. Gets me everytime! Absolutely no feedback that it is opening. Looks also nice when demonstrating Gnome to others, NOT! Beside this one, I really love Gnome and use it daily for over 4 years.
I know, it’s not funny when you cannot use a good software because of hardware requirements, but face it: 128MB is too few juice for Gnome.
It is quite simply below the minimum system requirements.
If you want a comfortable desktop nonetheless I suggest you try using a lightweight (but not featureless) window manager plus ROX Desktop: not simply Rox Filer (that is a very good file manager), also its panel, session manager, pinboard (the overlay that gives you icons on the desktop), and maybe some other trinket.
If you look at the “themed” Rox Desktops, it is very good looking, also. There is for example a port of the Industrial theme for Rox.
Then again, if you are a very experienced user you can simply use an ultralight wm like pwm, a couple of rxvts and be done with it (I used this method when gmc was awful, eazel nautilus unusable, and no other fm appealed me… and use it still, when I bother to power on my P100 24MB laptop with debian).
Yes, they are still “just” desktops. I don’t think that GNOME or KDE take the desktop idea too far, but rather that other “desktops” aren’t really desktops but merely pretty shells to launch stand-alone applications.
I use my desktop as an integrated development environment and thus it should have some functionality. Most tools (=applications) which users only use occasionally are not loaded into memory if the user doesn’t actually start them, so that’s not a problem.
If you really don’t need all of this and just want a “pretty shell”, then XFCE or something similar should suit you just fine. Heck you could even just start Metacity and the panel, which is about what I did when my hardware was too slow for a complete desktop. But I don’t understand the complaints about GNOME/KDE doing too much.
If only the Gnome developers would actually listen to the very frequent complaints about memory usage and bloat. That Gnome is slower and heavier than Windows XP does NOT give Linux newcomers a good impression. But no, Havoc and co. will continue coding on their bought-last-month boxes, dismiss the truth and hinder Linux adoption on the 20 million+ PCs with 128 MB RAM.
One of the claims made for FOSS on a regular basis is the ability to breath new life into old hardware. Obviously XFCE, Fluxbox (and I’m sure others I haven’t mentioned) fit this particular bill. They are both lightweight and very efficient in this regard. But 128mb ain’t gonna cut it with Gnome (can’t comment on KDE as I haven’t used it for quite a while) which is a significant problem.
Gnome is barely usable on a machine with 128 MB of RAM; contrast this with Windows XP, which is very snappy on such a configuration.
I would suggest that the developers ARE aware of this problem, have 128mb in their sights and are beginning to address it. There were also bounties offered related to this problem. The relevant resolutions are eagerly awaited.
I find that laughable that someone actually thinks XP is snappy with 128. Anything less than 256 and it drags pretty bad.
That person might not be noticng the delays though, because he is constantly doing bong hits while using the computer.
i flat out call anyone who says 128 megs makes XP snappy a LIAR.
Ain’t that the damn truth but it does take a lot of RAM 512MB+ for gnome to feel as snappy as XP.
With say 256MB its livable but not as fast as XP and I do think those requirements are a bit high to say the least for an operating system that once prided itself as being usable on low-end machines.
This is of course still recognizing that one could run XFCE or WindowMaker or …. take your pick but its KDE or gnome that comes as the default desktop and trust defaults matter and give the new users a bad first impression.
This also ignores that most distros do NOT detect and activate DMA by default and most do NOT by default install the cpu optimized version of their kernel. Yes, people say cpu optimized kernels make no difference but I have played both ways in this and feel that it does make a difference worth noting.
The funny thing is that we have the source.
Why does everyone say that Gentoo is so fast? Because by compiling locally you have a cpu optimized version of all the packages. As someone who did a garnome install or two in my day let me tell you a cpu optimized version of all the desktop infrastructure does make a difference. I would love to see more distros offer 4 different builds – AMD, AMD-64, 386 and 686 to take advantage of the source the OSS and GPL has given them.
What, a handful of little things? None of this addresses the big problem with bloat and memory usage. Again and again I talk to newcomers who’re put off by the slowness of open source and Linux desktops.
Firefox is slower than IE (a lot slower at startup).
OpenOffice.org is slower than MS Office (and that’s without any MS Office preloading – try it in WINE).
KDE and Gnome are slower and heavy than XP’s desktop.
All these things come together, and it gives newcomers the impression of half-assed software. There needs to be a real, huge, genuine effort by open source desktop programmers for efficiency. But developers just keep buying the latest kit and lose track of how many older systems there are out there.
When Linux STILL has less than 10% of the market in 2010, despite every year being the “Year of the Linux Desktop”, perhaps some people will look back and actually recognise these real problems…
Or you can put your fingers in your ears and ignore it 🙂
“What, a handful of little things? None of this addresses the big problem with bloat and memory usage. Again and again I talk to newcomers who’re put off by the slowness of open source and Linux desktops.”
Did you even read the page?
Did you read the other page?
I get the impression you either didn’t, or you are simply trying to start a flamewar, probably both.
Anyway, I’m sorry, getting in a flamewar with yet an other troll is far to boring for me, but maybe you’ll be lucky and find someone else to play with.
Although I agree with what you’ve said, you must take into consideration what Gnome and KDE both offer on the desktop these days, the same as what vista promises/may offer when it comes out. I wonder if MS will be looking at ways to reduce ram usage in vista a year after it’s released(Around 2015 at the rate it’s going ) Will vista, OSX run on 128 meg of ram and still feel as snappy as 2k/xp?
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not defending Gnome/KDE. I think both run like pregnant slugs, even on 2gig of ram, but just maybe we’re expecting a little too much from modern software?
When Linux STILL has less than 10% of the market in 2010, despite every year being the “Year of the Linux Desktop”, perhaps some people will look back and actually recognise these real problems…
Yeah right. Because it’s exactly _your_ problems which are the _only_ reason why Linux isn’t there yet. Gotta love this kind of argument.
Just say it as it is an be done with it. So you believe that some popular OSS software is slower than their properietory competitors. Fine. It’s probably true. But understand that the problem is of different priority to different people and don’t be a jerk about it. There are so many things which still need to be done in the free software world, performance improvements are always part of it. Not more, not less.
KDE and Gnome are slower and heavy than XP’s desktop.
My personnal experience is that KDE is very fast, and XP has a tendency of gratuitously thrashing on the hard disk for no apparent reason.
However, I heard lots of people claiming that for them, KDE was slow as hell, and XP was fast.
I think I heard as many people claiming that KDE is faster than XP as people saying it’s the other way round.
What it tells me is that you can’t just throw “XXX is slower than YYY”, based solely on your personnal experience. Things are apparently more complicated than that.
What, a handful of little things? None of this addresses the big problem with bloat and memory usage. Again and again I talk to newcomers who’re put off by the slowness of open source and Linux desktops.
All of them address bloat and memory usage and its the little things especially for example mem leaks in gnome-terminal that make a lot of difference in desktop speed especially for the sysadmin set.
Firefox is slower than IE (a lot slower at startup).
This has nothing to do with gnome. Though Firefox does start faster on my Ubuntu setup from a dead start than on my XP setup (dual boot box).
OpenOffice.org is slower than MS Office (and that’s without any MS Office preloading – try it in WINE).
See above. This has nothing to do with gnome or memory reduction in gnome.
KDE and Gnome are slower and heavy than XP’s desktop.
Heavier? Not so sure. Slower? Depends on what you are talking about. Start-up is slower on linux in general. On a box with 512MB+ RAM I find gnome just within seconds of the launch time for native gnome apps to native XP apps with some apps like gedit for example having lots more features than Notepad. Sometimes faster or a second or so slower. But yes you are right about one thing it takes a lot of RAM to get to that point. The window movement is a bit jerkier due to X limitations that are being worked right now through X.org. But response time within the app is just as fast.
People seem to go completely by startup times which can be improved in a number of ways like FC4 using link tools to speed up lib linking for startup. Or imho compiling the desktop for cpu optimization which does make a difference after using garnome I can truly attest to this. (We have the source?!? Use it to our advantage.)
There needs to be a real, huge, genuine effort by open source desktop programmers for efficiency.
So if they do nothing they are putting their fingers in their ears and ignoring the problem but if they do something you belittle it as half-ass.
Ok, I can follow that troll but only if I am blindly hating.
When Linux STILL has less than 10% of the market in 2010, despite every year being the “Year of the Linux Desktop”, perhaps some people will look back and actually recognise these real problems…
Considering the fact that linux is an alternative OS with no preinstall support from hw manufacturers mostly put together by volunteers and a few distro companies then …. I think its pretty amazing.
I almost understand this reaction though.
I despise the term “Year of the Linux Desktop”.
Linux was always a desktop OS. Just not a desktop OS for mass consumption. Linus originally envisioned a Unix-like OS that he could run as his desktop on cheap x86 hardware.
Not necessarily in the beginning as a low-cost server alternative.
Part of its the mainstream presses response to the increase in the numbers in a boring x86 OS world dominated by one player – Microsoft.
Part of it is the community’s fault and its over-evangelizing of the OS as a desktop solution and its refusal to steer newbies or hype the proper distros.
For example, I love Ubuntu. I love its desktop and the fact that non-free kernel mods are included and that the community has such great autoinstall tools for grabbing codecs and all that. I use it every single day. But its still not a newb distro imho.
That is Linspire or Xandros or even for the adventurous Vidalinux. They are much closer to the desktop goal.
Personally as an old crusty sysadmin that has been using linux as my desktop since 1997 I could care less if Linux dominates the desktop. In fact, I think the hype can hurt more than help the OS.
The progress should be to creating a good lightweight server OS as a platform for running FOSS server apps and …. as a great alternative to Exceed and unix workstations.
Why do you need to comment everything that you don’t agree with as “do you want to start a flamewar ?”. Start taking comments from people as they are since they have an own opinion. If you can’t get along with it then you clearly show what other people are trying to explain here. Problems related to GNOME brought up more than a dozen of times being ignored by people who disagree. If we mirror this sentence to the bugreports and complaints that people give then we have a similar situation. People complain about memory usage and developers not careing enough because they disagree with people who complain. Or they simply comment those people to start a flamewar. Instead of commenting here, why don’t you take those peoples comment serious and start contributing some bytes to solve the issues ?
I don’t comment everything I don’t agree with as “do you want to start a flamewar ?”.
And where did I suggest that people weren’t entitled to their own opinion?
Anyway, if you look at my first post you’ll see that I provided some links that run counter to the other guys claim that the Gnome devs aren’t aware of the issue and aren’t doing anything. How it this evil?
Now, instead of somehow giving a decent answer to this the guy I later accussed of only wanting to start a flamewar simply dismissed this page as only addressing little things, which is simply factually wrong if you bother to read the page.
On top of this he then also brought up other points that are totally unrelated to memory consuption in Gnome.
So please tell me, where does this kind of behavior leave us? How would you like me to react to this kind of behavior? How is anyone supposed to engage in a meaningful discussion with anyone behaving like this?
I fail to comprehend how did they manage to make such a mess. Almost no gnome app uses the bonobo architecture and, despite being written in C, it’s still way slower than KDE. To add insult to the injury most closed source apps for Linux use Qt rather than GTK+ which, btw, has been getting slower and slower since 2.0 came out. OTOH E17 is coming out soon, and will 0wn all other desktops, the proprietary Microseft Windows XP piece of shit system included.
I personally quite frequently Gnome 2.x on elder hardware. To sketch the systems:
* Gnome 2.0 on a SunBlade 100 with 2GByte of RAM running Solaris 9
* Gnome 2.8 on a HP Kayak XU 800 in single processor configuration and 512MByte of RAM running Fedora Core 3
The SunBlade 100 has a UltraSPARC IIe processor running at 500MHz (CINT2000 baseline 165, a PentiumII at 266MHz offers roughly the same integer horsepower). The SunBlade 100 is a pretty slow system by todays PC hardware standards. But Gnome 2.0 is quite usable on this box. I do not say snappy, I just say sufficient.
My HP Kayak XU 800 features a single Pentium III (Coppermine) running at 800MHz (estimated CINT2000 baseline ~400). So that box, despite the fact it has ~2.5x the horsepower of the SUN Blade 100, is also pretty slow system by todays PC hardware standards. But I would rate the speed of Gnome as snappy.
So to use the Gnome 2.x desktop a PIII class system with 512MByte of RAM is sufficient. Used systems with these specs are often sold for less than $100.
Federico Mena-Quintero is one of those heroes constantly working on reducing GNOME/Gtk memory usage. Check out his blog for progress and information how you can help:
BTW – it always amazes me, how people compare (slow) Gnome to a (fast) XFCE. XFCE is fast because it’s said to be fast. This is mostly a placebo effect.
Just take a look on the window manager benchmark that rasterman did:
those benchmarks are windows persecond and time between system call and window.
“speed” as seen by the user is time from interaction (clicking on a shortcut/menu item) and time before something useful happens (menu pop up, window appear) which while related doesn’t have all that much to do with how many windows/second it can do, it doesn’t matter if the window can be drawn .01 seconds faster if the app/menu still takes thirty seconds to load (because say system needs to swap or it’s calling way more bits than it needs to (see: complaints a couple weeks back about volume applet and gstreamer)).
A window manager feels snappy, even if it needs ~250ms to create a single empty window.
But taking into account the general knowledge that the reaction time of a human person is roughly a second, which is even 4x that span of time, this fact becomes a triviality.
Those stats are meaningless, because they deal with a tiny fraction of WM performance that hardly has an impact on perceived speed by the user.
Users usually judge desktop speed by:
– How fast it starts up (XFCE shines here)
– How fast windows can be moved and resized (XFWM is much better in this regard than Metacity)
– Whether or not the computer runs out of memory and thus becomes slow due to swapping (XFCE uses a lot less memory, so this happens less with few RAM)
XFCE offers nothing of interest to me, but I’d recommend it to anyone looking for a nice low-resource desktop.
will be good to see improvements in drag and drop. right now, OS X is the gold standard as far as drag and drop is concerned, hopefully other desktops will soon start to catch up.
I think that the issue of how well Gnome runs on old hardware is not useful if the goal is to increase Linux adoption for the desktop.
The advantage of running a Linux desktop on old hardware is adopted from the arguments for running Linux on servers, where the advantage was substituting Linux for other software to do the same work. The fact is, the difference in what a server is asked to do today compared to 5 years ago is far smaller than what a desktop client is asked to do today compared to 5 years ago.
Today someone running a desktop system (and like it or not, this includes every Joe Sixpack who gets his computer from Best Buy) has a far greater expectation as to what that desktop will do for them compared to 5 years ago. Previously, the point was made that used hardware can be bought for $100. This makes no economic sense if one can get hardware that is more than four times as powerful for less than four times that price. Trying to make the argument that one should adopt Linux for the desktop because it will run on old hardware is probably not useful in a market where people are buying new computers rather than trying to fix their old ones.
This is completely redundant. The Joe Sixpacks getting their machines from Best Buy are very unlikely to try Linux anyway, at least for many years. And the consumer market is only a small portion of the computing world.
By having horribly memory-munching desktops and apps like OpenOffice.org and Gnome, the Linux community is locking itself out of a HUGE market: the millions upon millions of machines running NT4 and Win98 in businesses.
Everyone bleats about the ‘Microsoft treadmill’ and companies aren’t pleased with having to buy new hardware for Windows upgrades. And yet these boxes with 64 and 128 MB RAM (if you’re lucky) crawl with grossly inneficient software like OOo, Gnome and even Firefox (huge memory leaks). Linux should be there, snapping up a lucrative market, giving businesses a great incentive to switch.
And no, don’t waffle on about Fluxbox and Dillo. Large companies aren’t interested, and it’s a ridiculous solution anyway: to get reasonable speed, you have to ditch the integrated desktop and choose fiddly, feature-lacking programs?!
Again, this’ll be ignored, as will the hundreds of posts I see on Linux newbie forums questioning the sheer weight and slowness. Linux’s desktop market share will continue to be negligible and everyone will keep pointing at Microsoft rather than real, severe issues that people actually care about (the Gnomers should spend some time with Windows convertees).
It’s a lost cause, methinks. Look to Syllable, Haiku and co. to see elegant, efficient coding where the same feature as in Gnome or OOo is implemented 20 times lighter and faster.
“What, a handful of little things? None of this addresses the big problem with bloat and memory usage.”
So what exactly is the “big problem with bloat and memory usage”? I’m sure we’d all like to know. There is no silver bullet fix for this problem. This is a “death by a thousand cuts” type of problem, which is why it is so hard to fix.
As I see it, there are four things you can do when faced with memory consumption issues in a large app.
1) Identify wasteful memory usage in existing code and fix it.
2) Be careful in new development not to make the problem worse.
3) Create tools to help with 1 and 2.
4) Remove features.
Obviously, #4 is not very attractive unless the feature doesn’t provide much end user value.
#1 is obviously going to be a slow process. It is also not fun or glamorous, so its hard to get a lot of people working on it. Hopefully, #3 will help speed up the process a little, but it is going to get harder over time as the “low hanging fruit” will probably get picked early on.
isn’t it DUH a operating system/desktop environment 3-4 years old (Windows XP) needs less resources than a current, more featurefull and more advanced DE like KDE or Gnome?
anyway, lots of this debate might be solved by KDE4, with a memory usage reduction of 15-25% – while still offering all the features KDE has now, and Vista has promised – and more. Including search (but smarter, not a dumb indexer), hardware acceleration (as will be ‘normal’ under linux around the time Vista sees the light) and much more.
Er, duh, Gnome and KDE are competing against Windows XP desktops – or at least trying to get people to change. Therefore it’ll be installed on machines that have WinXP, which could be a few years old.
anyway, lots of this debate might be solved by KDE4, with a memory usage reduction of 15-25% – while still offering all the features KDE has now, and Vista has promised – and more. Including search (but smarter, not a dumb indexer), hardware acceleration
Laf, stop overrating KDE 4, it wouln’d do half of Vista would do, get real.
I’m more likely to try out KDE4 (I’m a gnome person myself) than Windows Vista. That OS looks like ass, and more than likely runs like it too.
To get more on topic, Gnome 2.12 is FAST. I was running Ubuntu Breezy Badger under VMware (with only 256mb of ram) and it was screaming, it seemed even faster than Hoary that was running as the host OS. So I wouldn’t put down the possiblity that they haven’t worked on the speed so quickly.
As a side note, at least with Linux desktops, you don’t get a progressively slowing system, with all the adware/spyware stuff infecting windows PC’s, they become unstable as well as dog slow.
Is there even such a thing as KDE4? I’ve got the impression that it’s as much vapor ware as GNOME3
The initial porting of KDE to Qt4, which is to become KDE 4, started some time ago. And this is now svn trunk(=cvs head), and has been so for over a month. You can easily download it, and parts will even compile and run. So I’ll call it more like work in progress than vapor. And comparing it to GNOME3, which I don’t think the GNOME comunity has started to seriously plan yet, are flawed.
I think that, aside from the need to improve performance, the GNOME (and KDE) programmers really need to think about Unix/Linux’s strengths as opposed to other operating systems. One of these is its ability to be used as a multi-user system, with multiple concurrent log-ins.
Neither DE really caters for this at the moment. I am not referring merely to security but even to basic features. For example, if a user logs into a command-line Unix shell, they are normally greeted with the MOTD. However, logging directly into a dekstop environment does not cater for this. No window appears with messages. Likewise, “talk” “wall” and “finger” do not have equivalent tools under the GUI.
This is one area to address in order to really distinguish the Linux desktop environments from their commercial OS rivals.
WOOT WOOT! Here it comes!
url anyone?
Is it Beta 1 or Beta 2??
The title and the summary don’t match
Beta 2
The Live CD is coming. The other way to try it is the latest Ubuntu live cds (which the gnome ones are based off of)
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/daily-live/current/
Corey
Mate, thanks for that great site link. I am seriously considering a switch to Ubuntu from my current distro and did not realise that these daily live builds were available. (The FTP mirror I normally go to only has the “official” final releases.)
This will be great!
Give us n00bs screenies to droll over!
http://www.gnome.org/~davyd/gnome-2-12/
Any new features? How is the memory requirements reduction coming along?
My laptop performs great using Gentoo and a -ck kernel… until it runs out of 256MB of physical memory and starts swapping like mad. A few nights ago I woke up in the middle of the night to the sound of my laptop’s hard drive continuously chugging. All of my memory was consumed and two processes were stuck in a state where each would take turns swapping their pages in and out of memory continuously as fast as possible.
The problem wasn’t GNOME, though, it was (and is always) Firefox. Firefox consumes so much memory that it almost makes GNOME’s memory usage meaningless. Regardless of whether I use fluxbox or GNOME, all my memory is gone with a couple terminals, a media player, thunderbird, and firefox. If I close firefox, half of my memory frees and my system gets a lot faster.
I have a system with 128mb of RAM and I was a bit tired with gnome2.10 of memory consumation (try to see how much the slow gnome-terminal, even clock-applet, consume).
It’s not acceptable.
What I noticed running free with 2.10 was that after closing some applications the swap and memory didn’t free too much.
With windowmaker when I close firefox for example I see a true reduction of swap and memory.
So I think it’s gnome-related and not firefox.
What about listening a CD ?
Okay my CD-rom drive is crappy, it’s old 1x I think, hey I have a notebook of toshiba, though.
Well I can’t listen music too easily, some pauses sometimes, under gnome with cd-player.
You know I downloaded cdcd from debian/sid and I’m using it to listen my music flawless.
Yes I have to use the command line, but I don’t care to use a graphics interfaces to listen some CDs.
cdcd
cdcd>play
>next
>stop
>pause
Also another example.
Suppose you are going to open a file on the internet and firefox ask you which program to open it.
Suppose I go to /usr/bin well I can tell you that directory listing in the dialog box of firefox takes few time with windowmaker, with gnome it took a lot!
You can try it.
That was my final decision to switch to windowmaker and to leave gnome to machine with big memories.
So my humble conclusion is that windowmaker is fine for my machine, gnome 2.10 is not.
I won’t try 2.12 just to be illusioned by some proclams aiming to improve memory management.
The facts to me has driven me to a frustating desktop experience.
So instead of putting my notebook to the trash, I like it’s LCD monitor, I’m using less resources consuming desktops.
I hate after some work with some apps to click on the Application main menu and have to wait up to 5 seconds or more to see the application menu list with Gnome.
I use Opera 8 on my 500 MHz PIII. Firefox is really slow on older machines. On pages with Flash the CPU goes up 100% and stays there. This does not happen in Opera
Right now infrastructure for advanced debugging has been integrated in gtk and glib 2.7.x. After 2.8 is released, reducing memory comsuption will be much easier.
Meanwhile, you can track progress here:
http://live.gnome.org/MemoryReduction
could i ask how much firefox windows/tabs are open and how much RAM does it use ?
and why on earth do you keep firefox open while sleeping ? you can’t use a session_saving plugin and close it ?
Use Epiphany, it’s faster and system resource friendly, if you don’t visit Java sites that is.
Good idea except epiphany sucks balls. Other than that, I’m switching right away!
Does anyone know how to get Epiphany to open links in new tabs by just ONE CLICK? Not middle click, or anything else, just regular clicking the link.
Gnome needs a better build script so you can easily take the base install from Slack, Arch, Gnoppix, Deb, etc run the script, and have a working, vanilla Gnome desktop.
Garnome is too easy to break and not well-maintained anymore.
And JHBuild seems like its more of a development sandbox.
http://www.akcaagac.com/index_cvsgnome.html
troubles with firefox, blame gnome. that’s not really clever. firefox has almost nothing to do with gnome (as do much other so called gnome apps). try the gnome webbrowsers (nautilus? ephipany?).
btw maybe some KDE fans should start a flamewar here, too, as some other gnomes did in the “KDE 3.5 alpha 1” topic. I have some fuell: drop gnome, its only advantage is it is slightly easier to use, and KDE is gaining quickly here. the primary reason gnome was developed was because Qt was non-free, it is GPL now – what is more free? KDE has a better architecture anyway – time developing gnome is wasted.
what about that
good job Gnome team
Yeah, well, this is beta 2, KDE is alpha 1… more stable? Figures…
– Simon
One would certainly hope so, considering this is beta2 of Gnome and KDE 3.5 is still at alpha state. Given the previous track record of the KDE team I would expect KDE 3.5 to be very stable when the final version ships.
I hope to see gnome get some of the below niggling issues out of the way before a ton of huge paragigm shifting changes come down the pike in Gnome 3.0.
Notice the ones that are marked from the roadmap as coming in gnome 2.12.
1. A menu editor (I know coming gnome 2.12)
2. Better network browsing (also gnome 2.12) — But will I be prompted for my username and pass when I browse into a host? Will browsing a windows network really work? Time will tell and I really hope because sometimes I don’t know the share name is I need.
3. Easy audio CD burning — Yes I am using it now with Rhythmbox .9 arch main branch. It rocks and so does tag editing and this is needed. Rhythmbox .90 released today.
4. Launch feedback for desktop objects (Folders and such on the desktop)
5. Disable doubleclick on panel applets.
6. Improved user level System Tools (coming in gnome 2.12 as a goal) — we cannot leave it to the distros now can we.
7. Beagle or Storage inclusion — prefer Storage as a more flexible solution personally.
8. Replacement of esd as a sound daemon — (gnome 2.12 unassigned goal)
9. Browsing into an archive — (gnome 2.12 possible uri-chaining)
10. Skippy, expocity or some other form of expose style functionality in gnome.
Here comes the big one. The one I would trade all of the above advancements for. Let me preface this. The next goal should be the biggest and most important goal of the project imho, period. Gnome has a slick, sleek and minimal appearance. This has one unfortunate side-effect for the end user. It looks fast. Users expect it to be fast but gnome is NOT fast without a ton of RAM.
Why do I focus on RAM. My laptop with 128MB is sooo slow I use XFCE now on it. On the other hand, my blastwave package loaded ancient Sun Ultra5 with 256MB is faster, more responsive and livable with gnome. With 512MB on a (I admit it) faster laptop guess what? Gnome is as fast as XP on the same box.
Speed and memory footprint reduction — Gnome needs to place speed optimization and memory reduction once again imho as a major goal and I am very excited to see that memory reduction appearing as a a goal with even some bounties placed on it.
Frankly, I think a noble goal might be to be almost as fast XFCE. It uses gtk but its lightning fast and designed for speed. I know the gnome team cannot possibly get it as fast as XFCE but as a goal to reach for I believe it is noble to try.
I really do hope that the gnome team can resolve all of these issues listed and I find myself also in higher spirits seeing a number of gnome developers wishing for a return and a new birth of a proper focus on a gnome office as oppossed to relying on the good will of the OpenOffice group. Maybe someone will become motivated to start working crawiaps or another project.
However, I seriously doubt that every issue I mentioned above can all be completely resolved in one release.
instead of flaming, how about us nongnome guys learn from gnome, and hopefully the gnome people will learn some stuff from kde.
I prefer KDE to gnome…. gnome seems too dumbed down for me but some of the features of 2.12 really have me a little excited. I’ll always use KDE(gotta have massive control) but for a few of the people I administer I may very well end up putting them on the new GNOME. I think it’d work out better for them.
This is the sort of attitude we need more of. I’m sure that both projects have something to offer the other. Throw in compliance with freedesktop.org standards and it can only keep getting better.
Islam is not dissimilar to other religions, except in that its adherents seem to be rather conservative and violent after extended following. You know the type.
Christianity and Judaism have their disadvantages too though, so really Islam is not too different. Except that for some reason, Muslims have been unable to make a convincing case in favour of public acceptance. They haven’t been able to control their outhbreaks of violence, and their lack of success can only be explained by the negative effects of Islam.
This leads me to think that Islam is perhaps not as innocent as its advocates claim. If it was it would be nonviolent, wouldn’t it? But the incessant rage of the typical Muslim is a damning indictment of the negative effects of Islam.
>I hate after some work with some apps to click on the
>Application main menu and have to wait up to 5 seconds >or more to see the application menu list with Gnome.
This is the one thing I really hate. The delay when you click the menu after not using it for a time. You click the menu and nothing happens, so you click it again and closing it while opening. Gets me everytime! Absolutely no feedback that it is opening. Looks also nice when demonstrating Gnome to others, NOT! Beside this one, I really love Gnome and use it daily for over 4 years.
I know, it’s not funny when you cannot use a good software because of hardware requirements, but face it: 128MB is too few juice for Gnome.
It is quite simply below the minimum system requirements.
If you want a comfortable desktop nonetheless I suggest you try using a lightweight (but not featureless) window manager plus ROX Desktop: not simply Rox Filer (that is a very good file manager), also its panel, session manager, pinboard (the overlay that gives you icons on the desktop), and maybe some other trinket.
If you look at the “themed” Rox Desktops, it is very good looking, also. There is for example a port of the Industrial theme for Rox.
Then again, if you are a very experienced user you can simply use an ultralight wm like pwm, a couple of rxvts and be done with it (I used this method when gmc was awful, eazel nautilus unusable, and no other fm appealed me… and use it still, when I bother to power on my P100 24MB laptop with debian).
For me both – Gnome as KDE – are no more just desktops. These beasts have IMHO evolved into higly integrated all-in-one multi-purpose suites.
Should be the aim of Gnome and KDE really be to try to provide support for everything Joe Average needs?
Yes, they are still “just” desktops. I don’t think that GNOME or KDE take the desktop idea too far, but rather that other “desktops” aren’t really desktops but merely pretty shells to launch stand-alone applications.
I use my desktop as an integrated development environment and thus it should have some functionality. Most tools (=applications) which users only use occasionally are not loaded into memory if the user doesn’t actually start them, so that’s not a problem.
If you really don’t need all of this and just want a “pretty shell”, then XFCE or something similar should suit you just fine. Heck you could even just start Metacity and the panel, which is about what I did when my hardware was too slow for a complete desktop. But I don’t understand the complaints about GNOME/KDE doing too much.
If only the Gnome developers would actually listen to the very frequent complaints about memory usage and bloat. That Gnome is slower and heavier than Windows XP does NOT give Linux newcomers a good impression. But no, Havoc and co. will continue coding on their bought-last-month boxes, dismiss the truth and hinder Linux adoption on the 20 million+ PCs with 128 MB RAM.
Sigh indeed:
http://live.gnome.org/MemoryReduction
http://primates.ximian.com/~bmaurer/GIMPNet-%23gtk-devel.log
One of the claims made for FOSS on a regular basis is the ability to breath new life into old hardware. Obviously XFCE, Fluxbox (and I’m sure others I haven’t mentioned) fit this particular bill. They are both lightweight and very efficient in this regard. But 128mb ain’t gonna cut it with Gnome (can’t comment on KDE as I haven’t used it for quite a while) which is a significant problem.
With regard to your final comment. Quoting http://live.gnome.org/MemoryReduction
Gnome is barely usable on a machine with 128 MB of RAM; contrast this with Windows XP, which is very snappy on such a configuration.
I would suggest that the developers ARE aware of this problem, have 128mb in their sights and are beginning to address it. There were also bounties offered related to this problem. The relevant resolutions are eagerly awaited.
I find that laughable that someone actually thinks XP is snappy with 128. Anything less than 256 and it drags pretty bad.
That person might not be noticng the delays though, because he is constantly doing bong hits while using the computer.
i flat out call anyone who says 128 megs makes XP snappy a LIAR.
I find that laughable that someone actually thinks XP is snappy with 128. Anything less than 256 and it drags pretty bad.
That person might not be noticng the delays though, because he is constantly doing bong hits while using the computer.
i flat out call anyone who says 128 megs makes XP snappy a LIAR.
Ain’t that the damn truth but it does take a lot of RAM 512MB+ for gnome to feel as snappy as XP.
With say 256MB its livable but not as fast as XP and I do think those requirements are a bit high to say the least for an operating system that once prided itself as being usable on low-end machines.
This is of course still recognizing that one could run XFCE or WindowMaker or …. take your pick but its KDE or gnome that comes as the default desktop and trust defaults matter and give the new users a bad first impression.
This also ignores that most distros do NOT detect and activate DMA by default and most do NOT by default install the cpu optimized version of their kernel. Yes, people say cpu optimized kernels make no difference but I have played both ways in this and feel that it does make a difference worth noting.
The funny thing is that we have the source.
Why does everyone say that Gentoo is so fast? Because by compiling locally you have a cpu optimized version of all the packages. As someone who did a garnome install or two in my day let me tell you a cpu optimized version of all the desktop infrastructure does make a difference. I would love to see more distros offer 4 different builds – AMD, AMD-64, 386 and 686 to take advantage of the source the OSS and GPL has given them.
http://live.gnome.org/MemoryReduction
What, a handful of little things? None of this addresses the big problem with bloat and memory usage. Again and again I talk to newcomers who’re put off by the slowness of open source and Linux desktops.
Firefox is slower than IE (a lot slower at startup).
OpenOffice.org is slower than MS Office (and that’s without any MS Office preloading – try it in WINE).
KDE and Gnome are slower and heavy than XP’s desktop.
All these things come together, and it gives newcomers the impression of half-assed software. There needs to be a real, huge, genuine effort by open source desktop programmers for efficiency. But developers just keep buying the latest kit and lose track of how many older systems there are out there.
When Linux STILL has less than 10% of the market in 2010, despite every year being the “Year of the Linux Desktop”, perhaps some people will look back and actually recognise these real problems…
Or you can put your fingers in your ears and ignore it 🙂
“What, a handful of little things? None of this addresses the big problem with bloat and memory usage. Again and again I talk to newcomers who’re put off by the slowness of open source and Linux desktops.”
Did you even read the page?
Did you read the other page?
I get the impression you either didn’t, or you are simply trying to start a flamewar, probably both.
Anyway, I’m sorry, getting in a flamewar with yet an other troll is far to boring for me, but maybe you’ll be lucky and find someone else to play with.
Although I agree with what you’ve said, you must take into consideration what Gnome and KDE both offer on the desktop these days, the same as what vista promises/may offer when it comes out. I wonder if MS will be looking at ways to reduce ram usage in vista a year after it’s released(Around 2015 at the rate it’s going
) Will vista, OSX run on 128 meg of ram and still feel as snappy as 2k/xp?
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not defending Gnome/KDE. I think both run like pregnant slugs, even on 2gig of ram, but just maybe we’re expecting a little too much from modern software?
When Linux STILL has less than 10% of the market in 2010, despite every year being the “Year of the Linux Desktop”, perhaps some people will look back and actually recognise these real problems…
Yeah right. Because it’s exactly _your_ problems which are the _only_ reason why Linux isn’t there yet. Gotta love this kind of argument.
Just say it as it is an be done with it. So you believe that some popular OSS software is slower than their properietory competitors. Fine. It’s probably true. But understand that the problem is of different priority to different people and don’t be a jerk about it. There are so many things which still need to be done in the free software world, performance improvements are always part of it. Not more, not less.
“Firefox is slower than IE (a lot slower at startup).”
Correct my if I’m wrong, but I think this is a somewhat “unfair” comparison.
Launching IE is the equivalent of File>New Window in firefox. Coparing this behaviour they seem pretty equivalent.
KDE and Gnome are slower and heavy than XP’s desktop.
My personnal experience is that KDE is very fast, and XP has a tendency of gratuitously thrashing on the hard disk for no apparent reason.
However, I heard lots of people claiming that for them, KDE was slow as hell, and XP was fast.
I think I heard as many people claiming that KDE is faster than XP as people saying it’s the other way round.
What it tells me is that you can’t just throw “XXX is slower than YYY”, based solely on your personnal experience. Things are apparently more complicated than that.
What, a handful of little things? None of this addresses the big problem with bloat and memory usage. Again and again I talk to newcomers who’re put off by the slowness of open source and Linux desktops.
All of them address bloat and memory usage and its the little things especially for example mem leaks in gnome-terminal that make a lot of difference in desktop speed especially for the sysadmin set.
Firefox is slower than IE (a lot slower at startup).
This has nothing to do with gnome. Though Firefox does start faster on my Ubuntu setup from a dead start than on my XP setup (dual boot box).
OpenOffice.org is slower than MS Office (and that’s without any MS Office preloading – try it in WINE).
See above. This has nothing to do with gnome or memory reduction in gnome.
KDE and Gnome are slower and heavy than XP’s desktop.
Heavier? Not so sure. Slower? Depends on what you are talking about. Start-up is slower on linux in general. On a box with 512MB+ RAM I find gnome just within seconds of the launch time for native gnome apps to native XP apps with some apps like gedit for example having lots more features than Notepad. Sometimes faster or a second or so slower. But yes you are right about one thing it takes a lot of RAM to get to that point. The window movement is a bit jerkier due to X limitations that are being worked right now through X.org. But response time within the app is just as fast.
People seem to go completely by startup times which can be improved in a number of ways like FC4 using link tools to speed up lib linking for startup. Or imho compiling the desktop for cpu optimization which does make a difference after using garnome I can truly attest to this. (We have the source?!? Use it to our advantage.)
There needs to be a real, huge, genuine effort by open source desktop programmers for efficiency.
So if they do nothing they are putting their fingers in their ears and ignoring the problem but if they do something you belittle it as half-ass.
Ok, I can follow that troll but only if I am blindly hating.
When Linux STILL has less than 10% of the market in 2010, despite every year being the “Year of the Linux Desktop”, perhaps some people will look back and actually recognise these real problems…
Considering the fact that linux is an alternative OS with no preinstall support from hw manufacturers mostly put together by volunteers and a few distro companies then …. I think its pretty amazing.
I almost understand this reaction though.
I despise the term “Year of the Linux Desktop”.
Linux was always a desktop OS. Just not a desktop OS for mass consumption. Linus originally envisioned a Unix-like OS that he could run as his desktop on cheap x86 hardware.
Not necessarily in the beginning as a low-cost server alternative.
Part of its the mainstream presses response to the increase in the numbers in a boring x86 OS world dominated by one player – Microsoft.
Part of it is the community’s fault and its over-evangelizing of the OS as a desktop solution and its refusal to steer newbies or hype the proper distros.
For example, I love Ubuntu. I love its desktop and the fact that non-free kernel mods are included and that the community has such great autoinstall tools for grabbing codecs and all that. I use it every single day. But its still not a newb distro imho.
That is Linspire or Xandros or even for the adventurous Vidalinux. They are much closer to the desktop goal.
Personally as an old crusty sysadmin that has been using linux as my desktop since 1997 I could care less if Linux dominates the desktop. In fact, I think the hype can hurt more than help the OS.
The progress should be to creating a good lightweight server OS as a platform for running FOSS server apps and …. as a great alternative to Exceed and unix workstations.
That is where an OS like Linux shines.
Hey ralph!
Why do you need to comment everything that you don’t agree with as “do you want to start a flamewar ?”. Start taking comments from people as they are since they have an own opinion. If you can’t get along with it then you clearly show what other people are trying to explain here. Problems related to GNOME brought up more than a dozen of times being ignored by people who disagree. If we mirror this sentence to the bugreports and complaints that people give then we have a similar situation. People complain about memory usage and developers not careing enough because they disagree with people who complain. Or they simply comment those people to start a flamewar. Instead of commenting here, why don’t you take those peoples comment serious and start contributing some bytes to solve the issues ?
Hey Anonymous (IP: 84.129.216.—)!!
I don’t comment everything I don’t agree with as “do you want to start a flamewar ?”.
And where did I suggest that people weren’t entitled to their own opinion?
Anyway, if you look at my first post you’ll see that I provided some links that run counter to the other guys claim that the Gnome devs aren’t aware of the issue and aren’t doing anything. How it this evil?
Now, instead of somehow giving a decent answer to this the guy I later accussed of only wanting to start a flamewar simply dismissed this page as only addressing little things, which is simply factually wrong if you bother to read the page.
On top of this he then also brought up other points that are totally unrelated to memory consuption in Gnome.
So please tell me, where does this kind of behavior leave us? How would you like me to react to this kind of behavior? How is anyone supposed to engage in a meaningful discussion with anyone behaving like this?
I fail to comprehend how did they manage to make such a mess. Almost no gnome app uses the bonobo architecture and, despite being written in C, it’s still way slower than KDE. To add insult to the injury most closed source apps for Linux use Qt rather than GTK+ which, btw, has been getting slower and slower since 2.0 came out. OTOH E17 is coming out soon, and will 0wn all other desktops, the proprietary Microseft Windows XP piece of shit system included.
Look, Eugenio or whoever insists on modding comments that spell the truth down: Get over yourself and learn to respect others opinions.
15 MB RSS mem usage for simple input language switching gnome applet is too much.
I personally quite frequently Gnome 2.x on elder hardware. To sketch the systems:
* Gnome 2.0 on a SunBlade 100 with 2GByte of RAM running Solaris 9
* Gnome 2.8 on a HP Kayak XU 800 in single processor configuration and 512MByte of RAM running Fedora Core 3
The SunBlade 100 has a UltraSPARC IIe processor running at 500MHz (CINT2000 baseline 165, a PentiumII at 266MHz offers roughly the same integer horsepower). The SunBlade 100 is a pretty slow system by todays PC hardware standards. But Gnome 2.0 is quite usable on this box. I do not say snappy, I just say sufficient.
My HP Kayak XU 800 features a single Pentium III (Coppermine) running at 800MHz (estimated CINT2000 baseline ~400). So that box, despite the fact it has ~2.5x the horsepower of the SUN Blade 100, is also pretty slow system by todays PC hardware standards. But I would rate the speed of Gnome as snappy.
So to use the Gnome 2.x desktop a PIII class system with 512MByte of RAM is sufficient. Used systems with these specs are often sold for less than $100.
Federico Mena-Quintero is one of those heroes constantly working on reducing GNOME/Gtk memory usage. Check out his blog for progress and information how you can help:
http://primates.ximian.com/~federico/news.html
IMHO the Gnome developers care much about the user feedback. It’s just that most users wants shiny new features, not optimizations.
BTW – it always amazes me, how people compare (slow) Gnome to a (fast) XFCE. XFCE is fast because it’s said to be fast. This is mostly a placebo effect.
Just take a look on the window manager benchmark that rasterman did:
http://www.rasterman.com/index.php?page=News
(section “E17 is being optimised”)
Note that XFCE got the worse results among all window managers. On the contrary, metacity results are not that bad.
those benchmarks are windows persecond and time between system call and window.
“speed” as seen by the user is time from interaction (clicking on a shortcut/menu item) and time before something useful happens (menu pop up, window appear) which while related doesn’t have all that much to do with how many windows/second it can do, it doesn’t matter if the window can be drawn .01 seconds faster if the app/menu still takes thirty seconds to load (because say system needs to swap or it’s calling way more bits than it needs to (see: complaints a couple weeks back about volume applet and gstreamer)).
The only fact that this bench gives me is:
A window manager feels snappy, even if it needs ~250ms to create a single empty window.
But taking into account the general knowledge that the reaction time of a human person is roughly a second, which is even 4x that span of time, this fact becomes a triviality.
Those stats are meaningless, because they deal with a tiny fraction of WM performance that hardly has an impact on perceived speed by the user.
Users usually judge desktop speed by:
– How fast it starts up (XFCE shines here)
– How fast windows can be moved and resized (XFWM is much better in this regard than Metacity)
– Whether or not the computer runs out of memory and thus becomes slow due to swapping (XFCE uses a lot less memory, so this happens less with few RAM)
XFCE offers nothing of interest to me, but I’d recommend it to anyone looking for a nice low-resource desktop.
will be good to see improvements in drag and drop. right now, OS X is the gold standard as far as drag and drop is concerned, hopefully other desktops will soon start to catch up.
I think that the issue of how well Gnome runs on old hardware is not useful if the goal is to increase Linux adoption for the desktop.
The advantage of running a Linux desktop on old hardware is adopted from the arguments for running Linux on servers, where the advantage was substituting Linux for other software to do the same work. The fact is, the difference in what a server is asked to do today compared to 5 years ago is far smaller than what a desktop client is asked to do today compared to 5 years ago.
Today someone running a desktop system (and like it or not, this includes every Joe Sixpack who gets his computer from Best Buy) has a far greater expectation as to what that desktop will do for them compared to 5 years ago. Previously, the point was made that used hardware can be bought for $100. This makes no economic sense if one can get hardware that is more than four times as powerful for less than four times that price. Trying to make the argument that one should adopt Linux for the desktop because it will run on old hardware is probably not useful in a market where people are buying new computers rather than trying to fix their old ones.
This is completely redundant. The Joe Sixpacks getting their machines from Best Buy are very unlikely to try Linux anyway, at least for many years. And the consumer market is only a small portion of the computing world.
By having horribly memory-munching desktops and apps like OpenOffice.org and Gnome, the Linux community is locking itself out of a HUGE market: the millions upon millions of machines running NT4 and Win98 in businesses.
Everyone bleats about the ‘Microsoft treadmill’ and companies aren’t pleased with having to buy new hardware for Windows upgrades. And yet these boxes with 64 and 128 MB RAM (if you’re lucky) crawl with grossly inneficient software like OOo, Gnome and even Firefox (huge memory leaks). Linux should be there, snapping up a lucrative market, giving businesses a great incentive to switch.
And no, don’t waffle on about Fluxbox and Dillo. Large companies aren’t interested, and it’s a ridiculous solution anyway: to get reasonable speed, you have to ditch the integrated desktop and choose fiddly, feature-lacking programs?!
Again, this’ll be ignored, as will the hundreds of posts I see on Linux newbie forums questioning the sheer weight and slowness. Linux’s desktop market share will continue to be negligible and everyone will keep pointing at Microsoft rather than real, severe issues that people actually care about (the Gnomers should spend some time with Windows convertees).
It’s a lost cause, methinks. Look to Syllable, Haiku and co. to see elegant, efficient coding where the same feature as in Gnome or OOo is implemented 20 times lighter and faster.
Sigh…
“What, a handful of little things? None of this addresses the big problem with bloat and memory usage.”
So what exactly is the “big problem with bloat and memory usage”? I’m sure we’d all like to know. There is no silver bullet fix for this problem. This is a “death by a thousand cuts” type of problem, which is why it is so hard to fix.
As I see it, there are four things you can do when faced with memory consumption issues in a large app.
1) Identify wasteful memory usage in existing code and fix it.
2) Be careful in new development not to make the problem worse.
3) Create tools to help with 1 and 2.
4) Remove features.
Obviously, #4 is not very attractive unless the feature doesn’t provide much end user value.
#1 is obviously going to be a slow process. It is also not fun or glamorous, so its hard to get a lot of people working on it. Hopefully, #3 will help speed up the process a little, but it is going to get harder over time as the “low hanging fruit” will probably get picked early on.
Xfce looks like the DE that will have good performance with funtionality.
Too bad i dont like it personally
Aha, there goes the slow/fast argument again. Sheesh Geeks!
yeah, well I’ve got fibre going between cable modem and my nic.
isn’t it DUH a operating system/desktop environment 3-4 years old (Windows XP) needs less resources than a current, more featurefull and more advanced DE like KDE or Gnome?
anyway, lots of this debate might be solved by KDE4, with a memory usage reduction of 15-25% – while still offering all the features KDE has now, and Vista has promised – and more. Including search (but smarter, not a dumb indexer), hardware acceleration (as will be ‘normal’ under linux around the time Vista sees the light) and much more.
Er, duh, Gnome and KDE are competing against Windows XP desktops – or at least trying to get people to change. Therefore it’ll be installed on machines that have WinXP, which could be a few years old.
Your argument is absolutely ludicrous.
anyway, lots of this debate might be solved by KDE4, with a memory usage reduction of 15-25% – while still offering all the features KDE has now, and Vista has promised – and more. Including search (but smarter, not a dumb indexer), hardware acceleration
Laf, stop overrating KDE 4, it wouln’d do half of Vista would do, get real.
Is there even such a thing as KDE4? I’ve got the impression that it’s as much vapor ware as GNOME3
Is there even such a thing as KDE4? I’ve got the impression that it’s as much vapor ware as GNOME3
That’s the sad part there is not even a pre pre pre alpha of KDE4 an it is already better than Windows Vista.
go figure.
I’m more likely to try out KDE4 (I’m a gnome person myself) than Windows Vista. That OS looks like ass, and more than likely runs like it too.
To get more on topic, Gnome 2.12 is FAST. I was running Ubuntu Breezy Badger under VMware (with only 256mb of ram) and it was screaming, it seemed even faster than Hoary that was running as the host OS. So I wouldn’t put down the possiblity that they haven’t worked on the speed so quickly.
As a side note, at least with Linux desktops, you don’t get a progressively slowing system, with all the adware/spyware stuff infecting windows PC’s, they become unstable as well as dog slow.
Is there even such a thing as KDE4? I’ve got the impression that it’s as much vapor ware as GNOME3
The initial porting of KDE to Qt4, which is to become KDE 4, started some time ago. And this is now svn trunk(=cvs head), and has been so for over a month. You can easily download it, and parts will even compile and run. So I’ll call it more like work in progress than vapor. And comparing it to GNOME3, which I don’t think the GNOME comunity has started to seriously plan yet, are flawed.
I think that, aside from the need to improve performance, the GNOME (and KDE) programmers really need to think about Unix/Linux’s strengths as opposed to other operating systems. One of these is its ability to be used as a multi-user system, with multiple concurrent log-ins.
Neither DE really caters for this at the moment. I am not referring merely to security but even to basic features. For example, if a user logs into a command-line Unix shell, they are normally greeted with the MOTD. However, logging directly into a dekstop environment does not cater for this. No window appears with messages. Likewise, “talk” “wall” and “finger” do not have equivalent tools under the GUI.
This is one area to address in order to really distinguish the Linux desktop environments from their commercial OS rivals.
http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/xorg/2005-August/009168.html