I am running ArchLinux+Gnome 2.12.1 on a system with 128M and Duron 1.2G, so I do expect that. Gnome runs quite smoothly but slows down especially when memory is short of, saying firefox with 7-8 browsing tab page with many pictures.
Dude, you really need more RAM… if you want to run that many sites at the same time. It’s not horribly expensive these days you know, and I think you’d find it worth it.
I’m not so sure it was that, from what I’ve read out of it the main problem was that the tools they had were just plain insufficient and that now they have the tools they need to make meaningful contributions to speed up.
If you look at slide 2, you’ll see that the gist of the slide is basically “Eugenia was totally wrong. Yes, Gnome is slow, but this list of things isn’t why… Use a real profiler.”
I’ve been saying for years that GNOME is extremely slow and bloated for what it does, and I was always labelled a ‘troll’. Now look — even the GNOME crew realise there’s a lot to be done! Thanks for proving me right 🙂
Time after time I’ve demonstrated GNOME or KDE to a Linux newcomer and they’ve always been unimpressed how sluggish it is compared to their Windows installation. It might hurt to hear, but it’s true — the big Linux desktops are very, heavy heavy compared to Windows. I’ve seen these complaints first-hand from newcomers, so it’s good that they’re finally not being ignored.
That’s not entirely true. They’re not “heavy heavy” compared to windows. They’re only “heavy”.
😛
Windows(MS) has the advantage of integration, and also the advantage of being the only one.
Modulatity takes it’s toll, as does the openness of our product.(in this instance)
Even though the typical install of windows xp will eat up around 110-150,(after you install the patches and patch the patches) my FC4 box only chews up around 60.
Just as a point of reference, I have an FC3 box and it chews up around 80.
You’ll never see a slimming down like that for newer releases in the windows world. Jeez, look at the system requirements for vista.
You can get it down to about 60 by disabling some Windows services. System will still be usable, just missing a few things (like automatic update and other stuff that you probably never ever see).
You can get it down to about 60 by disabling some Windows services. System will still be usable, just missing a few things (like automatic update and other stuff that you probably never ever see).
You can turn services (daemons) off in linux as well. So GNU/Linux generally consumes less resources than Windows.
Turning off the Automatic Update for Windows is not something I would recommend, if that was what you were meaning?
Turning off Visual Styles however, that’s a wise step (in my mind).
In general it’s always wise to tweak your system (turning off services you don’t need, turning those on you do need).
Speed on GNU/Linux can be drastically improved by prelinking your packages.
However. Higher speed in Gnome is always a good thing. But I’m also oldfashioned (sort of).
Time after time I’ve demonstrated GNOME or KDE to a Linux newcomer and they’ve always been unimpressed how sluggish it is compared to their Windows installation.
Even KDE can feel sluggish in certain circumstances, although the optimisation of Qt has helped quite a lot along with the infrastructure they’ve built on top. You also have to remember it’s not just Gnome or KDE – it’s the whole system right through the kernel, to Xorg to the toolkit to the desktop environment infrastructure.
I’m surprised about you saying that KDE seems slow to newcomers… Event to this day on the rare occassion that I load up KDE It feels responsive.
I use Gnome at home and XP at work. I know Gnome seems heavy compared to most Linux WM and DEs, but on my Athalon 2600 with a gig of ram, it feels more responsive than XP on an equivelant pentium setup at work.
>> If you want to run faster you need FEWER features not
>> more of them. That way lies BLOAT, which is exactly
>> the problem.
No. That’s definitely not where all the bloat is.
It’s how it’s programmed. Read the slides: if you spend too much time on doing useless things (at the same time), you’ll end up with a slow program (that’s only on reason of course).
Even a “hello world” type of program could be made sluggish that way.
This guy is a hero really. Concentrating on the hard, unglamorous slog of making things better for everyone (stable, fast) and not on fluffing about as a cool hacker doing cool new stuff which gets dumped unfinished as soon as the next cool stuff turns up. Linux needs a lot more people like him.
The main reason I’m not using Gnome is because of it’s speed. Moving windows around or opening apps are way too slow for a modern DE. Hopefully they’ll speed it up a bit for the next release. That combined with Xorg 7.0 should make a pretty snappy desktop. At least one can hope it will.
Well, the main reason for me to use Gnome is it’s speed. Wonderfully snappy response in regard to drawing the menues. Not like the sluggish performance you get on windows (even in Win2K3 Server).
There are some issues with moving windows around, but the same is true for Windows.
well, on my sytem (Athlon64 3000+, 1GB of RAM, etc.) Gnome feels noticably faster than WinXp does. That, however, doesn’t go for gtk apps I use (gedit, rhythmbox, …), they usually feel sluggish.
Yes, indeed, Linux is heavy. It’s like driving a tank. It feels sluggish, but it’s a damn stable ride.
Windows on the other had is like a ferrari; Very Fast… on a straight track, anyway. However, put any medium sized obstable on the road, and you’re dead.
In my Linux tank I may feel a little bump, but I’ll still keep going!
I can run 30+ apps in Linux and not even notice it. On the same machine running Windows, the UI tends to freeze up for a few seconds under heavy load. The taskbar won’t respond, windows won’t move. Windows will often complain that an application “does not respond”. Sure, Windows is fast. But that changes quickly when you start 3D Studio Max, Photoshop, and Unreal Editor 3.0. And that’s just three stupid apps.
Linux feels sluggish, but I don’t mind too much anymore. Linux feels “heavy” when you first boot it, and it will feel *just as heavy* running 30+ apps after 5 days.
In the end, Linux wins for me. For any casual user who only has 2 or 3 simple apps open all the time, Windows is the better option. For much demanding users, Linux wins.
I expect every Windows users to disagree with me, and Linux users to agree with me. Nothing will ever change that, and thus this argument is totally pointless
‘Doze shows you a desktop fairly early, but it’s just bait; you can’t actually do anything for a significant period, while the OS finishes booting.
Meanwhile, you’ve queued a fistful of mouseclicks, so you get three .doc files, two web browser windows and a spreadsheet in a pear tree when its done.
Why do you blindly shill Microsoft at every opportunity???
What the guy said is a proven fact… ALL versions of Windows uses prelinking, therefore, ALL versions of Windows has the desktop on display, before the system can do anything with user input.
I have been watching your postings lately, and you defend Microsoft a little too much, this would be fine, if they actually paid you to do this.
Erm… Maybe your computer is faster than mine. When I load windows XP I’m presented with the desktop and I start navigating the start menu to the program I wish to load, and before I manage to get there the start menu has closed all by itself, possibly because some new program just loaded into memory and decided that it needed to refresh the start menu or take control of the system or something. Who knows. Point is that it’s very annoying. The answer is to let it sit for 2 minutes ( do something else, away from the computer) and then start working.
This has always been a problem with Windows, on any computer I’ve ever used any versions of windows on. But once it gets going windows is okay. There are many annoying things with ALL operating systems. This one is just hard to understand. They could fix it by giving the start menu priority and not letting the virus scan software or some silly taskbar application take over while you are trying to use the start menu.
I feel the same. Windows is very fast when it works but after defragging, for example, Windows crawls like a slug on tar: It works fast when you use one app, but when you try to switch the window everything gets stuck for a while. It’s often faster just to reboot the whole thing than wait wait wait.
Linux on the other hand feels slow all the time but almost never sluggish.
“I expect every Windows users to disagree with me, and Linux users to agree with me. Nothing will ever change that, and thus this argument is totally pointless ”
they will just to spite, but beyond that, i use gnome 2.8 on debian sarge and the only time i get slow down is like for instance i bought a new 320GB serial ata drive, i then had to move 70GB worth of stuff to it, i had a xterm copying about 16GB and the rest i did with nautilus i had about 5 copies going at once, lots of I/O going on, the menu took maybe 1secs to open xine took maybe 3secs to open(noticably slower), but after i started the avi everything was smooth. as a matter of fact im ripping a dvd right now(The Big Hit) and i see no slowdown i have beep, gaim, firefox, firestarter, xterm, and thoggen(slow for ripping movies) other than that im sure i could fire up doom3 and it would be fine. so this tank your talking about i would more aliken it to a lightweight bulldozer. if you say windows XP is faster at startup i would understand, because when you get to you desktop, windows hasnt finished, its still loading. sure if we started gdm at number 4 instead of service number 10 it would appear to start faster. but services would still be starting. now from gdm to desktop done loading is about 5sec. yes we(linux users) can run 30+ apps at once for 5 days. i have to give windows credit here though, iv seen windows running pretty well under heavy loads, I.E.: a 1.2ghz machine 256mb of ram had most of the normal instances of apps running, messaging(all three of the major), IE and all of the uber cool toolbars, and all of the 300 infections of spyware,adware, and malware. now granted IMing and web browsing was pretty much all you could do but what more could a windows user ask for, iv seen them(the user) run that way for months, why do we have amd 4800+ x2’s, windows? wel reading through that seemed like a run on sentence but im not fixing it, peace.
“I expect every Windows users to disagree with me, and Linux users to agree with me. Nothing will ever change that, and thus this argument is totally pointless ”
they will just to spite, but beyond that, i use gnome 2.8 on debian sarge and the only time i get slow down is like for instance i bought a new 320GB serial ata drive, i then had to move 70GB worth of stuff to it, i had a xterm copying about 16GB and the rest i did with nautilus i had about 5 copies going at once, lots of I/O going on, the menu took maybe 1secs to open xine took maybe 3secs to open(noticably slower), but after i started the avi everything was smooth. as a matter of fact im ripping a dvd right now(The Big Hit) and i see no slowdown i have beep, gaim, firefox, firestarter, xterm, and thoggen(slow for ripping movies) other than that im sure i could fire up doom3 and it would be fine. so this tank your talking about i would more aliken it to a lightweight bulldozer. if you say windows XP is faster at startup i would understand, because when you get to you desktop, windows hasnt finished, its still loading. sure if we started gdm at number 4 instead of service number 10 it would appear to start faster. but services would still be starting. now from gdm to desktop done loading is about 5sec. yes we(linux users) can run 30+ apps at once for 5 days. i have to give windows credit here though, iv seen windows running pretty well under heavy loads, I.E.: a 1.2ghz machine 256mb of ram had most of the normal instances of apps running, messaging(all three of the major), IE and all of the uber cool toolbars, and all of the 300 infections of spyware,adware, and malware. now granted IMing and web browsing was pretty much all you could do but what more could a windows user ask for, iv seen them(the user) run that way for months, why do we have amd 4800+ x2’s, windows? well reading through that seemed like a run on sentence but im not fixing it, peace.
I can run 30+ apps in Linux and not even notice it. On the same machine running Windows, the UI tends to freeze up for a few seconds under heavy load.
LOL. So true. When I was burning in my new computer, I ran two instances of cpuburn-in (it’s a dual-core machine) continuously. When using the machine, GNOME didn’t feel any different. It’s wasn’t blazingly fast, but it was certainly quite usable (as it should be with 2×2.4Ghz!) I’d really like to see somebody use WinXP for any length of time with two instances of Prime95 going!
3d studio Max is slow because rendering is slow It would be slow on Linux (not that i dont use or prefer linux ((in fact i dont use windows at all)))… just to get some facts straight!
Really great news. This summer I wait for reiser4 (no, 3 years waiting)+ xorg7.0 + composite + cairo on glitz + declared gcc-4.1 optimizer revolution (25-30% code speedup)… and nothing happened. Ok, I personnally do not contribute even one bit to fix that. May be some whining about freetype2/xft/pango ignoring monitor gamma curve, but nobody care so it is not count. But this presentation is like fresh air.
> May be some whining about freetype2/xft/pango ignoring monitor gamma curve, but nobody cares
that’s because gamma should only be taken into account when blitting glyph bitmaps on the target surface.
In other words, you could complain about the Render extension not supporting gamma-corrected alpha-blending. But with a little digging you’ll discover that there is little way to hardware-accelerate this operation, which means sluggish performance even with top notch graphics cards.
“that’s because gamma should only be taken into account when blitting glyph bitmaps on the target surface.”
Wrong. If you a programmer and want to draw anything but 0 or 255 on you monitor then gamma issue take place. Average programmer never perform “C1=pow(C0, 1.0/2.2)” on values before call XPutImage() or do it wrong way and loose precision. He just beleive in X and docs and bravely perform average (C=(C1+C2)/2) or transparent composite operation thinking that values in pixmap are monitor intencity. And more, users of such apps start to spread mystical legends about top-secret tricks such as “after you resize picture in GIMP it is good to slightly increase/decrease brightness, tsss, dont tell anybody, it is for hi-end Photoshop artist only”. GUI designers spend hours to selecting font/bachground colors and fonts that suck less, etc. Gradients, dithering, GIMP -like image processing filters(mostly), crappy half-assed AA font (there is patch on xft that try to improve that, will it be included in final xorg 7.0 ?).
Of course there is no hardware that perform gamma-correct composite operation on 8-bit values (modern Matrox may be ?), but i wrote not about x driver but about full “freetype2/xft/pango” chain, for example it is possible to render correct picture with background with respect to gamma ( and hopelly rgb order on LCD) to cache on hi level (GTK+). And finally, why it is work on XP (clearType), at least MS use gamma 1.4 but it can be turned to 2.2. Conclusion: gamma curve is very old and annoying beast that affect everything.
I have small IRC talk with one of the main GTK+ devs and answer was “we tryed fix it before and result does not impressive, so we do not care. You can play with if you wish”. But changes are so huge, it touch everything beginning from X color to rewriting most apps (changing colors, redesigning). Gamma curve ( and more general – good color management) must be initiated by hi-level devs. Jumping to cairo is a good reason to to it now.
If you are prepared to do the work, I suggest the best way to go about this is to publish a paper explaining the porblem and what has to be done to fix it.
What has always struck me as miraculous is how Linux handles a criminal amount of load without coughing. I’ve found my self compiling large packages in the background, burning a CD to disk, listening to music, browsing the web, six IRC windows open on another worskpace, and on and on, and Linux acts as if nothing is happening.
When I’m installing software on windows, I literally have to close down all other open applications. Copying a file to floppy disk will freeze Windows for some minutes. I don’t even bother unzipping tar.bz files on Window. And when I burning a CD, I just leave the computer for some minutes.
Now, we have zealots over here telling me GNOME is slow? It turns out that what these zealots are refering to as slowness is not actually so. They mean the UI is jerky. You see on Windows and OS X, well ochestrated animations are used to conceal or viel the jerkiness of the UI.
I don’t care for speed. It kills. I want to see more smoothness, better use feedback, well designed animations and sexy small applications that are stable, reliable and robust. If you want speed, use TWM. The jerkiness and redraw problems can be cleverly vieled via good animations and other UI tricks. But I don’t think hackers are good at stuff like that, so we temporarily at a disadvantage.
In my experience, GNOME is fast. Much faster and lot more responsive than Windows XP is, especially under very heavy load. The UI experience is not as smooth, however.
You are mixing up two things. Linux is a kernel, it is much more efficient at handling load when compared to windows xp.
GNOME is a desktop environment, it has nothing to do with handling programs (memory management, job scheduling etc). GNOME is solely responsible for the UI experience and as you said, it is not as smooth.
Just yesterday I was ripping a new CD and trying to play hte music at the same time. The music was stuttering, not constantly, but stuttering. Annoying as hell. I think some of it is a problem with iTunes 5, and some of it Windows.
But installing an app you have to close everything down? I don’t think so. Are you exaggerating here, or is your system just crappy?
I think what the guy was referring to was this, some Windows apps will force a reboot at the end of the install process. So, naturally, you have to close all other open apps.
And you never have problems decompressing files ? how often do you actually use .tgz or .gz under Windows ?
I couldn’t agree more, and this was something that I was thinking about the other day. I have decent rig… Soyo motherboard, Athlon XP 2500, gig of RAM. And just last night I was ripping a DVD, transcoding a different DVD, running an emerge sync, compiling a new kernel, watching a movie in totem, had FireFox with 12 tabs open, Eclipse in the background, and BMP running idle, not to mention numerous background servers, a few gnome-terminals, and the system has been up for over 30 days. Nothing at all is stuttering either. Just like you said, the kernel (mine’s 2.6.13) takes a CRIMINAL amount of load without coughing…
When I’m installing software on windows, I literally have to close down all other open applications. Copying a file to floppy disk will freeze Windows for some minutes. I don’t even bother unzipping tar.bz files on Window. And when I burning a CD, I just leave the computer for some minutes.
Sounds like you have some problems with your Windows install/PC. My Windows machine has its fair share of quirks, but it holds up quite well under load. I’ve had it burning 2 CDs simultaneously (2 burners), while recording audio in one instance of Audacity and editing/exporting in another. And this is on fairly modest hardware (these days), an AthlonXP 2800 with 1GB RAM.
How do well-orchestrated animations hide jerkiness? What animations does Windows do? OSX does the rotating-cube effect for fast-user switching, and the genie effect for the dock, but these actually use more system resources, not less.
OSX is doing quite well on my box while running LightWave’s Layout and Modeler, Photoshop, Safari, Mail, and iTunes. No stuttering, no system lags. Granted, I also have 2GB of RAM installed, but that’s because I’m doing some serious 3D work (my scenes, hi-res textures and high-poly models included, are running over 1GB in memory usage right now.) It’s all about using the right tool for the job, and OSX doesn’t get in the way. The only serious gripe I have with Apple right now is that they need to do some serious work on getting around to implementing OpenGL 2.0.
a typical install with a ton of crap running in the background will use up 100+mb .. I’ve yet to have even an untweaked install use over 80mb .. mine usually use around 45mb.. debian on my laptop uses about 90 with xorg and icewm running.. I really need to work on that..
In my experience, when an operating system is under load and its task manager tells you that the RAM isn’t full, it means that the OS’s memory management is poor, and that it’s swapping stuff that it shouldn’t be. I’d rather have my RAM being used; that’s what it’s there for. Bear in mind I’m not saying that it’s better to use more memory if you can use less; I’m pointing out that good memory management and good memory usage reporting are both things you won’t really see on Windows, so whatever you think about what it’s doing, you should take with a large pinch of the old NaCl.
Apparently Windows is pretty aggressive about paging out minimized applications, even if there’s plenty of available RAM. I guess the rationale is that applications that as much memory as possible should be left free for programs that the user is working in. I don’t think this makes much sense these days, though, when 512MB of RAM is pretty much a minimum.
I believe this is the reason why, under Windows, if you have a lot of tabs open in Firefox and minimize it for a while, the drive will churn when you restore it and it will take a while for it to become responsive again as it’s loaded back into memory.
Gnome applications are leaking memory over and over because the coders are dump jerks.
It is a flat-out fact that kde is superior to gnome. gnome is a bloated clunky pile of crap that needs to either shape up or ship the hell out. Distros that are using gnome as their default desktop are morons and only holding the linux movement back (THIS IS A FACT and anyone with a logical thought process can see this).
Gnome applications are leaking memory over and over because the coders are dump jerks.
It is a flat-out fact that kde is superior to gnome
Is gnome running faster on a AMD64 2.0GHZ than on a PIV 3.0 GHz? Because Gnome 2.12 runs maybe faster on my simple AMD64 3000+ 2.0 GHz SuSE 10 box than KDE.
Most people don’t understand that windows has integration with kernel when it comes to gui. This makes it “look” faster but it’s actualy slower. If it wasn’t integrated with the kernel you wouldn’t be able to do much.
“This makes it (Windows) “look” faster but it’s actualy slower”
Really? How come the desktop is up and running much faster under Windows? (And yes, it’s usable.) How come Firefox and OpenOffice.org load faster under Windows? How come I don’t see as much tearing and flickering under Windows? How come apps respond immediately rather than with latency?
Oh right, must just be my imagination. Despite the fact that I and countless others find Windows much lighter and snappier, we all must be wrong. All of us. Go see some of the previous threads about this — but all those people are wrong eh!
It’s this attitude that keeps Linux at a bare few percent of the market. Avoiding what people actually want. When Linux STILL has less than 5% of the desktop market in 2010, perhaps you’ll be a bit more open.
Conversely, how about the “countless” people like me who find Windows heavier and more sluggish than Linux (with Gnome) in most instances? Not everything is about you, hmm? Sometimes, what you and some others experience with Linux and Windows is still the aberration, and not the norm.
1) Go visit a lot of Linux-newbie forums around the net
2) See what some of the most common complaints are
3) Install Linux on newcomer’s PCs and see
4) Ask yourself why, after 15 years, Linux still has negligible market share
I’ve installed Linux for lots of newcomers. I can’t stand Microsoft and really want to see an alternative emerge. But after the 20th time of hearing:
“Why’s the desktop so slow? It takes ages to open a file window. And OpenOffice is ridiculous. And Firefox takes about five times longer than IE… etc. etc.”
I’ve seen too much of this to keep fudging explanations. In the end, it’s just poorly engineered, sloppily coded software with no elegance or thought in design. The apps may work acceptably in terms of features, but AGAIN and AGAIN I’ve seen newcomers turned off by what they see as a sluggish, bloated mess. Which in many respects it is.
And the Linux community’s answer is “omfg fix it or use fluxbox and dillo!!!”. Ah thanks — switch to completely bare-bones software just to get the equivalent speed of Windows.
Yes, I’ve seen Windows machines clogged up with virii and spyware that are so slow they’re unusable. But I’ve also used far too many that obliterate Lin/GNOME/KDE/OOo/FF in terms of fast startup, running speed and efficiency.
It’s up to you if you choose to ignore this. But again, you have to ask yourself, after 15 years of Linux, why does it still have an utterly negligible desktop market share? 15 YEARS!!
Answer: it’s not all down to MS’s dominance and Adobe not making software. It’s also down to the experience. And if you spend time at newbie Linux forums, you’ll see that bloat, sluggish performance, buggy software and nightmarish program installation* is a HUGE obstacle to wider Linux desktop update. Ignore if you like — but when we’re in the same position in 2010, you might want to open your eyes and start to look at these REAL problems…
(* Boo to the first person to say ‘just apt-get it’. What if it’s not in your ‘repositories’? What if a new version of an app comes out? Oh, your distro only issues security fixes. So to just get a new app you have to fiddle around with ‘development repositories’, compiling source from scratch, and dependencies en masse. Try it — get the newest Gnumeric when it’s lanuched. Double-click and go, keeping the rest of your system intact? I think not 🙂 )
In any event, most of the so called “newb distors” are also the painfully slow distros. The more advanced distros (which are not for this audience) (Arch, Gentoo, Slack) thend to run much faster in the hands of an experienced administrator/operator
point is.. this is not an inharent linux/gnome/kde problem, it is a problem with certain distros that try to have anything and everything installed by default.
I must add, there is one exception to the “slow newb distro” that I have experienced first hand, and that is PCLinuxOS, I have used this distro and was very impressed with the speed.
I use Gentoo on 4 machines and Arch on one of my older machines and they are all on par with windows in the speed department.
These newcomers, who were they? Average joe’s and jane’s that just want to use their computer? Giving them Linux today is a bad idea.
But what’s really the problem is that you’ve been embarrased. People have said that they didn’t like “your choice” because it’s “bad”. You’ve been hurt. Too bad, it’s your own fault for promising them something they weren’t going to get. Linux’ issues are not a secret.
I on the other hand, just like many others, truely enjoy Linux. I realize that there’s plenty of room for improvement. But it feels like I’m part of that improvement. I don’t care if it takes another 10 years, because I’m doing it all for me and everyone else that appreciates it.
Those who don’t understand that we’re doing this for fun should just turn away. Seriously. Stop complaining that it’s taking 20 years. So f–king what?
Besides, you’re talking out of your ass. The desktop has not been a target for Linux for 20 years. Roughly since 2000 have people seriously began working on getting Linux suitable for the desktop. I’m sure Microsoft already targetted the desktop in 1990. That gives them 10 years head start.
And for Mr. Anonymous and everyone that agrees with him: Please, stay with Microsoft. You’re clearly someone who doesn’t understand what Open Source means.
And for Mr. Anonymous and everyone that agrees with him: Please, stay with Microsoft. You’re clearly someone who doesn’t understand what Open Source means.
You have no power to tell anybody to do anything. Once you realize that, you’ll be able to cope in real life better.
And the Linux community’s answer is “omfg fix it or use fluxbox and dillo!!!”. Ah thanks — switch to completely bare-bones software just to get the equivalent speed of Windows.
I prefer xcompmgr. Or XFCE (very full featured DE). But I see your point, its not like that by default.
The performance in gnome 2.12 is already pretty good. Especially if you have a graphic card with drivers that accelerates render (nvidia) and run it on xorg 6.9 cvs. It’s not as good as windows but still good and the next release will probably be even better since the development is now much focused on improving performance and decresing memory usage. The next release of cairo wil also improve things.
This has nothing to do with GNOME, has it? I think it is important to have a system that is also responsive without hardware rendering in the 3D-GPU. When we got that, we could makeing it even bether with GPU-rendering in GL.
I have gdesklets open with a lot of plugins, I even use transparancy (Composite).
I burn CD’s, have a lot of Firefox Windows open, shells, gaim, Rythembox, Evolution etc. and I never notice any performanceloss at all, my system always keeps responsive and it’s not that heavy (AMD Barton 2600 XP, GF6800GT)
When I used to run Windows XP only, I had to reinstall it after a few months of use because the more applications and games I installed and removed, the more bloated and unstable/unresponsive it became so formatting and reinstalling was the only option to get it fast, stable and responsive again like it was from the start.
I never had similar issues with slackware linux running gnome.
At this moment the Windows portion of my dualboot system doesn’t work anymore, it won’t boot anymore and sits there with a black screen, no error codes at all.
I’m sick of reinstalling it over and over again so i’ll keep it with Linux for the next couple of years
When I used to run Windows XP only, I had to reinstall it after a few months of use because the more applications and games I installed and removed, the more bloated and unstable/unresponsive it became so formatting and reinstalling was the only option to get it fast, stable and responsive again like it was from the start.
I never had similar issues with slackware linux running gnome.
Well, windows belongs in a category of its own. The more you use it the slower and crappier it gets and finally it wont even boot. Thankfully windows seems to be the only OS that has this feature.
after a few defrags, system cleans, no antivirus(!)… well it seems to work out ok
Anyway im using more and more my linux box (ubuntu 5.10RC dist-upgraded from 5.04 dist-upgraded from 4.10) lol… its a 1 year old system and it keeps getting faster.
really!
linux boot is slower… running some apps for the 1st time is slower… ui responsiveness is as snappy as in windows (i’m using gnome) BUT overaull the system feels MUCH faster because everything keeps running.
just the other day i was trying to scann my hdd for bad sectors in windows… gave up because xp totally locked up. switched to linux, started the scan and went on as if nothing was running.
Yea, first loads are slow because in order to load most apps it has to find all their shared libs and load those first. The bootup is slow because SysVinit is slow, and because there’s a lot of stuff that gets started up. You can get it to about the same time as XP boots in, but you have to sacrifice USB hotplug..
You’ve probably got a decent machine. Around the 1GHz mark is, for me, where you start to lose the feel for sluggishness in UI toolkits. On my 1800 Athlon I can’t tell that GTK is in anyway slow; on my Duron 1GHz I can tell a few things are slow (like showing complex ui frames when switching tabs), and on my 700 celeron I can tell all…
But, such is progress. You have to buy a new pc someday if you want the new toys!
Welcome to the unbiased GNOMEnews.com. The place where we talk about all types of Operating Systems, Desktop Environments …. but preferabely and mainly GNOME …. OSNews.com full of GNOME drones.
Is it possible for an article to be posted on OSNews without there being a string of comments along the lines of: “Oh noes, an article about Y! That reveals a clear bias against N!”
If one were to take all those comments at face value, they would probably conclude that OSNews is biased – both for and against – every single OS, software company, and open source development group in existence.
Analyzing and improving GNOME startup time is of course a fine thing to do but imo fixing all the issues inside GNOME should be much more of a priority than anything else. I think a few developers should start seeing the applications and the desktop as a whole and fix the half working stuff first. Different Toolbars are still an issue, not behaving to the ‘Toolbars & Menus’ capplet is an issue, having the applications permanently crash or not work correctly is an issue, having stuff like Evolution permanently trash the sync files including startup crashes, duplicate email entries and other things (in 3.4.0 release) should be addressed, making Nautilus become usable should be a priority thing, the logout lockup or freeze (for minutes) should be addressed and fixed (session manager). Make GStreamer work seamlessly with GNOME should be an priority thing and and and, the list can be expanded in so many areas which makes me wonder sometimes how people can get serious work done with GNOME. Take a look over to KDE for example, they are of course not perfect either but their list of true annoyances are at an minimum and permanent development and improvement addresses issues so they get fixed really fast. GNOME is a never ending pit full of issues which should be addressed. At it’s current state it never surpasses Windows 95 or any other Windows version nor is it in any competition with MacOSX or anything else.
Hmmm i’m using Dropline GNOME for quite some time right now and of course it has some issues but I never came across the ones you are describing, maybe it has been a long time ago since you last used gnome?
Btw. How on earth can you ever say that Windows 95 is better then GNOME at it’s current state???
Come on, I had to reboot Win95 twenty times a day because of system hangs and blue screens!
When Windows crashes everything is crashing including the kernel, which f*cks up your whole system in a matter of time.
When my X-Windows is crashing (and that is very rare) my Linux system is still up and running and within a few seconds i’m back to work.
Now that JPR gave over Evolution to some clueless morons they finally managed to break that damn thing entirely for me. I never have had any issues with Evolution in all the years I’ve been using it but now 3 weeks before they released 3.4.0 (also the time where JPR gave up on it (the only serious programmer working on Evolution)) the new maintainer managed to make a f–king mess out of it.
a) always desynced index files
b) duplicate entries in Evolution window
c) crashing of Evolution during startup (every now and then)
d) requires me to remove all index files manually
e) but they get trashed whenever I start Evolution again.
I filled bugreports for everything I found with 3.4.0 and all I got returned was rude comments by some guy. The desyncing errors and the permanent crashes and trashing of my serious data is so annoying and problematic that I start to consider switching to KMail or (KDE entirely).
I mean, speeding up GNOME startup time is indeed nice but what with usability. There is nothing much inside GNOME that works perfectly or satisfying enough to be considered serious.
Rhythmbox, once started as great application and now it lost totally against amaroK from KDE.
Planner is no where serious enough to be a serious MS Project replacement. It lacks so much it’s more a toy than a serious project planning application. Look over to TaskJuggler from KDE which in many areas is far supperior over MS Project.
Nautilus is more or less a f–king joke rather than a serious filemanager. I wonder why resources are still being blown into this.
Evolution as mentioned above is left to unskilled people. I don’t condemn those who don’t know it better but I condemn them for having trashed one of my primarily used applications.
There is so much, everything summed up would be easily filling a phonebook of annoyances, problems, trash, not working things. I wonder why GNOME is being paid so much attention for and I really wonder who the audience here is who regulary reply saying best words about GNOME while it’s nothing more than a broken Desktop Environment that shouldn’t be considered usable nor reliable.
Well I’ve read the presentation and there wasn’t too much in there. Setting goals like making Nautilus start < 0.5 seconds really doesn’t give you anything. I would expect that anyone could take shortcuts to make Nautilus start faster, but that wouldn’t give you the fundamental reasons why it doesn’t start that fast in the first place. It might also make things worse as development is added in the future.
No wonder there’s a car crash picture on as the first slide!
I never have had any issues with Evolution in all the years I’ve been using it but now 3 weeks before they released 3.4.0 (also the time where JPR gave up on it (the only serious programmer working on Evolution)) the new maintainer managed to make a f–king mess out of it.
The last time I used Evolution was circa 2001/2002. It was OK, made a decent Outlook replacement and worked fine. The UI responsiveness wasn’t top-notch (and I ran it in KDE sometimes as well) but it was a pretty good e-mail app. What’s happened in four years? I know the Groupwise integration didn’t go well, but surely it can’t have caused that.
Yer, JPR is a guy I rate. I didn’t know he’d stopped doing stuff with Evolution.
Nautilus is more or less a f–king joke rather than a serious filemanager. I wonder why resources are still being blown into this.
Considering that Eazel and others have pumped a lot into Nautilus over the years there doesn’t seem to have been much of a cumulative gain or anything to show for it.
Planner is no where serious enough to be a serious MS Project replacement. It lacks so much it’s more a toy than a serious project planning application.
I can speak from experience here and have gone into all the alternatives. I’ve needed a desktop alternative project planning tool and TaskJuggler wipes the floor with everything (including some commercial stuff). Planner is simply a Microsoft Project wannabe. I read an amusing openSUSE bug regarding TaskJuggler’s installation when using a Gnome desktop. Well, it’s your loss ;-).
I wonder why GNOME is being paid so much attention for and I really wonder who the audience here is who regulary reply saying best words about GNOME while it’s nothing more than a broken Desktop Environment
Well, it’s an open source world so you can’t say what should be given attention or not. However, for people looking for a reliable desktop they can actually move to, nine to five, five days a week, that’s a serious issue and on you simply cannot brush it off. Gnome just isn’t it as it stands, which isn’t great after all these years. KDE has some tidying up to do, and it is by no means perfect at all, but its technology actually largely works as advertised on the tin. Yes, you got blue screens etc. with Windows 95, but by and large, its technology, file manager etc. actually worked.
If you still want the gtk look, try Thunderbird or Sylpheed. Both are excellent and both address my major problem with evolution: memory utilization. Combined, evolution + evolution-data-server were chewing up >300 mb of memory for me. Thunderbird is still on the heavy side but it’s really an excellent app, better than evolution IMO in nearly all respects.
> Maybe it has been a long time ago since you last
> used gnome?
The GNOME I am refering to is the latest available from http://ftp.gnome.org as we speak now its 2.12.1
> Btw. How on earth can you ever say that Windows 95
> is better then GNOME at it’s current state???
I can because Windows works and has the necessary companies and powerful applications behind it. What exists for GNOME that could be compareable to what exists on Windows ?
> Come on, I had to reboot Win95 twenty times a day
> because of system hangs and blue screens!
That’s your experience. Maybe you shouldn’t be using a computer then ?
> When Windows crashes everything is crashing
> including the kernel, which f*cks up your whole
> system in a matter of time.
Stop trolling please. The problem you describe can be anything. Either it’s a not certified 3rd party driver or any hacked up Kernel thing also 3rd party.
> When my X-Windows is crashing (and that is very
> rare) my Linux system is still up and running and
> within a few seconds i’m back to work.
X-Windows is architecture independant. You can also run it on Solaris, BSD, Darwin and even Windows, Amiga and other architectures. Maybe X-Windows does crash so badly on Windows or AmigaOS that you need to reboot it too. Who knows. But since you talk about Linux you seem to have a small tunnel through what you look.
>I can because Windows works and has the necessary companies and powerful applications >behind it. What exists for GNOME that could be compareable to what exists on Windows ?
That’s unfair, you have to pay hunderds of dollars for good software on Windows, take MS Office as example, for that price I can buy myself a new computer.
OpenOffice is free and it’s comparable to MS Office 2003.
>That’s your experience. Maybe you shouldn’t be using a computer then ?
You know just like anybody else how unstable Win95 is.
And now, ten years further Windows has become more stable but it’s still suffering from the same problems we had with Windows95.
>Stop trolling please. The problem you describe can be anything. Either it’s a not certified 3rd >party driver or any hacked up Kernel thing also 3rd party.
lol, I always get that same excuse, its always a 3rd party driver or software that f–ks up my system.
If you only use Microsoft software it will never happen! Yeah right.
>But since you talk about Linux you seem to have a small tunnel through what you look.
“One of the reasons I’ve chosen KDE over gnome is just what the title(html) is. Gnome feels heavy. It’s a good system, stable, lots of features.”
Hmmm. This is very funny, as I’ve ALWAYS felt that KDE felt like it was bloated from the get go, and then at least, doubled the bloat with every release as they were, obviously, modelling after windows, which is why I went with GNOME.
“Every report I read about GNOME tells of brave new features, background indexing, etc If you want to run faster you need FEWER features not more of them. That way lies BLOAT, which is exactly the problem.”
Also, it would be VERY nice if they would finish those features BEFORE running along to even later and greater “features”. (This was one of my problems with GNOME, it always felt unfinished, and like KDE, but not to quite the same extent, seemed to bloat with every release.)
Solutions for me anyways:
For lowest resource requirements, I’d just go with CLI, but I usually don’t do this on anything other than pure servers, partially because of disk space(at one time) and the fact that I’d rarely, if ever, log into the actual console again once the system was up.
In an ultra low resource hogging environment, I’ll run fluxbox plus a few “helper” apps. (Also, pretty much requires to build your own desktop environment as it’s pretty spartan out of the box from CVS, which is good as you know exactly what is running, and presumably, exactly what you need to have running.)
In a more normal desktop environment where I want some speed and a decent looking/useful environment, I’ll go with xfce at significantly reduced resource costs v. KDE/GNOME but with a good chunk of the functionality of both. (Not to mention that recent xfce releases actually feel like they were finished, rather than just kicked out the door so that work on even more features could be started.) Xfce also comes with a nice standard configuration that should cover everything that most users would require… although I usually dump their filer for ROX filer, spatial is good.
I keep hearing people say gnome is bloated with out any proof what so ever. I guess you people dont compile then because the source code in 2.12 is smaller, yet more fuctional than 2.8.
Gnome-2.6
Control Center=2.6Mb
Nautilus=5.5Mb
Gedit=2.4Mb
Gnome panel=3.1Mb
————————–
Gnome-2.12
Control Center=1.8Mb
Nautilus=3.9Mb
Gedit=2Mb
Gnome panel=2.3Mb
————————–
Speed and bloat are two different things and as you can see, gnome is not bloated considering more fuctionallity in 2.12.
“omg MS sucks windows is slow bloated and crashes and is full of security holes. use linux!!!!11”
“But what about the fact that it’s much slower, there are still many bugs in the major apps, and there are have been many security holes in Firefox?”
“FIX IT URSELF!!!”
And hence Linux’s absolute miniscule market share, after 15 YEARS of development. When you people actually understand what people WANT, and you can’t just throw it back in their face when you advocate it, who knows — maybe 2016 will be the “Linux year of the desktop”.
Until then, the great ideas behind open source are wasted by a bunch of sloppily-coding bloatware meisters who just blame anyone and anything else when there are serious problems…
Don’t take me wrong – The Bazaar and the Cathedral shows you that opensource is a way to collaborate in your coding project that worked well with the Linux kernel( and do work nowadays also). Do not blah blah, do something. This was actually not pointed to the end users – it was for hackers.
Could you stop trolling? you post ALWAYS THE SAME MESSAGE in every Gnome thread, no matter if it talks of gnome startup time or it is a release announcement, if it is an interview with a developer or a review!
Had you tried to read the presentation, you would have noticed that Federico Mena-Quintero worked on optimizing gtk+ and pango, in order to achieve an overall improvement of Gnome responsiveness, a MEASURABLE improvement, for example making the file-selector appear in less than 0.1s instead of 1s.
Instead you whine about startup time efforts and evolution 3.4 (to be released in 2008, probably) always crashing. WTF?
Points 1 – 5 usually ends in flamewars, you being called by names, you getting inflamatory responses, you are considered being a troll. Don’t you think these things has been tried before ? In all the years I tried seriously contributing to GNOME it usually ends up like this. Most of the GNOMER’s are inflamatory shitheads and huge assholes by showing huge egos. If it’s not done by them or if they can’t piss off someone then it’s probably not a good day for them.
> Instead you whine about startup time efforts and
> evolution 3.4 (to be released in 2008, probably)
> always crashing. WTF?
You might have figured out already that 3.4 could have been a typo ? But then I don’t whine about startup time efforts. I am simply a pissed off user and developer who is sick seeing how GNOME is being made a totally great Desktop Environment in the public by bullshit talks while in reality it’s a big mess for the majority of really serious users.
I believe that talking about startup time is a good thing but I also know that startup times are just the wrong thing to solve first. Primarily it would have helped more if they would start solving all the garbage and leftovers in GNOME to make it suck a lot less.
I’d also like to make a point and latency. Latency is a big problem in the kernel but thankfully 2.6.13 uses Preemption model to reduce it on the desktop. Distro kernels dont always use these features and seem less responsive. Xcompmgr in gnome leaves some trialed shadows when minimising a windows, gnome fault, xcompmgr fault?, no it’s latency in the kernel. If you use a -ck patched kernel which is tuned for the desktop then you’ll see it dont have this problem.
Who do you blame?, well in this instance the kernel latency and the gnome UI code.
Haha! The slides are entertaining. I, especially, love the quotes from osnews. They made me laugh. Federico is my admirer. I love reading his blogs and I appreciate his contributions to GNOME and GTK+. He also seems to be a level headed person.
Really. KDE3 used to be very slow and pretty unresponsive at its introduction. But as the 3-series evolved, it got faster with every major release(as in 3.1, 3.2, etc), while the number of major features added was relatively small. Of course the individual applications did change a lot, but KDE (and Qt) as a whole only went through a bunch of optimisations. I think that is why KDE feels way more responsive than Gnome nowadays.
Of course KDE has the advantage of a commercial organisation who is developing the toolkit. But then again, Gnome also seems to have a lot of support from the enterprises. Why don’t they pay people to optimise GTK, Gnome and especially Metacity?
Metacity may be the weakest link in the chain. Try to replace it with another WM and you’ll see a lot of sluggishness vanish.
Of course KDE has the advantage of a commercial organisation who is developing the toolkit. But then again, Gnome also seems to have a lot of support from the enterprises. Why don’t they pay people to optimise GTK, Gnome and especially Metacity?
Simply put, it’s not economically viable. You’re not going to see Sun, Red Hat or Novell doing this. The people working full-time on Gnome in these organisations are as overworked as it is keeping things like Gnome Terminal maintained – something that doesn’t even directly make any money for Red Hat! Does anyone really expect them to employ a whole division, putting in huge amounts of resources and chasing shadows simply to do nothing but optimisation work on something they don’t directly make any money out of? Look at Novell in particular that is coming under quite a bit of investor pressure.
This kind of work takes huge resources – unless you have well designed software to start off with ;-). Microsoft has had years of people working full-time, full-on, doing nothing but optimisation and QC work for Windows. It’s a truly thankless and frustrating task. Windows, as Gnome and the ‘Linux OS’ is, is a hugely complex piece of software. Does anyone seriously see this being done for Gnome after the years of developer resources, time and money it has consumed in these organisations and how overworked the developers are right now with stuff that has zero direct return for their employers?
At least this guy is introducing some method into the madness.
MS, hate them or hate them, introduced this years, if not decades ago. They stated that after a product ships a whole new team sets to work on it to optimize it. So Win95 (see Webster’s under suckage) begats countless tweaks (4 gens of ’95 alone, 98, 98SE, ME) each of which is hugely better than the original — yet the feature set is not much different.
Clearly the GNOME people need to do this also — form a separate group who have a single purpose of tweaking/refining/improving what has been shipped. Yes it would be nice if the big brains of core development take what they say to heart, but if not then at least there is an optimized product in addition to a bleeding edge one.
As to XP being somehow less load capable, I can’t agree with this. I regularly copy multi GB of data, without any performance hits at all. I set up a batch file (like last night) to encode 10’s of GB of WAVs into MP3s and there is no hit at all — admittedly due to Intel’s hyperthreading + nice lame coding. My “resting state” of XP is with a dozen programs running. I am quite willing to bet that those complaining about slow XP after use of a program are referring, specifically and only, to a game. Games are resource hungry like Madonna is camera hungry. Personally I don’t run them, 48 years on this planet + almost 30 years of computing and you’d grow out of them too.
And the guy complaining about trying to find bad sectors slowing down XP is comical. First, this can only be usefully done outside of the GUI, at the Recovery Console. Second, things slow down when you have bad sectors — that IS the sign — as the OS takes this seriously enough to try, try, try again to save those writes it has pending. Novell Netware comes almost to a halt under the same situation, btw.
Bottom line: GNOME has grown like topsy and is now embarassing. At least one person of influence on this planet has taken a few steps to fix it. More are needed because more are always needed. Only real solution is to institutionalize optimization …as MS has.
“So Win95 (see Webster’s under suckage) begats countless tweaks (4 gens of ’95 alone, 98, 98SE, ME) each of which is hugely better than the original”
*COUGH COUGH* excuse me? Even the most rabid Microsoft fan would have a hard time arguing that ME wasn’t a half-hearted mistake of an OS that even a mother couldn’t love. It was light years worse than 98.
While I am not about to defend ME (I was a 98SE man, before the move to XP), ME was much better than 95 and 98. And ME still has a life today. One of the 5 computers in this household still runs it — with 128MB of RAM it won’t run other things very well, and that is what was on it when someone gave the computer to us. We can (and do) watch DVDs, AVIs, rip AVIs, rip MP3s, etc. on ME. And play all those games (and MAMEs) that don’t run on XP.
ME had 1 main fault, and 3 deliberate negative tweaks.
(1) It suffered as all non-NT/2000/XP MS GUIs suffered from limited ‘System Resources’, a deliberate crippling of the OS that absolutely forced people to move to NT/2000/XP. 95 extended the sizes of a couple of key SysRes areas …enough to get people to move from Win 3.1, but SysRes was the ultimate reason why ‘old Windows’ died.
(2a) They turned on “Fast Find” (which should have been called FFF, with the expletive pre-pended) and this caused the system to be 10 to 15% slower than 98SE. Designed to make Win2000 seem almost acceptable, speed-wise.
(2b) The default IE cache size was 10% of your hard drive, and this led to caches having up to 25,000 files in them — with the big problem being that Wn9x/ME could not handle more than about 50,000 to 60,000 files, total. Try it. [By the way, just deleting those files on a friend’s computer took 20 minutes!]
(2c) System Restore debuted with ME and while it can save your bacon at times, it is both a disk space and performance hog.
Turn off F’n Fast Find and System Restore (or set SysRestore to a very small diskspace footprint), then shrink the IE cache to 5 or 10MB, and you have a perfectly usable OS — for the “one app at a time” usage of the average person.
But no, there was nothing “half hearted” about ME.
It was a carefully crafted OS that improved on 98SE a bit but also stunted/crippled the OS enough that the average dumb user would think they had to move to XP. And it _was_ time to move. I dragged my feet moving from 98SE to XP as long as possible, but was soon very much at home on XP and now I won’t install a lesser Windows OS.
P.S. I am willing to bet that Vista will be equally crafty, offering benefits like very quick reinstalls via the new ‘image’ approach to the OS, even better graphics for gamers, and security changes and tweaks that make XP seem a bit broken.
P.P.S. Back to GNOME/Linux, I think both are at a crossroads in that Linux used to be able to brag about being the best OS for a low-end computer but now needs a new image. Linux needs to reinvent itself — is it a superior OS (certainly could be), is it a great lean OS (make it so with much better optimizations), is it a universal OS (market the core product more, and fight less about the different versions of Linux).
> Could you stop trolling? you post ALWAYS THE SAME MESSAGE in every Gnome thread, no matter if it talks of gnome startup time or it is a release announcement, if it is an interview with a developer or a review!
> To prevent his comments from disappearing he even
> posts them multiple times to the same news.
The comments had to be reposted multiple times (and honestly the contents was more than accurate and correct and valid) but some asshole moderator did
a) removed them (not just moderated them down)
b) some moron users who felt offended (assholes like you primarily) kept moderating valid arguments down. but not because they might be technical wrong, no because they felt insulted in general because someone said something bad (or the turth) about GNOME.
Feel free to moderate my comments down. I spent a lot of my spare free time supporting GNOME in the past and I know how the thing really is and how it’s in real life. All the good bits and bites like a) contribute code, b) talk with developers, c) fill in bugreports and many more I’ve done over and over. It only results in offending responses and asshole behavior of the majority of GNOME people. Sick dumb jerks that behave friendly in the public that have nothing better to do than promote and sell GNOME as the ultimative solution, while it’s horrible broken, useless and just a waste of time. It only causes dozens of ‘Linux not ready for the Desktop’ articles show up over and over again. GNOME is useless get it finally!
…and everybody knows that but to say that you have to close things down when installing is a load of crap. I have Windows XP installed on a machine and it is blazing fast. Just a few days ago I was downloading some drivers, surfing the web, burning a cd, and installing programs and I was running quite fine with no lag or anything like that. I dont know where people get these ideas from.
Yes Linux is badass and can handle insane loads because I have experienced that and Windows cannot compare to that…but that does not mean XP is a slouch.
And if you tweak XP…then it definitely aint to slouch either. Heck after tweaking I dont have problems like ending up with a sluggish system after a few days of usage ever! You just gotta know what you are doing in XP to get the max benefit and the same goes for Linux as well. But yes the bottomline is Linux > XP in terms of stability and multitasking insane loads.
> To prevent his comments from disappearing he even
> posts them multiple times to the same news.
The comments had to be reposted multiple times (and honestly the contents was more than accurate and correct and valid) but some asshole moderator did
a) removed them (not just moderated them down)
b) some moron users who felt offended (assholes like you primarily) kept moderating valid arguments down. but not because they might be technical wrong, no because they felt insulted in general because someone said something bad (or the turth) about GNOME.
Feel free to moderate my comments down. I spent a lot of my spare free time supporting GNOME in the past and I know how the thing really is and how it’s in real life. All the good bits and bites like a) contribute code, b) talk with developers, c) fill in bugreports and many more I’ve done over and over. It only results in offending responses and asshole behavior of the majority of GNOME people. Sick dumb jerks that behave friendly in the public that have nothing better to do than promote and sell GNOME as the ultimative solution, while it’s horrible broken, useless and just a waste of time. It only causes dozens of ‘Linux not ready for the Desktop’ articles show up over and over again. GNOME is useless get it finally!
Is it just me or does the example in the above slide make GNOME/GTK software design look very bad? I mean why would a programmer, or the software if it’s done automatically, load and process something which isn’t actually needed at all?
When you’re writing Object Oriented code you have a lot of methods, which are basicly just loops of code that call eachother. Its very easy to call extra loops of code that perform several extra operations you might not have meant to perform at that time. But the loss of performance is usually acceptable vs. the loss of time writing and organizing that much code in a structured program. Plus OO code is easy to maintain, so eventuall you will find the time to go back and fix all the extra loops.
So that’s all we’re seeing here. Extra bloat because the genius who designed it wasn’t smoking enough hash to bother fully exploring their own software. These things take time and a lot of creativity. If you’re just doing it as a job you might as well be flippin burgers. We’re going to have to do it over and over and over again until we get it right.
Well said. It’s amazing how ignorant and arrogant users are with regards to software development. The reality is that, nobody gets it right the first time for any sizable project. I don’t know anyone who begins writing a program thinking, “Geez, this has to be fast.” Its more like, “I hope this shit works.” And if it does work, consider yourself blessed. It’s hard enough getting a program to work correctly, talk less about optimizing it for some looser who’s still gonna whine about it being slow anyway.
It’s an ugly world of tradeoffs with a never ending supply of variables that can go wrong. It’s like throwing more balls at a juggler and insisting he juggles faster. Something has to give.
Er, GNOME has been around for, like, SIX YEARS or so. Would you give the same apology to a Microsoft product that still had major flaws and design issues after six years? Of course not.
It’s just like Linux — people say “Oh, it’s a new OS and the problems will be fixed soon.” Er, Linux has been around since 1991, and GNU since 1984.
You’d think after 15-20 YEARS of STILL not being able to make a fast, light, easy and friendly OS, people would be focusing their efforts elsewhere.
GNOME and most other OSS projects have been more focused on adding features, than speeding things up. As has already been said, optimizing existing code isn’t a sexy or easy task.
On the other hand, GNOME runs mighty fine on my P4 1.8 GHz desktop at work.
At least its a Novell guy and not some Sun guy pointing out our flaws. We got to kick those Sun guy’s asses and fix their broken GNOME.
Go git ’em tiger! Rawr!
KDE and GNOME have already shown significant improvements in performance, but now they need to get serious about it if they’re serious about being a major player on Everybody’s Desktop.
Why is everyone comparing *Linux* and *Windows*? The article is about Gnome, ffs! Yes, Linux is very good at multitasking and handling big loads, but it is one of the two mayor Desktop Enviroments this article is about.
It’s sad that everybody just starts to flame aorund for no apparent reason. Even the Gnome devs admits that this is a problem, and are thus doing something about it, wich is great. Do you Gnome-zealots think they just went “Hey, all those KDE and Windows trolls are going on about how Gnome is so slow. There really isn’t a problem, but let’s put a lot of energy and resources into to improving something that is already perfect”.
What a timely article. I’ve been on windows forever, and I still use it for games, and development on my laptop. After I got back from the Ohio Linuxfest, I installed Ubuntu 5.04. After trying it and it’s KDE install, I much prefer Gnome, at least on this dist. It’s much cleaner, and doens’t have the 40 pounds of KDE app weight taggind along. It’s even more funny since I’ve always been a KDE person on my FreeBSD installs.
I’m going to try this now, I’ve long been frustrated with gprof’s inability to be useful… I don’t like building static binaries just to profile them, and still be unable to profile my dynamic libraries…
Well for me it was exactly the other way around. I converted from GNOME to KDE and I very well believe that you will soon get back to KDE on your own once you notice all the mess inside GNOME.
For me the choice for KDE came because I needed quality software that could easily keep up with commercial products found on Windows.
I wanted to do some UML stuff and wasn’t able to find a matching GNOME application but KDE had one which was called Umbrello.
I also needed to paint computer related stuff ISO conform but DIA was way to buggy, ugly and not really working for GNOME so I used Kivio as free alternative for KDE.
Later on I was put in the place as a project leader at my company and had to admin some projects but there was no software for GNOME. Well not entirely true there was Planner but it was horrible unusable and not satisfying enough to be professional so I sticked with TaskJuggler which I was introduced to on KDE. It’s quite astonishing how great this application is and in many areas beats Microsoft Project.
I am also involved into electronics engineering (another part of what I do) and had to simulate electronic components but again I wasn’t able to find anything usable for GNOME but on KDE there was this KTechlab application which is quite similar to Electronics Workbench for Windows.
This only a handful of really cool applications that every serious person may be missing. Since GNOME claims for the corporate, I must ask where all these applications are. KDE does offer all these tools and they perfectly and nicely integrate with KDE.
There are a lot of other things such as the KDE Education software package, the nice IDE for KDE, nice Webdevel package and the very nice Koffice package with a lot of powerful and complete programs. Everything really missing on GNOME. It continues with perfectly nice PIM and much more.
For the entertainment you have cool stuff like amaroK and K3b. There is nothing halfway compareable for GNOME existing. I mean seriously. GNOME is so far behind, not just from the architecture and brokenes, it’s also miles away from professional working applications. All this already exists for KDE today.
I think there’s a nice side on both. There are some problems with the KDE projects IMO:
1.) Their .0 releases are almost unusable. This is probably because of the year release cycle, and I think they have a pretty short freeze time at the end.
2.) They’ve got a bunch of work coming up ahead. 4 could be killer, or a total crappiere.
Gnome is pretty steady and slow about changing. Their UI is usually a LOT easier to figure out.
I just started using gtk 2.8.x today, and I don’t feel any slowness at all on an athlon 1800.
I still miss the old file chooser though… I don’t care how snappy the new one gets, I wanna type into it!
Let me take on the flaws in your comments. For one what about rhythmbox with nautilus burn, it burns iso’s as well as music now with the need of a chunk of k3b on the screen next to Amarok. Screem for web developement, Abiword for writing docs because koffice is just broken when it comes to formats and puts PDF right where you cannot find it.
KDE is nice but it’s interface compared to gnome is huge, gnome always has had a simple UI and KDE it just like Windows. I keep saying it but KDE is just like Windows, gnome has a bold and simple why of doing things, just like the gnome panel on the top. I forget to mension Arts, what a broken peace of crap that is, even the devs say it needs redesigning and lots of work. Most people like KDE because it’s close to Windows, gnome on the other hand is minimal and simple, not big space hoggin desktop manager, is OSX like KDE, NO.
I know a lot of people who started Linux by using GNOME and once they have been shown the most issues found on GNOME they came up asking me what else there was they can use.
I introduced them to KDE (also done so at my faculty and later on in the company that I was working) and they were totally impressed by the flexibility, integration, cleanness and the professional applications found under KDE.
None of them who I have shown KDE turned back towards GNOME or anything else. Most of them have told me how thankful they were because I told them about the issues and opened their eyes. Some spent me a coffee and others even spent me a meal during lunchtime at work because they can finally use a working desktop and get their work done.
Some of them are still asking me the one or other question about KDE but most of the stuff they found out on their own because of the flexibility and high configurability that KDE offers. Everyone was able to style and customize their KDE the way they want.
> For one what about rhythmbox with nautilus burn, it
> burns iso’s as well as music now with the need of a
> chunk of k3b on the screen next to Amarok.
Right and that’s almost all of it. At least I get a pretty decent and really awesome media player with amaroK and a great burning app with K3b. So how great is Rhythmbox ? It basicly does nothing else than playing some tunes and even this it doesn’t do right. And where is the great burning app for GNOME ? They don’t exists. After Rhythmbox there was half a dozen attempts to make a halfway usable media player for GNOME and they all failed. I don’t say that there wasn’t some bad attempts for KDE either but look how fast amaroK progresses and becomes better compared to the stagnation you find on GNOME.
> Screem for web developement, Abiword for writing
> docs because koffice is just broken when it comes
> to formats and puts PDF right where you cannot find
> it.
Screem and Abiword (and let’s include Gnumeric) doesn’t make a full GNOME office suite. Koffice is by far more than that. It offers a presentation program, a document writing program, a spreadsheet program, a project managment program, a cool image manipulation program, a flowchart program and many more. Most of these applications share the same office architecture and supports the new open document format and the best, they fully integrate into KDE.
> KDE is nice but it’s interface compared to gnome is
> huge, gnome always has had a simple UI and KDE it
> just like Windows. I keep saying it but KDE is just
> like Windows.
You only demonstrate how much you don’t know about Windows. You compare KDE (a Desktop Environment) with the whole OS that Windows is. Windows is even more than KDE. If you look on Windows 2003 Server for example, then you can play with nice things such as Active Directory, deal with Grouprights and Userstuff, use the Microsoft Management Console and many other things. KDE also doesn’t share the view of Microsoft Windows. The only similar thing that might conclude to this is the K Menu at the bottom left inside the panel and that’s almost all. The entire looks of Desktops hasn’t changed much nor has it been inovated by anything. You can say what you want but KDE’s interface at least looks coherent and consistent across most KDE applications. The benefits of KDE here is that it’s designed in OOP and thus it’s easier to have everything look similar, with similar functionality and keycuts.
> gnome has a bold and simple why of doing things,
Right, because there isn’t much apps existing. I know GNOME very good and I know most applications and besides a few exceptions the majority of apps should be avoided by any means. If you go back to my initial reply to the ‘converted to GNOME from KDE’ comment above (see my IP) then you understand that GNOME still lacks a lot of professional applications.
> just like the gnome panel on the top. I forget to
> mension Arts, what a broken peace of crap that is,
> even the devs say it needs redesigning and lots of
> work.
Of course Arts is broken and good that you mention Arts. If you look close to the code of Arts then you figure out that it was written by GNOME folks, it uses heavy Glib functioncalls, was written by a GNOME’r for GNOME in former times. Another proof of concept how much garbage comes from GNOME.
> Most people like KDE because it’s close to Windows,
Most people like KDE because they get their work done. Because the necessary applications exists, because KDE looks great and integrates perfectly, because it’s designed properly and offers a lot of configurability, flexibility and expandability.
> gnome on the other hand is minimal and simple, not
> big space hoggin desktop manager, is OSX like KDE,
> NO.
Ok I think you need to get some basic knowledge what you are talking about.
GNOME is not minimal and neither simple. Have you ever tried explaining some new users howto change the color of GTK+ windows, or how to change GConf keys or other things. Most developers don’t even respond to users questions anymore because it’s to troublesome to explain to them. GNOME is also not compareable to OSX because GNOME is lacking a lot of OSX’s functionality. It starts from lack of having a good framework, it lacks from the new process sharing that OSX offers, the new ACL stuff that OSX offers, the Kernel plugin system that OSX now offers, lack of UTI’s and much much more. Something you easily overlook because you don’t know what you are talking about.
KDE is also no desktop hog as you want to make it look like.
GNOME fully installed (through one of the existing GNOME buildscripts) + Firefox + Evolution + Abiword is around 670 mb stripped binaries + data + devstuff (which of course gets installed if you compile from sources)
KDE fully installed (through one of the existing KDE buildscripts) is around 750 mb stripped binaries + data + devstuff (which of course gets installed if you compile from sources). This sounds like a huge waste but isn’t. You get far more out of it, far more tools, far more really usable programs. And the stuff usually works perfectly and as said above and I will repeat it again.
For me the choice for KDE came because I needed quality software that could easily keep up with commercial products found on Windows.
I wanted to do some UML stuff and wasn’t able to find a matching GNOME application but KDE had one which was called Umbrello.
I also needed to paint computer related stuff ISO conform but DIA was way to buggy, ugly and not really working for GNOME so I used Kivio as free alternative for KDE.
Later on I was put in the place as a project leader at my company and had to admin some projects but there was no software for GNOME. Well not entirely true there was Planner but it was horrible unusable and not satisfying enough to be professional so I sticked with TaskJuggler which I was introduced to on KDE. It’s quite astonishing how great this application is and in many areas beats Microsoft Project.
I am also involved into electronics engineering (another part of what I do) and had to simulate electronic components but again I wasn’t able to find anything usable for GNOME but on KDE there was this KTechlab application which is quite similar to Electronics Workbench for Windows.
This only a handful of really cool applications that every serious person may be missing. Since GNOME claims for the corporate, I must ask where all these applications are. KDE does offer all these tools and they perfectly and nicely integrate with KDE.
There are a lot of other things such as the KDE Education software package, the nice IDE for KDE, nice Webdevel package and the very nice Koffice package with a lot of powerful and complete programs. Everything really missing on GNOME. It continues with perfectly nice PIM and much more.
For the entertainment you have cool stuff like amaroK and K3b. There is nothing halfway compareable for GNOME existing. I mean seriously. GNOME is so far behind, not just from the architecture and brokenes, it’s also miles away from professional working applications. All this already exists for KDE today.
Some of your comments are wrong, since when just because someone dont finish a app or dont have time, does it become a gnome bashing match?
Amarok is a great application with constant development, why is that a gnome issue?, since thats what your saying. Rhythmbox has intergrated cd writing with nautilus, dbus, ipod support and simple serching. Gnome also has graveman If you want a burning application, but your making out that gnome is just useless. The point I was making is that gnome has a minial UI, launch Amarok and K3b together and it takes up your entire screen, rhythmbox, banshee dont do that.
Stop bashing gnome projects based on peoples time scale .Amarok is a good application because it’s developed well, not because KDE is any better or worse then gnome.
Yeah, metacity does suck and so does Gnome terminal. You just can’t get around it.
KDE is a better desktop environment, but I tend to use a lot of Gnome/gtk+ apps.
KDE is faster than Gnome. But I find XP to be faster than both. Frankly, I see a future for something other than either Gnome or KDE. Neither of them really attracted many people except for some geeks.
Always funny.. Of there’s an article about GNOME we can be sure lots of people will discuss Linux. Actually I use GNOME on FreeBSD and I am happy with it. And GNOME can run on [allmost] all UNIX platforms. I agree that it would be better to choose another default WM.
I can run 30+ apps in Linux and not even notice it. On the same machine running Windows, the UI tends to freeze up for a few seconds under heavy load. The taskbar won’t respond, windows won’t move. Windows will often complain that an application “does not respond”. Sure, Windows is fast. But that changes quickly when you start 3D Studio Max, Photoshop, and Unreal Editor 3.0. And that’s just three stupid apps.
I’m running 6 instances of Sony Vegas 6 (two of them rendering memory and CPU-hungry projects), additionally there is Photoshop 7, multiple copies of Firefox, VirtualDub, and other tools opened. Also there is a Quake3 window minimized and Nero burning the DVDRW. My Win2K system is absolutely smooth and responsive, as usual, under any load.
You are mixing up two things. Linux is a kernel, it is much more efficient at handling load when compared to windows xp.
Really? Maybe you can provide some facts? I feel the NT kernel handles the load very effectively.
That’s unfair, you have to pay hunderds of dollars for good software on Windows, take MS Office as example, for that price I can buy myself a new computer.
OpenOffice is free and it’s comparable to MS Office 2003.
and if you refute that you are completely full of shit. XP screems compaired to gnome or kde on the same hardware. Will that be remedied some day? I certainly believe so. I still use gnome 40hrs a week because its a great desktop for doing development work. Linux owns on the server as well. But for general home desktop usage gnome/kde are just to annoyingly sluggish to ignore.
KDE is pretty. But I can’t get around in it without using the mouse for nearly *everything*.
I’ve been using Linux for a long time, and while I’ve done my time configuring fvwm and blackbox, Gnome on a system with sufficient ram has actually saved me more time because I already know all the common windows shortcut keys: alt-tab, control-page-up for tabs, alt-space for window menu…
These are BIG time savers. Especially if you have a multiple desktops with a pile of multi-tabbed gnome-terms in each of them.
I DONT HAVE THE TIME TO SPEND LEARNING ANOTHER KEYSTROKE SYSTEM. I’d reconsider KDE if I knew the keystrokes. In the meantime, I get a LOT of work done with Gnome.
Some things that piss me off about gnome tho:
– rhythmbox: POS memory holes.
– gnome-terminal: transparent background refreshing can hang your session
– nautilus: nautilus is not any more stable than windows explorer and I find the CLI more useful anyhow.
– eog: using windows image previewer is much faster to use, it saves A LOT more keystrokes. eog used to be a big POS now it’s just mediocre. Watch your memory, and kill -9 eog when you see it slipping!
> Some of your comments are wrong, since when just
> because someone dont finish a app or dont have
> time, does it become a gnome bashing match?
I think the majority of people have been waiting long enough now. If those people can’t finish an application then they shouldn’t start a new one. A few of the RB clones has been started by people who initially worked on RB. So this either means RB sucks donkey balls or their initial approach was wrong.
> Amarok is a great application with constant
> development, why is that a gnome issue?, since
> thats what your saying.
I don’t say this is a GNOME issue, I only said that you can expect working and cool applications on KDE. This is valid because KDE is based upon OOP and has the better architecture. Good architecture usually leads in rapid application development.
> Rhythmbox has intergrated cd writing with nautilus,
> dbus, ipod support and simple serching.
Rhythmbox has no integrated CD writing capabilities, sure it has been hacked the way so it works somehow but the approach sucks badly. That’s one of the problems of the GNOME architecture. It’s hacked the way around it so it works somehow. But it hasn’t been hacked with brains so it might work with other things as well. About dbus and ipod or simple searching, no one gives a flying f–k for dbus if the entire application Rhythmbox as is doesn’t work properly enough for the simple task it was aimed for – playing music, giving feedback about artists, duration, genere, cover manager etc. (RB was aimed to be some sort of amaroK years ago).
> Gnome also has graveman If you want a burning
> application, but your making out that gnome is just
> useless.
GNOME pretty much is useless. I don’t have to burn CD’s or play music every day. You only junped on the part with CD burning and music playing and ignored all the rest of what I said about project management applications, presentation applications, uml creating applications and and and.
> The point I was making is that gnome has a minial
> UI, launch Amarok and K3b together and it takes up
> your entire screen, rhythmbox, banshee dont do
> that.
But this isn’t the point.
> Stop bashing gnome projects based on peoples time
> scale .Amarok is a good application because it’s
> developed well, not because KDE is any better or
> worse then gnome.
In what way are these two sentences related ? But besides that KDE is better than GNOME due to better framework and architecture. Something that has been repeated for years but still hasn’t reached you as it seems.
Why must you always pollute GNOME threads with your KDE zealotry Ali! All what you say are nothing but lies, and yet you insist on shaming the remaining dignity you have left and trolling like a mindless beast.
You say Rythmbox sucks. Well you suck! Use the million and one other music players available for GNOME and GTK+. I’m sick and tired of hearing your retarded banter.
KDE is not better than GNOME. It does not have a better Architecture, and it does not have better hackers. It is simply an alternative destkop env that some people appreciate while many others don’t. Just stop shoving your insulting opinions down my throat. And stop calling me an idiot for loving GNOME. If you don’t like GNOME, f–k off. This is a GNOME thread, not a KDE promotion arena.
I never heard such bullshit, I must say that your aproach to answering my questions sounds factual but masked as nonsence.
What part of rhythmbox uses nautilus cd burning do you not understand?. Amaork “K3B (CD-burning) integration” It’s not intergration is it, since ot just puts the files into k3b like you would launch k3b anyway.
Rhythmbox has resumed developement (0.9.0) and his alot more features including cd burning intergration. All it does is bring up a small dialog box for burning your music with nautilus cd burner.
If you dont like gnome so much why on earth bother commenting at all?. It’s obvious you have no input to gnome other than to piss all over it. People like you make me sick, what are you a KDE dev? because last time I spoke to one she sounded just like you.
I was running a very graphics intensive Swing app on an eight screen display setup at work and it was chronically slow despite all sorts of optimizations. Eventually I started thinking that it was just Swing being cludgy because of all the widget rendering it was doing and started to think about rewriting the whole thing in SWT. Then Nautilous started crashing and taking everything with it. I had thought about running things under KDE, but figured it had as much baggage as Gnome so I decided to try a lightweight window manager, WindowMaker. The initial intention was to avoid a crashing desktop, but i was amazed to find that my hitherto cludgy Swing app started running very smoothly. My users went from regularly cursing me and my app to “works fine, haven’t had any problems”.
Since then I’ve used WindowMaker for my general work and love it. I had recently upgraded my motherboard on my old clunker at home so I could run Eclipse without chugging, but was disappointed that it was still not as crisp as on my Windoze box at work. Under WMaker, though, it’s very smooth. The irony is that Eclipse uses the GTK native widget set, but runs slower under Gnome. Go figure.
There are problems with my WMaker experience. KMail doesn’t startup right. Downloading pictures from my camera is a hassle. But I’m almost willing to give up some of my Gnome / KDE dependent apps just to have everything run crisply the way it should on my new hardware.
Face the truth: pretty much everything associated with desktop Linux is dog slow. Disk access is slow. Screen updates are slow. It’s been this way for the past couple of decades. The reason is obvious but no one dares acknowledge it: most of the work in desktop Linux is done by second rate programmers. The wannabes who dream of being the best in the world but fail miserable at it while turning out page after page of bloated code.
Just woke up and had a perfect sleep. Ok now replying to some people here.
(IP: 164.8.213.—) and (IP: 62.254.0.—)
Thanks of you both for replying to me but does it have an intend to skip nearly 80% of what I wrote initially ?
First of all I am not hyping KDE here, no! I am only trying to make people realize how bad GNOME is and this on a GNOME zealotry site such as OSNews.com. So it’s not a KDE hyping, it’s more a GNOME bashing and it suits perfectly in a GNOME related thread where people keep exchanging arguments that not only startuptimes are the cause of GNOME’s problems but also the bad architecture of GNOME itself.
Thanks for skipping all the nice other tools that I was refering to such as:
Dia vs. Umbrello
Dia vs. Kivio
Planner vs. TaskJuggler
GnomeOffice vs. KDE Office
And the rest of the stuff that I mentioned. Instead giving a constructive feedback you both kept jumping on Rhythmbox and the CD burning app but this was just not my point. Who cares if you can burn a CD right out of Rhythmbox into Nautilus if both apps are in no ways trustable or compareable ? Besides this I also didn’t said that Rhythmbox sucks or something. I only said that it’s by far inferior if you compare it with amaroK.
Of course GNOME is by far inferior to KDE. GNOME is simply said – broken ! In all the years I found myself trapped in the illusion that GNOME is a cool desktop environment but the reality (the reality with KDE) has shown that it’s not. What does actually work with GNOME ? Nothing works anywhere usable to be considered corporate or good enough for the users. It’s still having this hacking mentality applied to it. Copying large chunks of files from ftp to your desktop is still broken, copying null byte files is still possible. Who is trusting such a desktop who can’t guarantee basic stuff to work ok ? Gstreamer still being used but avoided by RB and Totem they still offer Xine as option (maybe it’s still default). Evolution keep desyncinc with the index files and break them. Dia (which I will respond later on) is still to f–king broken to paint anything worth while for university or your company. Printing is too broken to be taken serious. If you print one page out of a 20 pages document using Evince you end up having that one page look differently due to different font than the rest of the pages (there is a bugreport for that). You still can not log out of GNOME with that broken session manager who usually keeps you locked for minutes.
And many many more. Way to much if you ask me. Of course the KDE developers are cooking with water too and so do the GNOME developers. But I believe that the OOP design of KDE and the well thought architecture makes it possible for them to achieve more in a shorter time. The stuff they create usually works and make sense. Sure not everything is perfect on KDE (does anything perfect exists ?) but the annoyances on KDE are far less than on GNOME and this fact is rewarded to KDE with huge numbers of users. GNOME’s second problem (primary is the broken framework of GNOME, secondary is the huge egos of many developers) is the community. You can’t compare the KDE community with the GNOME community. It’s like two different worlds met each other. While I recall huge inflamatory, slandering and highly offensive and insulting comments coming from GNOME and primarily developers which makes it nearly impossible to
a) contribute to GNOME
b) talk with developers
c) exchange experiences
Without that it ends in regular inflamatory stuff. On the KDE side it’s exactly differently you can have a dispute with them, you can even disagree with them and you can exchange experiences with them. And if you have a little clash with them then it’s usually forgotten two days later. The entire KDE community is far more friendly, open and openminded. Something the GNOME community needs to learn. Maybe GNOME would result in a better desktop if there wasn’t so many big egos involved. People who are hardly trying to re-invent themselves with every new release cycle of GNOME. There is much more I can say here but I doubt that many people who read OSN would understand the problems around GNOME to actually get what I am trying to say.
John, I hadn’t had that joy with DIA around 1999 when I was still at university.
I hope you don’t mind my fair comment on DIA but I never found it useful or reliable enough to get work done. As a former student I relied on a program like DIA to draw diagrams for university but the problems with it was simply too big to deal any further with it. Often it’s so, that you need to urgently draw something and then DIA simply fails for whatever reasons and then you have no time dealing with finding the problems and thus switch back to some drawing tool you know from university.
Even now I wanted to illustrate some problems found with DIA and I already made a few screenshots but then during work it crashed again and stopped bothering with it anymore.
My problems with DIA so far (and this is going over years):
a) Instability during working. Even now when I wanted to save a document or print into a file DIA crashed on me and the saved file ended up in 0 bytes. This was years ago a problem and this seem to be a problem now too. It doesn’t crash on first save, nor does it crash on the second but if you save a couple of times or print into a .ps file (yes you can do this with the printing option as well as exporting the diagram) it crashed.
b) I recall when I had to draw an UML diagram that I was called for dinner and saved my document so I can continue working on it once finished. After the dinner I came back into my room and loaded the document up again and I got an error message that the saved data was corrupt. Of course I was quite pissed off about this because I lost quite some amount of work done on this USE CASE diagram and instead spending my time redrawing the USE CASE diagram I of course wasted time in experimenting around with DIA to check whether these issues occour again (and they did).
c) The GUI of DIA is quite poor, you are presented with an empty sheet divided by blue lines. These lines are marking one page but you usually get 3-4 pages shown on one empty new sheet and I find this one quite irritating. Compared to the size of the objects you drag on the sheet you might assume that one page is filled up after draging a handful elements on it. Most people only want to paint one diagram that fits perfectly on one sheet and this is getting hard with DIA at least that’s my very personal opinion. Also the draging of objects and snapping them somewhere is quite sluggish and if you don’t take care enough you can easily drift out on the border and it paints another extra page on the left, the top, the right or the bottom.
d) The objects in DIA when printed out are quite ‘big’ the lines are quite ‘fat’ and the whole output isn’t really looking professional. This is valid if you use the application as is. You need to further alter a lot of things such as line stength and resize objects only to make the printout look more aesthetical. For example the lines and elements printed out with Rational Rose looks far more professional than the lines and elements from DIA. One day I had my professor asking me whether I made the printout with a drawing program (he refered here to Photoshop) you know drawing elypsis, lines and so on. I told him that I was using DIA a quite famous program on the open source architecture and he stopped further comments.
e) Sometimes the elements chosen from the Toolbar are looking differently to the elements that get dropped to the sheet which makes it quite confusing. Of course the functionality of the element is given so smaller cosmetical issues can be taken without issues.
f) When reporting problems with DIA to bugzilla and this finally sums everything up is a pain too, the way the maintainers are replying to their users and those who spent time reporting bugs can be summed up as totally rude. They have a way to reply to their audience that wants you to stop reporting anything anymore. Well I tried reporting around 4-5 things over the past years and then finally concluded that it will be better to leave them with their own destiny.
I know that DIA is the only application of its kind for GTK+ and GNOME but the application made a really poor impression on me and all the issues I encountered made it an application that I’d better not recommend others to use. You can do some graphs with it but then you really need to watch carefully what you are doing. The amount of random crashes, the GUI, the aesthetics, the default behavior of elements (big objects, lines are too thick, the overall printout once finished) aren’t really hitting. I therefore looked for alternative programs primarily for GNOME or GTK+ but wasn’t able to find anything and then later on I looked for applications on Linux and came to Umbrello and Kivio which finally got me going and my work done. Even the printout with Umbrello and Kivio came closer to the results from Rational Rose or Visio. DIA has a long way to go and I think some SUN people should be thrown towards DIA to improve it. Make it show one single sheet on startup, a bigger sheet but one page, make the objects dropped on this sheet a bit smaller or at least in a ratio that don’t make them too big, lines should be thinner and anti-aliased, and there are many other issues, small ones but you get hold of them once you are seriously using DIA to get some really important stuff done.
So far this is from my very personal experiences I had with DIA.
Most GNOME developers use MacOSX anyways so they have a working desktop OS to get their stuff done. GNOME has grown more a hobbiest project that they keep working on rather than working on it because the urgent requirement. But the requirement and need for a really working desktop has been lost for them. What purpose does it make to work on a desktop if you don’t really need one because you get a better one with a different OS you use ?
I recall years back when most GNOMER’s started hacking on GNOME. They hacked on it because there was a need for it but these days most of those ‘kids’ have grown and have families, they work for a company, get the bigger money and are able to buy something they ever dreamt about. They bought a nice PowerBook from Apple, installed MacOSX ontop of it and are enjoying the great commercial applications that come bundled with it. No hassle with different distros, no pain with package managment, they get work done. Now with the better job at the hand, that some might got through their open source contributions they don’t need to prove themselves anymore. They found a good job, do the work they are ordered to do, get the cash and feel the real life with all its quirks.
Someone else who recently had a point of resignation formed this in better words than I am able to do maybe you like to read it on your own:
I mean this also explains why GNOME feels so incomplete, sluggish, half backed, wasted. Now let’s get back to normal daily busines. Maybe a better programming language used inside GNOME would have solved a lot of issues. As said above KDE and GNOME developers are just cooking with water. But you can cook better if you have the better toys to heaten up the water. OOP was the solution for them, the rapid application development, creating more useful and better applications in shorter time frames. That’s KDE. Maybe MONO will solve something for GNOME in the future but I only see the GNOME community to get split up even more once it makes it’s ways into GNOME. Not to mention that MONO is not portable to other architectures – someone told me it’s due assembly language used inside MONO to create MONO.
you must have been running a distro that packages gnome and dia really bad. i have been using dia alot and have never ever had any of those problems that you describe.
so pherhaps you should try i more gnome centric distro.
or maby use a computer that dosent distorts reality
> you must have been running a distro that packages
> gnome and dia really bad. i have been using dia
> alot and have never ever had any of those problems
> that you describe.
That’s no problem of packaging, that’s a problem of broken application and clueless developers.
> so perhaps you should try i more gnome centric
> distro. or maby use a computer that dosent distorts
> reality
How does using a gnome centric distro solve the issues inside DIA ?
Maybe you like to read the feedback given by other commentors on DIA. You also find my above comment quoted there too (basicly it was a cut and paste that saved me time typing). The users find DIA to be slugish, not trustable, broken, horrible, crashing. And it’s no secret.
i still find it wierd since i never have had those problems. i would not know how gnome centric distrubutions solve it pherhaps patches. i have showed dia to alot of friends that got intressed and started using it to non of them have ever had any complaints.
pherhaps they have had some really bad realeses and i have gotten lucky to miss them i dont know.
in order to assist the anonymous guy (IP: 84.129.236.—) in his need to return to reality, here are my views.
i used to be a KDE user. i think kde/qt has a good architecture with regards to kparts (although all the rest is antiquated, such as arts etc) with great documentation for QT, and semi-good integration. but that wasnt enough. kde and qt have several major shortcoming that make it less commercially popular, and which the long suffering developers need to address. i’ve tried gnome and i decided that i liked it better. there are several problems with KDE that i found:
-KDE is buggy. i find it difficult to use the applications because many of them can’t seem to stay up long enough to do anything with them. the Crash-Master(ie konquerer) must be thee most bug-ridden and unnecessarily bloated application on the whole of linux to date. in comparison, i find gnome to be rock solid stable. nautilus has crashed on me only when i transferred 5000+ true type fonts from one folder to another whilst playing xsoldier. at least its predicatable. kde apps(especially the crash master) tend to crash randomly.
-while i find gnome to be snappy and responsive, i find kde to be horribly slow. i still have KDE on my pc in its own partition. gnome takes 6 seconds from login screen while kde takes 17 seconds to load.
-gnome looks so much more professional. there was a survey done recently where they took a large number of passers-by and asked them which desktop they preferred the appearence of between gnome and kde. in almost all instances, gnome was considered to be the most attractive. no matter how many theme-manager themes, styles, colour schemes, and window decorations i amass on my pc, i can’t seem to de-uglify kde enough to look even half as good as gnome. there’s something about the natural appearence of kde that is off putting and unprofessional. it always looks far too fisher-price and in-yer-face. this is perhaps one of the many logical reasons why, despite there being no major licencing issues with qt anymore, that all the big businesses are rejecting kde and favouring gnome.
-kde is horribly confusing. while i find gnome to be intuitive, logical, and a pleasure to work with, i find kde to be anything but. the kde developers should concentrate on simplifying the control centre and the rest of the confusing mess that is kde. then they should provide users with the option to click on advanced settings instead of forcing users to require a Phd in orienteering in order to use it.
-kde is bloated. gnome is more granular. this has the advantage that i don’t end up with 25,000 crappy paint programs that i don’t need when i install kdelibs and kdebase. with gnome, i can pick and choose what i want to install. this also helps to keep the size of gnome down. its also the reason why gnome is far faster and responsive than kde.
-kde applications are mostly amateurish compared to gnome. this is my biggest gripe that is stopping me from wanting to use kde instead of gnome. apart from kdevelop(which i like a lot), there isn’t a single half-decent kde application that can come close to its gtk/gnome equivelent. abiword is better than kword. gnumeric is better than kspread. any equivelent kde apps better than gimp? no comment. k3-d > kpovmodeller. nvu > quanta. any kde equivelents better than dia? no, i thought not. and the list goes on and on and on.
hopefully the kde developers can sort out all of kde’s many many problems(not least the lack of speed issue) for a future release, but i’m not holding my breath. i would like to like kde more than i do, so that can both develop on kde and use it too. gnome is the platform of choice for me, both for development and usage. the kde developers have years of work on their hands to make it usable (or at least as usable as gnome or OS X). i wish them the luck that they’ll inevitably need.
> To prevent his comments from disappearing he even
> posts them multiple times to the same news.
The comments had to be reposted multiple times (and honestly the contents was more than accurate and correct and valid) but some asshole moderator did
a) removed them (not just moderated them down)
b) some moron users who felt offended (assholes like you primarily) kept moderating valid arguments down. but not because they might be technical wrong, no because they felt insulted in general because someone said something bad (or the turth) about GNOME.
Feel free to moderate my comments down. I spent a lot of my spare free time supporting GNOME in the past and I know how the thing really is and how it’s in real life. All the good bits and bites like:
a) contribute code,
b) talk with developers,
c) fill in bugreports and many more I’ve done over and over.
It only results in offending responses and asshole behavior of the majority of GNOME people. Sick dumb jerks that behave friendly in the public that have nothing better to do than promote and sell GNOME as the ultimative solution, while it’s horrible broken, useless and just a waste of time. It only causes dozens of ‘Linux not ready for the Desktop’ articles show up over and over again. GNOME is useless get it finally!
“while it’s horrible broken, useless and just a waste of time.”
it seems very strange that ALL big business(after reseaching what their users want) are ignoring kde in favour of that ‘broken, useless and just a waste of time’ desktop that you call gnome.
Submitted by 
I am running ArchLinux+Gnome 2.12.1 on a system with 128M and Duron 1.2G, so I do expect that. Gnome runs quite smoothly but slows down especially when memory is short of, saying firefox with 7-8 browsing tab page with many pictures.
Dude, you really need more RAM… if you want to run that many sites at the same time. It’s not horribly expensive these days you know, and I think you’d find it worth it.
Looks like Eugenia’s complaining is good for something. 😉
I’m not so sure it was that, from what I’ve read out of it the main problem was that the tools they had were just plain insufficient and that now they have the tools they need to make meaningful contributions to speed up.
If you look at slide 2, you’ll see that the gist of the slide is basically “Eugenia was totally wrong. Yes, Gnome is slow, but this list of things isn’t why… Use a real profiler.”
One of the reasons I’ve chosen KDE over gnome is just what the title(html) is. Gnome feels heavy. It’s a good system, stable, lots of features.
It’s not that it takes up alot of memory that I’ve seen. There’s just …… something amiss.
Hopefully they get it sorted out. Given that something like this is being talked about, I know it’s not just me.
Good that some people is working with this! All we need is speed
I’ve been saying for years that GNOME is extremely slow and bloated for what it does, and I was always labelled a ‘troll’. Now look — even the GNOME crew realise there’s a lot to be done! Thanks for proving me right 🙂
Time after time I’ve demonstrated GNOME or KDE to a Linux newcomer and they’ve always been unimpressed how sluggish it is compared to their Windows installation. It might hurt to hear, but it’s true — the big Linux desktops are very, heavy heavy compared to Windows. I’ve seen these complaints first-hand from newcomers, so it’s good that they’re finally not being ignored.
That’s not entirely true. They’re not “heavy heavy” compared to windows. They’re only “heavy”.
😛
Windows(MS) has the advantage of integration, and also the advantage of being the only one.
Modulatity takes it’s toll, as does the openness of our product.(in this instance)
Even though the typical install of windows xp will eat up around 110-150,(after you install the patches and patch the patches) my FC4 box only chews up around 60.
Just as a point of reference, I have an FC3 box and it chews up around 80.
You’ll never see a slimming down like that for newer releases in the windows world. Jeez, look at the system requirements for vista.
That’s ram. Windows is a ram hog compared to linux.(see above post) 110-150MB
😛
Yet in alot of instances it feels faster due to integration.
You can get it down to about 60 by disabling some Windows services. System will still be usable, just missing a few things (like automatic update and other stuff that you probably never ever see).
And what exactly was the point of modding down my comment? Truth hurt?
You can get it down to about 60 by disabling some Windows services. System will still be usable, just missing a few things (like automatic update and other stuff that you probably never ever see).
You can turn services (daemons) off in linux as well. So GNU/Linux generally consumes less resources than Windows.
Turning off the Automatic Update for Windows is not something I would recommend, if that was what you were meaning?
Turning off Visual Styles however, that’s a wise step (in my mind).
In general it’s always wise to tweak your system (turning off services you don’t need, turning those on you do need).
Speed on GNU/Linux can be drastically improved by prelinking your packages.
However. Higher speed in Gnome is always a good thing. But I’m also oldfashioned (sort of).
Time after time I’ve demonstrated GNOME or KDE to a Linux newcomer and they’ve always been unimpressed how sluggish it is compared to their Windows installation.
Even KDE can feel sluggish in certain circumstances, although the optimisation of Qt has helped quite a lot along with the infrastructure they’ve built on top. You also have to remember it’s not just Gnome or KDE – it’s the whole system right through the kernel, to Xorg to the toolkit to the desktop environment infrastructure.
I’m surprised about you saying that KDE seems slow to newcomers… Event to this day on the rare occassion that I load up KDE It feels responsive.
I use Gnome at home and XP at work. I know Gnome seems heavy compared to most Linux WM and DEs, but on my Athalon 2600 with a gig of ram, it feels more responsive than XP on an equivelant pentium setup at work.
Every report I read about GNOME tells of brave new features, background indexing, etc
If you want to run faster you need FEWER features not more of them. That way lies BLOAT, which is exactly the problem.
>> If you want to run faster you need FEWER features not
>> more of them. That way lies BLOAT, which is exactly
>> the problem.
No. That’s definitely not where all the bloat is.
It’s how it’s programmed. Read the slides: if you spend too much time on doing useless things (at the same time), you’ll end up with a slow program (that’s only on reason of course).
Even a “hello world” type of program could be made sluggish that way.
This guy is a hero really. Concentrating on the hard, unglamorous slog of making things better for everyone (stable, fast) and not on fluffing about as a cool hacker doing cool new stuff which gets dumped unfinished as soon as the next cool stuff turns up. Linux needs a lot more people like him.
The main reason I’m not using Gnome is because of it’s speed. Moving windows around or opening apps are way too slow for a modern DE. Hopefully they’ll speed it up a bit for the next release. That combined with Xorg 7.0 should make a pretty snappy desktop. At least one can hope it will.
Well, the main reason for me to use Gnome is it’s speed. Wonderfully snappy response in regard to drawing the menues. Not like the sluggish performance you get on windows (even in Win2K3 Server).
There are some issues with moving windows around, but the same is true for Windows.
I really miss a wireframe option for Gnome
well, on my sytem (Athlon64 3000+, 1GB of RAM, etc.) Gnome feels noticably faster than WinXp does. That, however, doesn’t go for gtk apps I use (gedit, rhythmbox, …), they usually feel sluggish.
Yes, indeed, Linux is heavy. It’s like driving a tank. It feels sluggish, but it’s a damn stable ride.
Windows on the other had is like a ferrari; Very Fast… on a straight track, anyway. However, put any medium sized obstable on the road, and you’re dead.
In my Linux tank I may feel a little bump, but I’ll still keep going!
I can run 30+ apps in Linux and not even notice it. On the same machine running Windows, the UI tends to freeze up for a few seconds under heavy load. The taskbar won’t respond, windows won’t move. Windows will often complain that an application “does not respond”. Sure, Windows is fast. But that changes quickly when you start 3D Studio Max, Photoshop, and Unreal Editor 3.0. And that’s just three stupid apps.
Linux feels sluggish, but I don’t mind too much anymore. Linux feels “heavy” when you first boot it, and it will feel *just as heavy* running 30+ apps after 5 days.
In the end, Linux wins for me. For any casual user who only has 2 or 3 simple apps open all the time, Windows is the better option. For much demanding users, Linux wins.
I expect every Windows users to disagree with me, and Linux users to agree with me. Nothing will ever change that, and thus this argument is totally pointless
Couldn’t agree less.
‘Doze shows you a desktop fairly early, but it’s just bait; you can’t actually do anything for a significant period, while the OS finishes booting.
Meanwhile, you’ve queued a fistful of mouseclicks, so you get three .doc files, two web browser windows and a spreadsheet in a pear tree when its done.
ABM: anything but microsoft!
You are talking about Win98 here. This is not true of anything released since then.
My neighburs XP box acts the same way.
Why do you blindly shill Microsoft at every opportunity???
What the guy said is a proven fact… ALL versions of Windows uses prelinking, therefore, ALL versions of Windows has the desktop on display, before the system can do anything with user input.
I have been watching your postings lately, and you defend Microsoft a little too much, this would be fine, if they actually paid you to do this.
I’m not “defending” Microsoft.
Simple fact is that when my desktop loads, I’m not sitting there waiting.
Hell, even in WindowsME they made it so you could do things like click the start menu while the system was still loading (couldn’t do this in Win98).
Erm… Maybe your computer is faster than mine. When I load windows XP I’m presented with the desktop and I start navigating the start menu to the program I wish to load, and before I manage to get there the start menu has closed all by itself, possibly because some new program just loaded into memory and decided that it needed to refresh the start menu or take control of the system or something. Who knows. Point is that it’s very annoying. The answer is to let it sit for 2 minutes ( do something else, away from the computer) and then start working.
This has always been a problem with Windows, on any computer I’ve ever used any versions of windows on. But once it gets going windows is okay. There are many annoying things with ALL operating systems. This one is just hard to understand. They could fix it by giving the start menu priority and not letting the virus scan software or some silly taskbar application take over while you are trying to use the start menu.
I feel the same. Windows is very fast when it works but after defragging, for example, Windows crawls like a slug on tar: It works fast when you use one app, but when you try to switch the window everything gets stuck for a while. It’s often faster just to reboot the whole thing than wait wait wait.
Linux on the other hand feels slow all the time but almost never sluggish.
But linux doesn’t feel slow in fluxbox
“I expect every Windows users to disagree with me, and Linux users to agree with me. Nothing will ever change that, and thus this argument is totally pointless
”
they will just to spite, but beyond that, i use gnome 2.8 on debian sarge and the only time i get slow down is like for instance i bought a new 320GB serial ata drive, i then had to move 70GB worth of stuff to it, i had a xterm copying about 16GB and the rest i did with nautilus i had about 5 copies going at once, lots of I/O going on, the menu took maybe 1secs to open xine took maybe 3secs to open(noticably slower), but after i started the avi everything was smooth. as a matter of fact im ripping a dvd right now(The Big Hit) and i see no slowdown i have beep, gaim, firefox, firestarter, xterm, and thoggen(slow for ripping movies) other than that im sure i could fire up doom3 and it would be fine. so this tank your talking about i would more aliken it to a lightweight bulldozer. if you say windows XP is faster at startup i would understand, because when you get to you desktop, windows hasnt finished, its still loading. sure if we started gdm at number 4 instead of service number 10 it would appear to start faster. but services would still be starting. now from gdm to desktop done loading is about 5sec. yes we(linux users) can run 30+ apps at once for 5 days. i have to give windows credit here though, iv seen windows running pretty well under heavy loads, I.E.: a 1.2ghz machine 256mb of ram had most of the normal instances of apps running, messaging(all three of the major), IE and all of the uber cool toolbars, and all of the 300 infections of spyware,adware, and malware. now granted IMing and web browsing was pretty much all you could do but what more could a windows user ask for, iv seen them(the user) run that way for months, why do we have amd 4800+ x2’s, windows? wel reading through that seemed like a run on sentence but im not fixing it, peace.
“I expect every Windows users to disagree with me, and Linux users to agree with me. Nothing will ever change that, and thus this argument is totally pointless
”
they will just to spite, but beyond that, i use gnome 2.8 on debian sarge and the only time i get slow down is like for instance i bought a new 320GB serial ata drive, i then had to move 70GB worth of stuff to it, i had a xterm copying about 16GB and the rest i did with nautilus i had about 5 copies going at once, lots of I/O going on, the menu took maybe 1secs to open xine took maybe 3secs to open(noticably slower), but after i started the avi everything was smooth. as a matter of fact im ripping a dvd right now(The Big Hit) and i see no slowdown i have beep, gaim, firefox, firestarter, xterm, and thoggen(slow for ripping movies) other than that im sure i could fire up doom3 and it would be fine. so this tank your talking about i would more aliken it to a lightweight bulldozer. if you say windows XP is faster at startup i would understand, because when you get to you desktop, windows hasnt finished, its still loading. sure if we started gdm at number 4 instead of service number 10 it would appear to start faster. but services would still be starting. now from gdm to desktop done loading is about 5sec. yes we(linux users) can run 30+ apps at once for 5 days. i have to give windows credit here though, iv seen windows running pretty well under heavy loads, I.E.: a 1.2ghz machine 256mb of ram had most of the normal instances of apps running, messaging(all three of the major), IE and all of the uber cool toolbars, and all of the 300 infections of spyware,adware, and malware. now granted IMing and web browsing was pretty much all you could do but what more could a windows user ask for, iv seen them(the user) run that way for months, why do we have amd 4800+ x2’s, windows? well reading through that seemed like a run on sentence but im not fixing it, peace.
I can run 30+ apps in Linux and not even notice it. On the same machine running Windows, the UI tends to freeze up for a few seconds under heavy load.
LOL. So true. When I was burning in my new computer, I ran two instances of cpuburn-in (it’s a dual-core machine) continuously. When using the machine, GNOME didn’t feel any different. It’s wasn’t blazingly fast, but it was certainly quite usable (as it should be with 2×2.4Ghz!) I’d really like to see somebody use WinXP for any length of time with two instances of Prime95 going!
3d studio Max is slow because rendering is slow
It would be slow on Linux 
(not that i dont use or prefer linux ((in fact i dont use windows at all)))… just to get some facts straight!
Gnome is the NUMBER ONE. WMaker is Number TWO.
can’t reach the links at the moment.
me neither.
Use Coral Cache: http://primates.ximian.com.nyud.net:8090/~federico/docs/2005-GNOME-…
Really great news. This summer I wait for reiser4 (no, 3 years waiting)+ xorg7.0 + composite + cairo on glitz + declared gcc-4.1 optimizer revolution (25-30% code speedup)… and nothing happened. Ok, I personnally do not contribute even one bit to fix that. May be some whining about freetype2/xft/pango ignoring monitor gamma curve, but nobody care so it is not count. But this presentation is like fresh air.
> May be some whining about freetype2/xft/pango ignoring monitor gamma curve, but nobody cares
that’s because gamma should only be taken into account when blitting glyph bitmaps on the target surface.
In other words, you could complain about the Render extension not supporting gamma-corrected alpha-blending. But with a little digging you’ll discover that there is little way to hardware-accelerate this operation, which means sluggish performance even with top notch graphics cards.
nothing to do with freetype2, xft or pango.
“that’s because gamma should only be taken into account when blitting glyph bitmaps on the target surface.”
Wrong. If you a programmer and want to draw anything but 0 or 255 on you monitor then gamma issue take place. Average programmer never perform “C1=pow(C0, 1.0/2.2)” on values before call XPutImage() or do it wrong way and loose precision. He just beleive in X and docs and bravely perform average (C=(C1+C2)/2) or transparent composite operation thinking that values in pixmap are monitor intencity. And more, users of such apps start to spread mystical legends about top-secret tricks such as “after you resize picture in GIMP it is good to slightly increase/decrease brightness, tsss, dont tell anybody, it is for hi-end Photoshop artist only”. GUI designers spend hours to selecting font/bachground colors and fonts that suck less, etc. Gradients, dithering, GIMP -like image processing filters(mostly), crappy half-assed AA font (there is patch on xft that try to improve that, will it be included in final xorg 7.0 ?).
Of course there is no hardware that perform gamma-correct composite operation on 8-bit values (modern Matrox may be ?), but i wrote not about x driver but about full “freetype2/xft/pango” chain, for example it is possible to render correct picture with background with respect to gamma ( and hopelly rgb order on LCD) to cache on hi level (GTK+). And finally, why it is work on XP (clearType), at least MS use gamma 1.4 but it can be turned to 2.2. Conclusion: gamma curve is very old and annoying beast that affect everything.
So have you filed bugs, explaining these issues to the concerned developers?
I have small IRC talk with one of the main GTK+ devs and answer was “we tryed fix it before and result does not impressive, so we do not care. You can play with if you wish”. But changes are so huge, it touch everything beginning from X color to rewriting most apps (changing colors, redesigning). Gamma curve ( and more general – good color management) must be initiated by hi-level devs. Jumping to cairo is a good reason to to it now.
If you are prepared to do the work, I suggest the best way to go about this is to publish a paper explaining the porblem and what has to be done to fix it.
Also doesn’t work for me. 9am Eastern
What has always struck me as miraculous is how Linux handles a criminal amount of load without coughing. I’ve found my self compiling large packages in the background, burning a CD to disk, listening to music, browsing the web, six IRC windows open on another worskpace, and on and on, and Linux acts as if nothing is happening.
When I’m installing software on windows, I literally have to close down all other open applications. Copying a file to floppy disk will freeze Windows for some minutes. I don’t even bother unzipping tar.bz files on Window. And when I burning a CD, I just leave the computer for some minutes.
Now, we have zealots over here telling me GNOME is slow? It turns out that what these zealots are refering to as slowness is not actually so. They mean the UI is jerky. You see on Windows and OS X, well ochestrated animations are used to conceal or viel the jerkiness of the UI.
I don’t care for speed. It kills. I want to see more smoothness, better use feedback, well designed animations and sexy small applications that are stable, reliable and robust. If you want speed, use TWM. The jerkiness and redraw problems can be cleverly vieled via good animations and other UI tricks. But I don’t think hackers are good at stuff like that, so we temporarily at a disadvantage.
In my experience, GNOME is fast. Much faster and lot more responsive than Windows XP is, especially under very heavy load. The UI experience is not as smooth, however.
You are mixing up two things. Linux is a kernel, it is much more efficient at handling load when compared to windows xp.
GNOME is a desktop environment, it has nothing to do with handling programs (memory management, job scheduling etc). GNOME is solely responsible for the UI experience and as you said, it is not as smooth.
I agree with you to a point.
Just yesterday I was ripping a new CD and trying to play hte music at the same time. The music was stuttering, not constantly, but stuttering. Annoying as hell. I think some of it is a problem with iTunes 5, and some of it Windows.
But installing an app you have to close everything down? I don’t think so. Are you exaggerating here, or is your system just crappy?
I’ve never had problems with decompressing files.
I think what the guy was referring to was this, some Windows apps will force a reboot at the end of the install process. So, naturally, you have to close all other open apps.
And you never have problems decompressing files ? how often do you actually use .tgz or .gz under Windows ?
Not nearly as often as I would in nix, but from time to time.
I couldn’t agree more, and this was something that I was thinking about the other day. I have decent rig… Soyo motherboard, Athlon XP 2500, gig of RAM. And just last night I was ripping a DVD, transcoding a different DVD, running an emerge sync, compiling a new kernel, watching a movie in totem, had FireFox with 12 tabs open, Eclipse in the background, and BMP running idle, not to mention numerous background servers, a few gnome-terminals, and the system has been up for over 30 days. Nothing at all is stuttering either. Just like you said, the kernel (mine’s 2.6.13) takes a CRIMINAL amount of load without coughing…
When I’m installing software on windows, I literally have to close down all other open applications. Copying a file to floppy disk will freeze Windows for some minutes. I don’t even bother unzipping tar.bz files on Window. And when I burning a CD, I just leave the computer for some minutes.
Sounds like you have some problems with your Windows install/PC. My Windows machine has its fair share of quirks, but it holds up quite well under load. I’ve had it burning 2 CDs simultaneously (2 burners), while recording audio in one instance of Audacity and editing/exporting in another. And this is on fairly modest hardware (these days), an AthlonXP 2800 with 1GB RAM.
How do well-orchestrated animations hide jerkiness? What animations does Windows do? OSX does the rotating-cube effect for fast-user switching, and the genie effect for the dock, but these actually use more system resources, not less.
OSX is doing quite well on my box while running LightWave’s Layout and Modeler, Photoshop, Safari, Mail, and iTunes. No stuttering, no system lags. Granted, I also have 2GB of RAM installed, but that’s because I’m doing some serious 3D work (my scenes, hi-res textures and high-poly models included, are running over 1GB in memory usage right now.) It’s all about using the right tool for the job, and OSX doesn’t get in the way. The only serious gripe I have with Apple right now is that they need to do some serious work on getting around to implementing OpenGL 2.0.
a typical install with a ton of crap running in the background will use up 100+mb .. I’ve yet to have even an untweaked install use over 80mb .. mine usually use around 45mb.. debian on my laptop uses about 90 with xorg and icewm running.. I really need to work on that..
In my experience, when an operating system is under load and its task manager tells you that the RAM isn’t full, it means that the OS’s memory management is poor, and that it’s swapping stuff that it shouldn’t be. I’d rather have my RAM being used; that’s what it’s there for. Bear in mind I’m not saying that it’s better to use more memory if you can use less; I’m pointing out that good memory management and good memory usage reporting are both things you won’t really see on Windows, so whatever you think about what it’s doing, you should take with a large pinch of the old NaCl.
Apparently Windows is pretty aggressive about paging out minimized applications, even if there’s plenty of available RAM. I guess the rationale is that applications that as much memory as possible should be left free for programs that the user is working in. I don’t think this makes much sense these days, though, when 512MB of RAM is pretty much a minimum.
I believe this is the reason why, under Windows, if you have a lot of tabs open in Firefox and minimize it for a while, the drive will churn when you restore it and it will take a while for it to become responsive again as it’s loaded back into memory.
Can someone please post either version of the presentation somewhere?
The words alot does not exist. It is a lot. Read more books. compute less.
Gnome applications are leaking memory over and over because the coders are dump jerks.
It is a flat-out fact that kde is superior to gnome. gnome is a bloated clunky pile of crap that needs to either shape up or ship the hell out. Distros that are using gnome as their default desktop are morons and only holding the linux movement back (THIS IS A FACT and anyone with a logical thought process can see this).
I find both KDE and Gnome to be too slow. Fluxbox is and always will be my Wm of choice. And if I need a DE I’ll stick with XFCE4.
Gnome applications are leaking memory over and over because the coders are dump jerks.
It is a flat-out fact that kde is superior to gnome
Is gnome running faster on a AMD64 2.0GHZ than on a PIV 3.0 GHz? Because Gnome 2.12 runs maybe faster on my simple AMD64 3000+ 2.0 GHz SuSE 10 box than KDE.
Most people don’t understand that windows has integration with kernel when it comes to gui. This makes it “look” faster but it’s actualy slower. If it wasn’t integrated with the kernel you wouldn’t be able to do much.
“This makes it (Windows) “look” faster but it’s actualy slower”
Really? How come the desktop is up and running much faster under Windows? (And yes, it’s usable.) How come Firefox and OpenOffice.org load faster under Windows? How come I don’t see as much tearing and flickering under Windows? How come apps respond immediately rather than with latency?
Oh right, must just be my imagination. Despite the fact that I and countless others find Windows much lighter and snappier, we all must be wrong. All of us. Go see some of the previous threads about this — but all those people are wrong eh!
It’s this attitude that keeps Linux at a bare few percent of the market. Avoiding what people actually want. When Linux STILL has less than 5% of the desktop market in 2010, perhaps you’ll be a bit more open.
Conversely, how about the “countless” people like me who find Windows heavier and more sluggish than Linux (with Gnome) in most instances? Not everything is about you, hmm? Sometimes, what you and some others experience with Linux and Windows is still the aberration, and not the norm.
Thanks for that. Can I suggest you:
1) Go visit a lot of Linux-newbie forums around the net
2) See what some of the most common complaints are
3) Install Linux on newcomer’s PCs and see
4) Ask yourself why, after 15 years, Linux still has negligible market share
I’ve installed Linux for lots of newcomers. I can’t stand Microsoft and really want to see an alternative emerge. But after the 20th time of hearing:
“Why’s the desktop so slow? It takes ages to open a file window. And OpenOffice is ridiculous. And Firefox takes about five times longer than IE… etc. etc.”
I’ve seen too much of this to keep fudging explanations. In the end, it’s just poorly engineered, sloppily coded software with no elegance or thought in design. The apps may work acceptably in terms of features, but AGAIN and AGAIN I’ve seen newcomers turned off by what they see as a sluggish, bloated mess. Which in many respects it is.
And the Linux community’s answer is “omfg fix it or use fluxbox and dillo!!!”. Ah thanks — switch to completely bare-bones software just to get the equivalent speed of Windows.
Yes, I’ve seen Windows machines clogged up with virii and spyware that are so slow they’re unusable. But I’ve also used far too many that obliterate Lin/GNOME/KDE/OOo/FF in terms of fast startup, running speed and efficiency.
It’s up to you if you choose to ignore this. But again, you have to ask yourself, after 15 years of Linux, why does it still have an utterly negligible desktop market share? 15 YEARS!!
Answer: it’s not all down to MS’s dominance and Adobe not making software. It’s also down to the experience. And if you spend time at newbie Linux forums, you’ll see that bloat, sluggish performance, buggy software and nightmarish program installation* is a HUGE obstacle to wider Linux desktop update. Ignore if you like — but when we’re in the same position in 2010, you might want to open your eyes and start to look at these REAL problems…
(* Boo to the first person to say ‘just apt-get it’. What if it’s not in your ‘repositories’? What if a new version of an app comes out? Oh, your distro only issues security fixes. So to just get a new app you have to fiddle around with ‘development repositories’, compiling source from scratch, and dependencies en masse. Try it — get the newest Gnumeric when it’s lanuched. Double-click and go, keeping the rest of your system intact? I think not 🙂 )
just emerge it
just pacman it
how bout that
In any event, most of the so called “newb distors” are also the painfully slow distros. The more advanced distros (which are not for this audience) (Arch, Gentoo, Slack) thend to run much faster in the hands of an experienced administrator/operator
point is.. this is not an inharent linux/gnome/kde problem, it is a problem with certain distros that try to have anything and everything installed by default.
I must add, there is one exception to the “slow newb distro” that I have experienced first hand, and that is PCLinuxOS, I have used this distro and was very impressed with the speed.
I use Gentoo on 4 machines and Arch on one of my older machines and they are all on par with windows in the speed department.
These newcomers, who were they? Average joe’s and jane’s that just want to use their computer? Giving them Linux today is a bad idea.
But what’s really the problem is that you’ve been embarrased. People have said that they didn’t like “your choice” because it’s “bad”. You’ve been hurt. Too bad, it’s your own fault for promising them something they weren’t going to get. Linux’ issues are not a secret.
I on the other hand, just like many others, truely enjoy Linux. I realize that there’s plenty of room for improvement. But it feels like I’m part of that improvement. I don’t care if it takes another 10 years, because I’m doing it all for me and everyone else that appreciates it.
Those who don’t understand that we’re doing this for fun should just turn away. Seriously. Stop complaining that it’s taking 20 years. So f–king what?
Besides, you’re talking out of your ass. The desktop has not been a target for Linux for 20 years. Roughly since 2000 have people seriously began working on getting Linux suitable for the desktop. I’m sure Microsoft already targetted the desktop in 1990. That gives them 10 years head start.
And for Mr. Anonymous and everyone that agrees with him: Please, stay with Microsoft. You’re clearly someone who doesn’t understand what Open Source means.
And for Mr. Anonymous and everyone that agrees with him: Please, stay with Microsoft. You’re clearly someone who doesn’t understand what Open Source means.
You have no power to tell anybody to do anything. Once you realize that, you’ll be able to cope in real life better.
And the Linux community’s answer is “omfg fix it or use fluxbox and dillo!!!”. Ah thanks — switch to completely bare-bones software just to get the equivalent speed of Windows.
I prefer xcompmgr. Or XFCE (very full featured DE). But I see your point, its not like that by default.
Oh well, we get what we pay for.
i have suse 10.0 installed on both my desktop(amd64) and laptop(pentium m). both 1gb ram.
kde is faster than gnome on both of my modern machines.
NOTE: NOT the application/de performance but more on the User Iterface Responsiveness!!!
back in the old days where gnome was the fastest desktop on the place
im a total gnome fan. i use spatial nautilus…
pls fix it asap pls…
It takes about 10 minutes to load first slide
You using GNOME?
Lol sorry I couldn’t help myself
The performance in gnome 2.12 is already pretty good. Especially if you have a graphic card with drivers that accelerates render (nvidia) and run it on xorg 6.9 cvs. It’s not as good as windows but still good and the next release will probably be even better since the development is now much focused on improving performance and decresing memory usage. The next release of cairo wil also improve things.
This has nothing to do with GNOME, has it? I think it is important to have a system that is also responsive without hardware rendering in the 3D-GPU. When we got that, we could makeing it even bether with GPU-rendering in GL.
I’m running Slack 10.2 with DLG 2.12.
I have gdesklets open with a lot of plugins, I even use transparancy (Composite).
I burn CD’s, have a lot of Firefox Windows open, shells, gaim, Rythembox, Evolution etc. and I never notice any performanceloss at all, my system always keeps responsive and it’s not that heavy (AMD Barton 2600 XP, GF6800GT)
When I used to run Windows XP only, I had to reinstall it after a few months of use because the more applications and games I installed and removed, the more bloated and unstable/unresponsive it became so formatting and reinstalling was the only option to get it fast, stable and responsive again like it was from the start.
I never had similar issues with slackware linux running gnome.
At this moment the Windows portion of my dualboot system doesn’t work anymore, it won’t boot anymore and sits there with a black screen, no error codes at all.
I’m sick of reinstalling it over and over again so i’ll keep it with Linux for the next couple of years
When I used to run Windows XP only, I had to reinstall it after a few months of use because the more applications and games I installed and removed, the more bloated and unstable/unresponsive it became so formatting and reinstalling was the only option to get it fast, stable and responsive again like it was from the start.
I never had similar issues with slackware linux running gnome.
Well, windows belongs in a category of its own. The more you use it the slower and crappier it gets and finally it wont even boot. Thankfully windows seems to be the only OS that has this feature.
I havent reinstalled my xp box in a few months…
and im really ammazed: it still works decently!
after a few defrags, system cleans, no antivirus(!)… well it seems to work out ok
Anyway im using more and more my linux box (ubuntu 5.10RC dist-upgraded from 5.04 dist-upgraded from 4.10) lol… its a 1 year old system and it keeps getting faster.
really!
linux boot is slower… running some apps for the 1st time is slower… ui responsiveness is as snappy as in windows (i’m using gnome) BUT overaull the system feels MUCH faster because everything keeps running.
just the other day i was trying to scann my hdd for bad sectors in windows… gave up because xp totally locked up. switched to linux, started the scan and went on as if nothing was running.
for me, linux is like having a dual-core cpu
sry i mean “ui responsiveness is NOT as snappy as in windows”
Yea, first loads are slow because in order to load most apps it has to find all their shared libs and load those first. The bootup is slow because SysVinit is slow, and because there’s a lot of stuff that gets started up. You can get it to about the same time as XP boots in, but you have to sacrifice USB hotplug..
You’ve probably got a decent machine. Around the 1GHz mark is, for me, where you start to lose the feel for sluggishness in UI toolkits. On my 1800 Athlon I can’t tell that GTK is in anyway slow; on my Duron 1GHz I can tell a few things are slow (like showing complex ui frames when switching tabs), and on my 700 celeron I can tell all…
But, such is progress. You have to buy a new pc someday if you want the new toys!
Welcome to the unbiased GNOMEnews.com. The place where we talk about all types of Operating Systems, Desktop Environments …. but preferabely and mainly GNOME …. OSNews.com full of GNOME drones.
Is it possible for an article to be posted on OSNews without there being a string of comments along the lines of: “Oh noes, an article about Y! That reveals a clear bias against N!”
If one were to take all those comments at face value, they would probably conclude that OSNews is biased – both for and against – every single OS, software company, and open source development group in existence.
Analyzing and improving GNOME startup time is of course a fine thing to do but imo fixing all the issues inside GNOME should be much more of a priority than anything else. I think a few developers should start seeing the applications and the desktop as a whole and fix the half working stuff first. Different Toolbars are still an issue, not behaving to the ‘Toolbars & Menus’ capplet is an issue, having the applications permanently crash or not work correctly is an issue, having stuff like Evolution permanently trash the sync files including startup crashes, duplicate email entries and other things (in 3.4.0 release) should be addressed, making Nautilus become usable should be a priority thing, the logout lockup or freeze (for minutes) should be addressed and fixed (session manager). Make GStreamer work seamlessly with GNOME should be an priority thing and and and, the list can be expanded in so many areas which makes me wonder sometimes how people can get serious work done with GNOME. Take a look over to KDE for example, they are of course not perfect either but their list of true annoyances are at an minimum and permanent development and improvement addresses issues so they get fixed really fast. GNOME is a never ending pit full of issues which should be addressed. At it’s current state it never surpasses Windows 95 or any other Windows version nor is it in any competition with MacOSX or anything else.
Hmmm i’m using Dropline GNOME for quite some time right now and of course it has some issues but I never came across the ones you are describing, maybe it has been a long time ago since you last used gnome?
Btw. How on earth can you ever say that Windows 95 is better then GNOME at it’s current state???
Come on, I had to reboot Win95 twenty times a day because of system hangs and blue screens!
When Windows crashes everything is crashing including the kernel, which f*cks up your whole system in a matter of time.
When my X-Windows is crashing (and that is very rare) my Linux system is still up and running and within a few seconds i’m back to work.
Now that JPR gave over Evolution to some clueless morons they finally managed to break that damn thing entirely for me. I never have had any issues with Evolution in all the years I’ve been using it but now 3 weeks before they released 3.4.0 (also the time where JPR gave up on it (the only serious programmer working on Evolution)) the new maintainer managed to make a f–king mess out of it.
a) always desynced index files
b) duplicate entries in Evolution window
c) crashing of Evolution during startup (every now and then)
d) requires me to remove all index files manually
e) but they get trashed whenever I start Evolution again.
I filled bugreports for everything I found with 3.4.0 and all I got returned was rude comments by some guy. The desyncing errors and the permanent crashes and trashing of my serious data is so annoying and problematic that I start to consider switching to KMail or (KDE entirely).
I mean, speeding up GNOME startup time is indeed nice but what with usability. There is nothing much inside GNOME that works perfectly or satisfying enough to be considered serious.
Rhythmbox, once started as great application and now it lost totally against amaroK from KDE.
Planner is no where serious enough to be a serious MS Project replacement. It lacks so much it’s more a toy than a serious project planning application. Look over to TaskJuggler from KDE which in many areas is far supperior over MS Project.
Nautilus is more or less a f–king joke rather than a serious filemanager. I wonder why resources are still being blown into this.
Evolution as mentioned above is left to unskilled people. I don’t condemn those who don’t know it better but I condemn them for having trashed one of my primarily used applications.
There is so much, everything summed up would be easily filling a phonebook of annoyances, problems, trash, not working things. I wonder why GNOME is being paid so much attention for and I really wonder who the audience here is who regulary reply saying best words about GNOME while it’s nothing more than a broken Desktop Environment that shouldn’t be considered usable nor reliable.
Well I’ve read the presentation and there wasn’t too much in there. Setting goals like making Nautilus start < 0.5 seconds really doesn’t give you anything. I would expect that anyone could take shortcuts to make Nautilus start faster, but that wouldn’t give you the fundamental reasons why it doesn’t start that fast in the first place. It might also make things worse as development is added in the future.
No wonder there’s a car crash picture on as the first slide!
I never have had any issues with Evolution in all the years I’ve been using it but now 3 weeks before they released 3.4.0 (also the time where JPR gave up on it (the only serious programmer working on Evolution)) the new maintainer managed to make a f–king mess out of it.
The last time I used Evolution was circa 2001/2002. It was OK, made a decent Outlook replacement and worked fine. The UI responsiveness wasn’t top-notch (and I ran it in KDE sometimes as well) but it was a pretty good e-mail app. What’s happened in four years? I know the Groupwise integration didn’t go well, but surely it can’t have caused that.
Yer, JPR is a guy I rate. I didn’t know he’d stopped doing stuff with Evolution.
Nautilus is more or less a f–king joke rather than a serious filemanager. I wonder why resources are still being blown into this.
Considering that Eazel and others have pumped a lot into Nautilus over the years there doesn’t seem to have been much of a cumulative gain or anything to show for it.
Planner is no where serious enough to be a serious MS Project replacement. It lacks so much it’s more a toy than a serious project planning application.
I can speak from experience here and have gone into all the alternatives. I’ve needed a desktop alternative project planning tool and TaskJuggler wipes the floor with everything (including some commercial stuff). Planner is simply a Microsoft Project wannabe. I read an amusing openSUSE bug regarding TaskJuggler’s installation when using a Gnome desktop. Well, it’s your loss ;-).
I wonder why GNOME is being paid so much attention for and I really wonder who the audience here is who regulary reply saying best words about GNOME while it’s nothing more than a broken Desktop Environment
Well, it’s an open source world so you can’t say what should be given attention or not. However, for people looking for a reliable desktop they can actually move to, nine to five, five days a week, that’s a serious issue and on you simply cannot brush it off. Gnome just isn’t it as it stands, which isn’t great after all these years. KDE has some tidying up to do, and it is by no means perfect at all, but its technology actually largely works as advertised on the tin. Yes, you got blue screens etc. with Windows 95, but by and large, its technology, file manager etc. actually worked.
If you still want the gtk look, try Thunderbird or Sylpheed. Both are excellent and both address my major problem with evolution: memory utilization. Combined, evolution + evolution-data-server were chewing up >300 mb of memory for me. Thunderbird is still on the heavy side but it’s really an excellent app, better than evolution IMO in nearly all respects.
> Maybe it has been a long time ago since you last
> used gnome?
The GNOME I am refering to is the latest available from http://ftp.gnome.org as we speak now its 2.12.1
> Btw. How on earth can you ever say that Windows 95
> is better then GNOME at it’s current state???
I can because Windows works and has the necessary companies and powerful applications behind it. What exists for GNOME that could be compareable to what exists on Windows ?
> Come on, I had to reboot Win95 twenty times a day
> because of system hangs and blue screens!
That’s your experience. Maybe you shouldn’t be using a computer then ?
> When Windows crashes everything is crashing
> including the kernel, which f*cks up your whole
> system in a matter of time.
Stop trolling please. The problem you describe can be anything. Either it’s a not certified 3rd party driver or any hacked up Kernel thing also 3rd party.
> When my X-Windows is crashing (and that is very
> rare) my Linux system is still up and running and
> within a few seconds i’m back to work.
X-Windows is architecture independant. You can also run it on Solaris, BSD, Darwin and even Windows, Amiga and other architectures. Maybe X-Windows does crash so badly on Windows or AmigaOS that you need to reboot it too. Who knows. But since you talk about Linux you seem to have a small tunnel through what you look.
>I can because Windows works and has the necessary companies and powerful applications >behind it. What exists for GNOME that could be compareable to what exists on Windows ?
That’s unfair, you have to pay hunderds of dollars for good software on Windows, take MS Office as example, for that price I can buy myself a new computer.
OpenOffice is free and it’s comparable to MS Office 2003.
>That’s your experience. Maybe you shouldn’t be using a computer then ?
You know just like anybody else how unstable Win95 is.
And now, ten years further Windows has become more stable but it’s still suffering from the same problems we had with Windows95.
>Stop trolling please. The problem you describe can be anything. Either it’s a not certified 3rd >party driver or any hacked up Kernel thing also 3rd party.
lol, I always get that same excuse, its always a 3rd party driver or software that f–ks up my system.
If you only use Microsoft software it will never happen! Yeah right.
>But since you talk about Linux you seem to have a small tunnel through what you look.
Look who’s trolling now?
“One of the reasons I’ve chosen KDE over gnome is just what the title(html) is. Gnome feels heavy. It’s a good system, stable, lots of features.”
Hmmm. This is very funny, as I’ve ALWAYS felt that KDE felt like it was bloated from the get go, and then at least, doubled the bloat with every release as they were, obviously, modelling after windows, which is why I went with GNOME.
“Every report I read about GNOME tells of brave new features, background indexing, etc If you want to run faster you need FEWER features not more of them. That way lies BLOAT, which is exactly the problem.”
Also, it would be VERY nice if they would finish those features BEFORE running along to even later and greater “features”. (This was one of my problems with GNOME, it always felt unfinished, and like KDE, but not to quite the same extent, seemed to bloat with every release.)
Solutions for me anyways:
For lowest resource requirements, I’d just go with CLI, but I usually don’t do this on anything other than pure servers, partially because of disk space(at one time) and the fact that I’d rarely, if ever, log into the actual console again once the system was up.
In an ultra low resource hogging environment, I’ll run fluxbox plus a few “helper” apps. (Also, pretty much requires to build your own desktop environment as it’s pretty spartan out of the box from CVS, which is good as you know exactly what is running, and presumably, exactly what you need to have running.)
In a more normal desktop environment where I want some speed and a decent looking/useful environment, I’ll go with xfce at significantly reduced resource costs v. KDE/GNOME but with a good chunk of the functionality of both. (Not to mention that recent xfce releases actually feel like they were finished, rather than just kicked out the door so that work on even more features could be started.) Xfce also comes with a nice standard configuration that should cover everything that most users would require… although I usually dump their filer for ROX filer, spatial is good.
I keep hearing people say gnome is bloated with out any proof what so ever. I guess you people dont compile then because the source code in 2.12 is smaller, yet more fuctional than 2.8.
Gnome-2.6
Control Center=2.6Mb
Nautilus=5.5Mb
Gedit=2.4Mb
Gnome panel=3.1Mb
————————–
Gnome-2.12
Control Center=1.8Mb
Nautilus=3.9Mb
Gedit=2Mb
Gnome panel=2.3Mb
————————–
Speed and bloat are two different things and as you can see, gnome is not bloated considering more fuctionallity in 2.12.
Stop whining.
1) Fil in bug reports
2) Start researching
3) Start coding
4) Give feedback
5) Converse with the developers
(The ranking suppose not to mean any priority level)
Opensource software gives you this freedom, use it.
Ah, thanks for that attitude too!
“omg MS sucks windows is slow bloated and crashes and is full of security holes. use linux!!!!11”
“But what about the fact that it’s much slower, there are still many bugs in the major apps, and there are have been many security holes in Firefox?”
“FIX IT URSELF!!!”
And hence Linux’s absolute miniscule market share, after 15 YEARS of development. When you people actually understand what people WANT, and you can’t just throw it back in their face when you advocate it, who knows — maybe 2016 will be the “Linux year of the desktop”.
Until then, the great ideas behind open source are wasted by a bunch of sloppily-coding bloatware meisters who just blame anyone and anything else when there are serious problems…
Don’t take me wrong – The Bazaar and the Cathedral shows you that opensource is a way to collaborate in your coding project that worked well with the Linux kernel( and do work nowadays also). Do not blah blah, do something. This was actually not pointed to the end users – it was for hackers.
Sorry, typo Gnome-2.6=Gnome-2.8
Could you stop trolling? you post ALWAYS THE SAME MESSAGE in every Gnome thread, no matter if it talks of gnome startup time or it is a release announcement, if it is an interview with a developer or a review!
Had you tried to read the presentation, you would have noticed that Federico Mena-Quintero worked on optimizing gtk+ and pango, in order to achieve an overall improvement of Gnome responsiveness, a MEASURABLE improvement, for example making the file-selector appear in less than 0.1s instead of 1s.
Instead you whine about startup time efforts and evolution 3.4 (to be released in 2008, probably) always crashing. WTF?
> 1) Fil in bug reports
> 2) Start researching
> 3) Start coding
> 4) Give feedback
> 5) Converse with the developers
Points 1 – 5 usually ends in flamewars, you being called by names, you getting inflamatory responses, you are considered being a troll. Don’t you think these things has been tried before ? In all the years I tried seriously contributing to GNOME it usually ends up like this. Most of the GNOMER’s are inflamatory shitheads and huge assholes by showing huge egos. If it’s not done by them or if they can’t piss off someone then it’s probably not a good day for them.
Listen GheTto
> Instead you whine about startup time efforts and
> evolution 3.4 (to be released in 2008, probably)
> always crashing. WTF?
You might have figured out already that 3.4 could have been a typo ? But then I don’t whine about startup time efforts. I am simply a pissed off user and developer who is sick seeing how GNOME is being made a totally great Desktop Environment in the public by bullshit talks while in reality it’s a big mess for the majority of really serious users.
I believe that talking about startup time is a good thing but I also know that startup times are just the wrong thing to solve first. Primarily it would have helped more if they would start solving all the garbage and leftovers in GNOME to make it suck a lot less.
I’d also like to make a point and latency. Latency is a big problem in the kernel but thankfully 2.6.13 uses Preemption model to reduce it on the desktop. Distro kernels dont always use these features and seem less responsive. Xcompmgr in gnome leaves some trialed shadows when minimising a windows, gnome fault, xcompmgr fault?, no it’s latency in the kernel. If you use a -ck patched kernel which is tuned for the desktop then you’ll see it dont have this problem.
Who do you blame?, well in this instance the kernel latency and the gnome UI code.
Haha! The slides are entertaining. I, especially, love the quotes from osnews. They made me laugh. Federico is my admirer. I love reading his blogs and I appreciate his contributions to GNOME and GTK+. He also seems to be a level headed person.
Really. KDE3 used to be very slow and pretty unresponsive at its introduction. But as the 3-series evolved, it got faster with every major release(as in 3.1, 3.2, etc), while the number of major features added was relatively small. Of course the individual applications did change a lot, but KDE (and Qt) as a whole only went through a bunch of optimisations. I think that is why KDE feels way more responsive than Gnome nowadays.
Of course KDE has the advantage of a commercial organisation who is developing the toolkit. But then again, Gnome also seems to have a lot of support from the enterprises. Why don’t they pay people to optimise GTK, Gnome and especially Metacity?
Metacity may be the weakest link in the chain. Try to replace it with another WM and you’ll see a lot of sluggishness vanish.
Btw, I have mirrored the presentation (opd):
– http://www.jeugdvakantiewerk.nl/2005-GNOME-Summit-federico-profilin…
– http://stuwww.uvt.nl/~s178024/2005-GNOME-Summit-federico-profiling….
Btw, I have mirrored the presentation (odp):
– http://www.jeugdvakantiewerk.nl/2005-GNOME-Summit-federico-profilin…
– http://stuwww.uvt.nl/~s178024/2005-GNOME-Summit-federico-profiling….
Of course KDE has the advantage of a commercial organisation who is developing the toolkit. But then again, Gnome also seems to have a lot of support from the enterprises. Why don’t they pay people to optimise GTK, Gnome and especially Metacity?
Simply put, it’s not economically viable. You’re not going to see Sun, Red Hat or Novell doing this. The people working full-time on Gnome in these organisations are as overworked as it is keeping things like Gnome Terminal maintained – something that doesn’t even directly make any money for Red Hat! Does anyone really expect them to employ a whole division, putting in huge amounts of resources and chasing shadows simply to do nothing but optimisation work on something they don’t directly make any money out of? Look at Novell in particular that is coming under quite a bit of investor pressure.
This kind of work takes huge resources – unless you have well designed software to start off with ;-). Microsoft has had years of people working full-time, full-on, doing nothing but optimisation and QC work for Windows. It’s a truly thankless and frustrating task. Windows, as Gnome and the ‘Linux OS’ is, is a hugely complex piece of software. Does anyone seriously see this being done for Gnome after the years of developer resources, time and money it has consumed in these organisations and how overworked the developers are right now with stuff that has zero direct return for their employers?
At least this guy is introducing some method into the madness.
MS, hate them or hate them, introduced this years, if not decades ago. They stated that after a product ships a whole new team sets to work on it to optimize it. So Win95 (see Webster’s under suckage) begats countless tweaks (4 gens of ’95 alone, 98, 98SE, ME) each of which is hugely better than the original — yet the feature set is not much different.
Clearly the GNOME people need to do this also — form a separate group who have a single purpose of tweaking/refining/improving what has been shipped. Yes it would be nice if the big brains of core development take what they say to heart, but if not then at least there is an optimized product in addition to a bleeding edge one.
As to XP being somehow less load capable, I can’t agree with this. I regularly copy multi GB of data, without any performance hits at all. I set up a batch file (like last night) to encode 10’s of GB of WAVs into MP3s and there is no hit at all — admittedly due to Intel’s hyperthreading + nice lame coding. My “resting state” of XP is with a dozen programs running. I am quite willing to bet that those complaining about slow XP after use of a program are referring, specifically and only, to a game. Games are resource hungry like Madonna is camera hungry. Personally I don’t run them, 48 years on this planet + almost 30 years of computing and you’d grow out of them too.
And the guy complaining about trying to find bad sectors slowing down XP is comical. First, this can only be usefully done outside of the GUI, at the Recovery Console. Second, things slow down when you have bad sectors — that IS the sign — as the OS takes this seriously enough to try, try, try again to save those writes it has pending. Novell Netware comes almost to a halt under the same situation, btw.
Bottom line: GNOME has grown like topsy and is now embarassing. At least one person of influence on this planet has taken a few steps to fix it. More are needed because more are always needed. Only real solution is to institutionalize optimization …as MS has.
“So Win95 (see Webster’s under suckage) begats countless tweaks (4 gens of ’95 alone, 98, 98SE, ME) each of which is hugely better than the original”
*COUGH COUGH* excuse me? Even the most rabid Microsoft fan would have a hard time arguing that ME wasn’t a half-hearted mistake of an OS that even a mother couldn’t love. It was light years worse than 98.
While I am not about to defend ME (I was a 98SE man, before the move to XP), ME was much better than 95 and 98. And ME still has a life today. One of the 5 computers in this household still runs it — with 128MB of RAM it won’t run other things very well, and that is what was on it when someone gave the computer to us. We can (and do) watch DVDs, AVIs, rip AVIs, rip MP3s, etc. on ME. And play all those games (and MAMEs) that don’t run on XP.
ME had 1 main fault, and 3 deliberate negative tweaks.
(1) It suffered as all non-NT/2000/XP MS GUIs suffered from limited ‘System Resources’, a deliberate crippling of the OS that absolutely forced people to move to NT/2000/XP. 95 extended the sizes of a couple of key SysRes areas …enough to get people to move from Win 3.1, but SysRes was the ultimate reason why ‘old Windows’ died.
(2a) They turned on “Fast Find” (which should have been called FFF, with the expletive pre-pended) and this caused the system to be 10 to 15% slower than 98SE. Designed to make Win2000 seem almost acceptable, speed-wise.
(2b) The default IE cache size was 10% of your hard drive, and this led to caches having up to 25,000 files in them — with the big problem being that Wn9x/ME could not handle more than about 50,000 to 60,000 files, total. Try it. [By the way, just deleting those files on a friend’s computer took 20 minutes!]
(2c) System Restore debuted with ME and while it can save your bacon at times, it is both a disk space and performance hog.
Turn off F’n Fast Find and System Restore (or set SysRestore to a very small diskspace footprint), then shrink the IE cache to 5 or 10MB, and you have a perfectly usable OS — for the “one app at a time” usage of the average person.
But no, there was nothing “half hearted” about ME.
It was a carefully crafted OS that improved on 98SE a bit but also stunted/crippled the OS enough that the average dumb user would think they had to move to XP. And it _was_ time to move. I dragged my feet moving from 98SE to XP as long as possible, but was soon very much at home on XP and now I won’t install a lesser Windows OS.
P.S. I am willing to bet that Vista will be equally crafty, offering benefits like very quick reinstalls via the new ‘image’ approach to the OS, even better graphics for gamers, and security changes and tweaks that make XP seem a bit broken.
P.P.S. Back to GNOME/Linux, I think both are at a crossroads in that Linux used to be able to brag about being the best OS for a low-end computer but now needs a new image. Linux needs to reinvent itself — is it a superior OS (certainly could be), is it a great lean OS (make it so with much better optimizations), is it a universal OS (market the core product more, and fight less about the different versions of Linux).
> Could you stop trolling? you post ALWAYS THE SAME MESSAGE in every Gnome thread, no matter if it talks of gnome startup time or it is a release announcement, if it is an interview with a developer or a review!
Indeed, even the headlines are the same.
1. http://osnews.com/permalink.php?comment_id=42203
2. http://osnews.com/permalink.php?comment_id=40887
To prevent his comments from disappearing he even posts them multiple times to the same news. Someone from OSNews should stop this guy.
Shame that he’s from the same country as me.
> To prevent his comments from disappearing he even
> posts them multiple times to the same news.
The comments had to be reposted multiple times (and honestly the contents was more than accurate and correct and valid) but some asshole moderator did
a) removed them (not just moderated them down)
b) some moron users who felt offended (assholes like you primarily) kept moderating valid arguments down. but not because they might be technical wrong, no because they felt insulted in general because someone said something bad (or the turth) about GNOME.
Feel free to moderate my comments down. I spent a lot of my spare free time supporting GNOME in the past and I know how the thing really is and how it’s in real life. All the good bits and bites like a) contribute code, b) talk with developers, c) fill in bugreports and many more I’ve done over and over. It only results in offending responses and asshole behavior of the majority of GNOME people. Sick dumb jerks that behave friendly in the public that have nothing better to do than promote and sell GNOME as the ultimative solution, while it’s horrible broken, useless and just a waste of time. It only causes dozens of ‘Linux not ready for the Desktop’ articles show up over and over again. GNOME is useless get it finally!
Basic lessons in logic:
The statement:
“A could be faster.”
Does not prove the statement:
“A is slower than B”
to be true.
Read, understand, improve your level of discussion. Thank you.
I have mirrored the OpenDocument version of the presentation:
– http://www.jeugdvakantiewerk.nl/2005-GNOME-Summit-federico-profilin…
– http://stuwww.uvt.nl/~s178024/2005-GNOME-Summit-federico-profiling….
…and everybody knows that but to say that you have to close things down when installing is a load of crap. I have Windows XP installed on a machine and it is blazing fast. Just a few days ago I was downloading some drivers, surfing the web, burning a cd, and installing programs and I was running quite fine with no lag or anything like that. I dont know where people get these ideas from.
Yes Linux is badass and can handle insane loads because I have experienced that and Windows cannot compare to that…but that does not mean XP is a slouch.
And if you tweak XP…then it definitely aint to slouch either. Heck after tweaking I dont have problems like ending up with a sluggish system after a few days of usage ever! You just gotta know what you are doing in XP to get the max benefit and the same goes for Linux as well. But yes the bottomline is Linux > XP in terms of stability and multitasking insane loads.
I am testing Ubuntu 5.10 Breezy Badger on this machine here. gnome 2.12 is VERY impressive on it.
I am usually a 100% KDE user, but this new Gnome has got “I LIKE IT !” stamped all over it.
and it is far faster than previous versions.
Gnome still needs a killer app like Amarok though
Just a hypothetical question:Isn´t it about time we readjust the minimal specs needed for the least acceptible experience with various DE´s?
I doubt everything less than a PII 500GHz can keep up indefenitely.
[joke]
Woha! And I thought my PII 350 Mhz is slow. PII 500 Ghz would rock under any OS. 🙂
[/joke]
Dont compete with XP on speed.
XP is bloated and slow competing with XP or VISTA is an admission of defeat.
Look at the windows 2000 user interface, it is very simple, features everything anyone really needs and is very fast.
> To prevent his comments from disappearing he even
> posts them multiple times to the same news.
The comments had to be reposted multiple times (and honestly the contents was more than accurate and correct and valid) but some asshole moderator did
a) removed them (not just moderated them down)
b) some moron users who felt offended (assholes like you primarily) kept moderating valid arguments down. but not because they might be technical wrong, no because they felt insulted in general because someone said something bad (or the turth) about GNOME.
Feel free to moderate my comments down. I spent a lot of my spare free time supporting GNOME in the past and I know how the thing really is and how it’s in real life. All the good bits and bites like a) contribute code, b) talk with developers, c) fill in bugreports and many more I’ve done over and over. It only results in offending responses and asshole behavior of the majority of GNOME people. Sick dumb jerks that behave friendly in the public that have nothing better to do than promote and sell GNOME as the ultimative solution, while it’s horrible broken, useless and just a waste of time. It only causes dozens of ‘Linux not ready for the Desktop’ articles show up over and over again. GNOME is useless get it finally!
http://primates.ximian.com/~federico/docs/2005-GNOME-Summit/html/im…
Is it just me or does the example in the above slide make GNOME/GTK software design look very bad? I mean why would a programmer, or the software if it’s done automatically, load and process something which isn’t actually needed at all?
You must not be a programmer..
When you’re writing Object Oriented code you have a lot of methods, which are basicly just loops of code that call eachother. Its very easy to call extra loops of code that perform several extra operations you might not have meant to perform at that time. But the loss of performance is usually acceptable vs. the loss of time writing and organizing that much code in a structured program. Plus OO code is easy to maintain, so eventuall you will find the time to go back and fix all the extra loops.
So that’s all we’re seeing here. Extra bloat because the genius who designed it wasn’t smoking enough hash to bother fully exploring their own software. These things take time and a lot of creativity. If you’re just doing it as a job you might as well be flippin burgers. We’re going to have to do it over and over and over again until we get it right.
Well said. It’s amazing how ignorant and arrogant users are with regards to software development. The reality is that, nobody gets it right the first time for any sizable project. I don’t know anyone who begins writing a program thinking, “Geez, this has to be fast.” Its more like, “I hope this shit works.” And if it does work, consider yourself blessed. It’s hard enough getting a program to work correctly, talk less about optimizing it for some looser who’s still gonna whine about it being slow anyway.
It’s an ugly world of tradeoffs with a never ending supply of variables that can go wrong. It’s like throwing more balls at a juggler and insisting he juggles faster. Something has to give.
Er, GNOME has been around for, like, SIX YEARS or so. Would you give the same apology to a Microsoft product that still had major flaws and design issues after six years? Of course not.
It’s just like Linux — people say “Oh, it’s a new OS and the problems will be fixed soon.” Er, Linux has been around since 1991, and GNU since 1984.
You’d think after 15-20 YEARS of STILL not being able to make a fast, light, easy and friendly OS, people would be focusing their efforts elsewhere.
Thankfully there’s stuff like Haiku to come 🙂
GNOME and most other OSS projects have been more focused on adding features, than speeding things up. As has already been said, optimizing existing code isn’t a sexy or easy task.
On the other hand, GNOME runs mighty fine on my P4 1.8 GHz desktop at work.
At least its a Novell guy and not some Sun guy pointing out our flaws. We got to kick those Sun guy’s asses and fix their broken GNOME.
Go git ’em tiger! Rawr!
KDE and GNOME have already shown significant improvements in performance, but now they need to get serious about it if they’re serious about being a major player on Everybody’s Desktop.
To see this. Federico said he may optimice Pango next, so this could mean a real faster GNOME.
Good work Federico.
Why is everyone comparing *Linux* and *Windows*? The article is about Gnome, ffs! Yes, Linux is very good at multitasking and handling big loads, but it is one of the two mayor Desktop Enviroments this article is about.
It’s sad that everybody just starts to flame aorund for no apparent reason. Even the Gnome devs admits that this is a problem, and are thus doing something about it, wich is great. Do you Gnome-zealots think they just went “Hey, all those KDE and Windows trolls are going on about how Gnome is so slow. There really isn’t a problem, but let’s put a lot of energy and resources into to improving something that is already perfect”.
> The reality is that, nobody gets it right the first time for any sizable project.
Right the first time. Unfortunately GNOME is at version 2.12.1 now. That implies it to be the second time.
WTF to version numbers mean anyway? This is probably the first time this set of developers wrote these sections of Pango or the GtkFileChooser.
Nautilus was written by moneys. It might take years for several million moneys to write a file manager. We’ll have to wait and see.
What a timely article. I’ve been on windows forever, and I still use it for games, and development on my laptop. After I got back from the Ohio Linuxfest, I installed Ubuntu 5.04. After trying it and it’s KDE install, I much prefer Gnome, at least on this dist. It’s much cleaner, and doens’t have the 40 pounds of KDE app weight taggind along. It’s even more funny since I’ve always been a KDE person on my FreeBSD installs.
They quoted me…
They quoted me…
I wouldn’t be too proud of that. Did you understand the context?
I’m going to try this now, I’ve long been frustrated with gprof’s inability to be useful… I don’t like building static binaries just to profile them, and still be unable to profile my dynamic libraries…
Well for me it was exactly the other way around. I converted from GNOME to KDE and I very well believe that you will soon get back to KDE on your own once you notice all the mess inside GNOME.
For me the choice for KDE came because I needed quality software that could easily keep up with commercial products found on Windows.
I wanted to do some UML stuff and wasn’t able to find a matching GNOME application but KDE had one which was called Umbrello.
I also needed to paint computer related stuff ISO conform but DIA was way to buggy, ugly and not really working for GNOME so I used Kivio as free alternative for KDE.
Later on I was put in the place as a project leader at my company and had to admin some projects but there was no software for GNOME. Well not entirely true there was Planner but it was horrible unusable and not satisfying enough to be professional so I sticked with TaskJuggler which I was introduced to on KDE. It’s quite astonishing how great this application is and in many areas beats Microsoft Project.
I am also involved into electronics engineering (another part of what I do) and had to simulate electronic components but again I wasn’t able to find anything usable for GNOME but on KDE there was this KTechlab application which is quite similar to Electronics Workbench for Windows.
This only a handful of really cool applications that every serious person may be missing. Since GNOME claims for the corporate, I must ask where all these applications are. KDE does offer all these tools and they perfectly and nicely integrate with KDE.
There are a lot of other things such as the KDE Education software package, the nice IDE for KDE, nice Webdevel package and the very nice Koffice package with a lot of powerful and complete programs. Everything really missing on GNOME. It continues with perfectly nice PIM and much more.
For the entertainment you have cool stuff like amaroK and K3b. There is nothing halfway compareable for GNOME existing. I mean seriously. GNOME is so far behind, not just from the architecture and brokenes, it’s also miles away from professional working applications. All this already exists for KDE today.
I think there’s a nice side on both. There are some problems with the KDE projects IMO:
1.) Their .0 releases are almost unusable. This is probably because of the year release cycle, and I think they have a pretty short freeze time at the end.
2.) They’ve got a bunch of work coming up ahead. 4 could be killer, or a total crappiere.
Gnome is pretty steady and slow about changing. Their UI is usually a LOT easier to figure out.
I just started using gtk 2.8.x today, and I don’t feel any slowness at all on an athlon 1800.
I still miss the old file chooser though… I don’t care how snappy the new one gets, I wanna type into it!
Let me take on the flaws in your comments. For one what about rhythmbox with nautilus burn, it burns iso’s as well as music now with the need of a chunk of k3b on the screen next to Amarok. Screem for web developement, Abiword for writing docs because koffice is just broken when it comes to formats and puts PDF right where you cannot find it.
KDE is nice but it’s interface compared to gnome is huge, gnome always has had a simple UI and KDE it just like Windows. I keep saying it but KDE is just like Windows, gnome has a bold and simple why of doing things, just like the gnome panel on the top. I forget to mension Arts, what a broken peace of crap that is, even the devs say it needs redesigning and lots of work. Most people like KDE because it’s close to Windows, gnome on the other hand is minimal and simple, not big space hoggin desktop manager, is OSX like KDE, NO.
I wanted to do some UML stuff and wasn’t able to find a matching GNOME application but KDE had one which was called Umbrello.
I was trying out UML programs recently and also found Umbrello to be the best. The problem is that it doesn’t support UML.
It doesn’t support:
branching paths
paths ‘jogs’
label direcions
join comments with any element
association classes
n-ary assoiacions
connect dependencys to associations
connect associations to state constraints
I think Dia is one of the few “UML” prgorams that I actually have enjoyed working with.
I can’t help but remark that, except for a few specific dog-slow distros (eg. Fedora), KDE has never been more sluggish than Windows on my machines.
I know a lot of people who started Linux by using GNOME and once they have been shown the most issues found on GNOME they came up asking me what else there was they can use.
I introduced them to KDE (also done so at my faculty and later on in the company that I was working) and they were totally impressed by the flexibility, integration, cleanness and the professional applications found under KDE.
None of them who I have shown KDE turned back towards GNOME or anything else. Most of them have told me how thankful they were because I told them about the issues and opened their eyes. Some spent me a coffee and others even spent me a meal during lunchtime at work because they can finally use a working desktop and get their work done.
Some of them are still asking me the one or other question about KDE but most of the stuff they found out on their own because of the flexibility and high configurability that KDE offers. Everyone was able to style and customize their KDE the way they want.
> Let me take on the flaws in your comments.
So will I.
> For one what about rhythmbox with nautilus burn, it
> burns iso’s as well as music now with the need of a
> chunk of k3b on the screen next to Amarok.
Right and that’s almost all of it. At least I get a pretty decent and really awesome media player with amaroK and a great burning app with K3b. So how great is Rhythmbox ? It basicly does nothing else than playing some tunes and even this it doesn’t do right. And where is the great burning app for GNOME ? They don’t exists. After Rhythmbox there was half a dozen attempts to make a halfway usable media player for GNOME and they all failed. I don’t say that there wasn’t some bad attempts for KDE either but look how fast amaroK progresses and becomes better compared to the stagnation you find on GNOME.
> Screem for web developement, Abiword for writing
> docs because koffice is just broken when it comes
> to formats and puts PDF right where you cannot find
> it.
Screem and Abiword (and let’s include Gnumeric) doesn’t make a full GNOME office suite. Koffice is by far more than that. It offers a presentation program, a document writing program, a spreadsheet program, a project managment program, a cool image manipulation program, a flowchart program and many more. Most of these applications share the same office architecture and supports the new open document format and the best, they fully integrate into KDE.
> KDE is nice but it’s interface compared to gnome is
> huge, gnome always has had a simple UI and KDE it
> just like Windows. I keep saying it but KDE is just
> like Windows.
You only demonstrate how much you don’t know about Windows. You compare KDE (a Desktop Environment) with the whole OS that Windows is. Windows is even more than KDE. If you look on Windows 2003 Server for example, then you can play with nice things such as Active Directory, deal with Grouprights and Userstuff, use the Microsoft Management Console and many other things. KDE also doesn’t share the view of Microsoft Windows. The only similar thing that might conclude to this is the K Menu at the bottom left inside the panel and that’s almost all. The entire looks of Desktops hasn’t changed much nor has it been inovated by anything. You can say what you want but KDE’s interface at least looks coherent and consistent across most KDE applications. The benefits of KDE here is that it’s designed in OOP and thus it’s easier to have everything look similar, with similar functionality and keycuts.
> gnome has a bold and simple why of doing things,
Right, because there isn’t much apps existing. I know GNOME very good and I know most applications and besides a few exceptions the majority of apps should be avoided by any means. If you go back to my initial reply to the ‘converted to GNOME from KDE’ comment above (see my IP) then you understand that GNOME still lacks a lot of professional applications.
> just like the gnome panel on the top. I forget to
> mension Arts, what a broken peace of crap that is,
> even the devs say it needs redesigning and lots of
> work.
Of course Arts is broken and good that you mention Arts. If you look close to the code of Arts then you figure out that it was written by GNOME folks, it uses heavy Glib functioncalls, was written by a GNOME’r for GNOME in former times. Another proof of concept how much garbage comes from GNOME.
> Most people like KDE because it’s close to Windows,
Most people like KDE because they get their work done. Because the necessary applications exists, because KDE looks great and integrates perfectly, because it’s designed properly and offers a lot of configurability, flexibility and expandability.
> gnome on the other hand is minimal and simple, not
> big space hoggin desktop manager, is OSX like KDE,
> NO.
Ok I think you need to get some basic knowledge what you are talking about.
GNOME is not minimal and neither simple. Have you ever tried explaining some new users howto change the color of GTK+ windows, or how to change GConf keys or other things. Most developers don’t even respond to users questions anymore because it’s to troublesome to explain to them. GNOME is also not compareable to OSX because GNOME is lacking a lot of OSX’s functionality. It starts from lack of having a good framework, it lacks from the new process sharing that OSX offers, the new ACL stuff that OSX offers, the Kernel plugin system that OSX now offers, lack of UTI’s and much much more. Something you easily overlook because you don’t know what you are talking about.
KDE is also no desktop hog as you want to make it look like.
GNOME fully installed (through one of the existing GNOME buildscripts) + Firefox + Evolution + Abiword is around 670 mb stripped binaries + data + devstuff (which of course gets installed if you compile from sources)
KDE fully installed (through one of the existing KDE buildscripts) is around 750 mb stripped binaries + data + devstuff (which of course gets installed if you compile from sources). This sounds like a huge waste but isn’t. You get far more out of it, far more tools, far more really usable programs. And the stuff usually works perfectly and as said above and I will repeat it again.
For me the choice for KDE came because I needed quality software that could easily keep up with commercial products found on Windows.
I wanted to do some UML stuff and wasn’t able to find a matching GNOME application but KDE had one which was called Umbrello.
I also needed to paint computer related stuff ISO conform but DIA was way to buggy, ugly and not really working for GNOME so I used Kivio as free alternative for KDE.
Later on I was put in the place as a project leader at my company and had to admin some projects but there was no software for GNOME. Well not entirely true there was Planner but it was horrible unusable and not satisfying enough to be professional so I sticked with TaskJuggler which I was introduced to on KDE. It’s quite astonishing how great this application is and in many areas beats Microsoft Project.
I am also involved into electronics engineering (another part of what I do) and had to simulate electronic components but again I wasn’t able to find anything usable for GNOME but on KDE there was this KTechlab application which is quite similar to Electronics Workbench for Windows.
This only a handful of really cool applications that every serious person may be missing. Since GNOME claims for the corporate, I must ask where all these applications are. KDE does offer all these tools and they perfectly and nicely integrate with KDE.
There are a lot of other things such as the KDE Education software package, the nice IDE for KDE, nice Webdevel package and the very nice Koffice package with a lot of powerful and complete programs. Everything really missing on GNOME. It continues with perfectly nice PIM and much more.
For the entertainment you have cool stuff like amaroK and K3b. There is nothing halfway compareable for GNOME existing. I mean seriously. GNOME is so far behind, not just from the architecture and brokenes, it’s also miles away from professional working applications. All this already exists for KDE today.
Some of your comments are wrong, since when just because someone dont finish a app or dont have time, does it become a gnome bashing match?
Amarok is a great application with constant development, why is that a gnome issue?, since thats what your saying. Rhythmbox has intergrated cd writing with nautilus, dbus, ipod support and simple serching. Gnome also has graveman If you want a burning application, but your making out that gnome is just useless. The point I was making is that gnome has a minial UI, launch Amarok and K3b together and it takes up your entire screen, rhythmbox, banshee dont do that.
Stop bashing gnome projects based on peoples time scale .Amarok is a good application because it’s developed well, not because KDE is any better or worse then gnome.
I like Gnome, but the problem is simple.
Metacity. The worst window manager ever.
Its boring. Its slow. It eats RAM and CPU. It has the worst minimize trick of all time.
Metacity is the problem. Use’s XFCE’s window manager or Enlightenment in Gnome and see how fast it can go.
Metacity is the problem.
Yeah, metacity does suck and so does Gnome terminal. You just can’t get around it.
KDE is a better desktop environment, but I tend to use a lot of Gnome/gtk+ apps.
KDE is faster than Gnome. But I find XP to be faster than both. Frankly, I see a future for something other than either Gnome or KDE. Neither of them really attracted many people except for some geeks.
OK, both KDE and Gnome use more RAM than Windows but f*** !! I prefer to use part of the money not used for windows license to buy more RAM !
KDE and Gnome are not slow if you have 512 MB of RAM and a >= 40MB hard disk (which have decent performance).
Windows is closed, insecure, ugly (teletubbies look), expensive and not customizable.
Wait for the next windows version, Vista, if you think KDE or Gnome are bloated and slow…
Always funny.. Of there’s an article about GNOME we can be sure lots of people will discuss Linux. Actually I use GNOME on FreeBSD and I am happy with it. And GNOME can run on [allmost] all UNIX platforms. I agree that it would be better to choose another default WM.
I can run 30+ apps in Linux and not even notice it. On the same machine running Windows, the UI tends to freeze up for a few seconds under heavy load. The taskbar won’t respond, windows won’t move. Windows will often complain that an application “does not respond”. Sure, Windows is fast. But that changes quickly when you start 3D Studio Max, Photoshop, and Unreal Editor 3.0. And that’s just three stupid apps.
I’m running 6 instances of Sony Vegas 6 (two of them rendering memory and CPU-hungry projects), additionally there is Photoshop 7, multiple copies of Firefox, VirtualDub, and other tools opened. Also there is a Quake3 window minimized and Nero burning the DVDRW. My Win2K system is absolutely smooth and responsive, as usual, under any load.
You are mixing up two things. Linux is a kernel, it is much more efficient at handling load when compared to windows xp.
Really? Maybe you can provide some facts? I feel the NT kernel handles the load very effectively.
That’s unfair, you have to pay hunderds of dollars for good software on Windows, take MS Office as example, for that price I can buy myself a new computer.
OpenOffice is free and it’s comparable to MS Office 2003.
ROTFL. Definitely the best comment of the thread.
Oh and if FreeBSD is too hard too install and you want a fast and easy Linux distro, take Xandros. 🙂
and if you refute that you are completely full of shit. XP screems compaired to gnome or kde on the same hardware. Will that be remedied some day? I certainly believe so. I still use gnome 40hrs a week because its a great desktop for doing development work. Linux owns on the server as well. But for general home desktop usage gnome/kde are just to annoyingly sluggish to ignore.
KDE is pretty. But I can’t get around in it without using the mouse for nearly *everything*.
I’ve been using Linux for a long time, and while I’ve done my time configuring fvwm and blackbox, Gnome on a system with sufficient ram has actually saved me more time because I already know all the common windows shortcut keys: alt-tab, control-page-up for tabs, alt-space for window menu…
These are BIG time savers. Especially if you have a multiple desktops with a pile of multi-tabbed gnome-terms in each of them.
I DONT HAVE THE TIME TO SPEND LEARNING ANOTHER KEYSTROKE SYSTEM. I’d reconsider KDE if I knew the keystrokes. In the meantime, I get a LOT of work done with Gnome.
Some things that piss me off about gnome tho:
– rhythmbox: POS memory holes.
– gnome-terminal: transparent background refreshing can hang your session
– nautilus: nautilus is not any more stable than windows explorer and I find the CLI more useful anyhow.
– eog: using windows image previewer is much faster to use, it saves A LOT more keystrokes. eog used to be a big POS now it’s just mediocre. Watch your memory, and kill -9 eog when you see it slipping!
Yeah, metacity does suck and so does Gnome terminal. You just can’t get around it.
Eh.. you can’t? I can:
cd /usr/ports/x11/xterm ; make install clean
and:
cd /usr/ports/x11-wm/sawfish2 ; make install clean
killall metacity; sawfish &
gnome-session-save
Cheers! 😉
> Some of your comments are wrong, since when just
> because someone dont finish a app or dont have
> time, does it become a gnome bashing match?
I think the majority of people have been waiting long enough now. If those people can’t finish an application then they shouldn’t start a new one. A few of the RB clones has been started by people who initially worked on RB. So this either means RB sucks donkey balls or their initial approach was wrong.
> Amarok is a great application with constant
> development, why is that a gnome issue?, since
> thats what your saying.
I don’t say this is a GNOME issue, I only said that you can expect working and cool applications on KDE. This is valid because KDE is based upon OOP and has the better architecture. Good architecture usually leads in rapid application development.
> Rhythmbox has intergrated cd writing with nautilus,
> dbus, ipod support and simple serching.
Rhythmbox has no integrated CD writing capabilities, sure it has been hacked the way so it works somehow but the approach sucks badly. That’s one of the problems of the GNOME architecture. It’s hacked the way around it so it works somehow. But it hasn’t been hacked with brains so it might work with other things as well. About dbus and ipod or simple searching, no one gives a flying f–k for dbus if the entire application Rhythmbox as is doesn’t work properly enough for the simple task it was aimed for – playing music, giving feedback about artists, duration, genere, cover manager etc. (RB was aimed to be some sort of amaroK years ago).
> Gnome also has graveman If you want a burning
> application, but your making out that gnome is just
> useless.
GNOME pretty much is useless. I don’t have to burn CD’s or play music every day. You only junped on the part with CD burning and music playing and ignored all the rest of what I said about project management applications, presentation applications, uml creating applications and and and.
> The point I was making is that gnome has a minial
> UI, launch Amarok and K3b together and it takes up
> your entire screen, rhythmbox, banshee dont do
> that.
But this isn’t the point.
> Stop bashing gnome projects based on peoples time
> scale .Amarok is a good application because it’s
> developed well, not because KDE is any better or
> worse then gnome.
In what way are these two sentences related ? But besides that KDE is better than GNOME due to better framework and architecture. Something that has been repeated for years but still hasn’t reached you as it seems.
Why must you always pollute GNOME threads with your KDE zealotry Ali! All what you say are nothing but lies, and yet you insist on shaming the remaining dignity you have left and trolling like a mindless beast.
GNOME CD/DVD Burner
http://gnomebaker.sourceforge.net/
UML App
http://gaphor.sourceforge.net/
You say Rythmbox sucks. Well you suck! Use the million and one other music players available for GNOME and GTK+. I’m sick and tired of hearing your retarded banter.
KDE is not better than GNOME. It does not have a better Architecture, and it does not have better hackers. It is simply an alternative destkop env that some people appreciate while many others don’t. Just stop shoving your insulting opinions down my throat. And stop calling me an idiot for loving GNOME. If you don’t like GNOME, f–k off. This is a GNOME thread, not a KDE promotion arena.
I never heard such bullshit, I must say that your aproach to answering my questions sounds factual but masked as nonsence.
What part of rhythmbox uses nautilus cd burning do you not understand?. Amaork “K3B (CD-burning) integration” It’s not intergration is it, since ot just puts the files into k3b like you would launch k3b anyway.
Rhythmbox has resumed developement (0.9.0) and his alot more features including cd burning intergration. All it does is bring up a small dialog box for burning your music with nautilus cd burner.
If you dont like gnome so much why on earth bother commenting at all?. It’s obvious you have no input to gnome other than to piss all over it. People like you make me sick, what are you a KDE dev? because last time I spoke to one she sounded just like you.
only when KDE has a usable GUI. Maybe in 4.0, maybe not…
I was running a very graphics intensive Swing app on an eight screen display setup at work and it was chronically slow despite all sorts of optimizations. Eventually I started thinking that it was just Swing being cludgy because of all the widget rendering it was doing and started to think about rewriting the whole thing in SWT. Then Nautilous started crashing and taking everything with it. I had thought about running things under KDE, but figured it had as much baggage as Gnome so I decided to try a lightweight window manager, WindowMaker. The initial intention was to avoid a crashing desktop, but i was amazed to find that my hitherto cludgy Swing app started running very smoothly. My users went from regularly cursing me and my app to “works fine, haven’t had any problems”.
Since then I’ve used WindowMaker for my general work and love it. I had recently upgraded my motherboard on my old clunker at home so I could run Eclipse without chugging, but was disappointed that it was still not as crisp as on my Windoze box at work. Under WMaker, though, it’s very smooth. The irony is that Eclipse uses the GTK native widget set, but runs slower under Gnome. Go figure.
There are problems with my WMaker experience. KMail doesn’t startup right. Downloading pictures from my camera is a hassle. But I’m almost willing to give up some of my Gnome / KDE dependent apps just to have everything run crisply the way it should on my new hardware.
Face the truth: pretty much everything associated with desktop Linux is dog slow. Disk access is slow. Screen updates are slow. It’s been this way for the past couple of decades. The reason is obvious but no one dares acknowledge it: most of the work in desktop Linux is done by second rate programmers. The wannabes who dream of being the best in the world but fail miserable at it while turning out page after page of bloated code.
“The wannabes who dream of being the best in the world but fail miserable at it while turning out page after page of bloated code.”
You are confused. You are mistaking them for the code monkeys in Redmond.
http://primates.ximian.com/~federico/news-2005-10.html#09
Good morning everyone!
Just woke up and had a perfect sleep. Ok now replying to some people here.
(IP: 164.8.213.—) and (IP: 62.254.0.—)
Thanks of you both for replying to me but does it have an intend to skip nearly 80% of what I wrote initially ?
First of all I am not hyping KDE here, no! I am only trying to make people realize how bad GNOME is and this on a GNOME zealotry site such as OSNews.com. So it’s not a KDE hyping, it’s more a GNOME bashing and it suits perfectly in a GNOME related thread where people keep exchanging arguments that not only startuptimes are the cause of GNOME’s problems but also the bad architecture of GNOME itself.
Thanks for skipping all the nice other tools that I was refering to such as:
Dia vs. Umbrello
Dia vs. Kivio
Planner vs. TaskJuggler
GnomeOffice vs. KDE Office
And the rest of the stuff that I mentioned. Instead giving a constructive feedback you both kept jumping on Rhythmbox and the CD burning app but this was just not my point. Who cares if you can burn a CD right out of Rhythmbox into Nautilus if both apps are in no ways trustable or compareable ? Besides this I also didn’t said that Rhythmbox sucks or something. I only said that it’s by far inferior if you compare it with amaroK.
Of course GNOME is by far inferior to KDE. GNOME is simply said – broken ! In all the years I found myself trapped in the illusion that GNOME is a cool desktop environment but the reality (the reality with KDE) has shown that it’s not. What does actually work with GNOME ? Nothing works anywhere usable to be considered corporate or good enough for the users. It’s still having this hacking mentality applied to it. Copying large chunks of files from ftp to your desktop is still broken, copying null byte files is still possible. Who is trusting such a desktop who can’t guarantee basic stuff to work ok ? Gstreamer still being used but avoided by RB and Totem they still offer Xine as option (maybe it’s still default). Evolution keep desyncinc with the index files and break them. Dia (which I will respond later on) is still to f–king broken to paint anything worth while for university or your company. Printing is too broken to be taken serious. If you print one page out of a 20 pages document using Evince you end up having that one page look differently due to different font than the rest of the pages (there is a bugreport for that). You still can not log out of GNOME with that broken session manager who usually keeps you locked for minutes.
And many many more. Way to much if you ask me. Of course the KDE developers are cooking with water too and so do the GNOME developers. But I believe that the OOP design of KDE and the well thought architecture makes it possible for them to achieve more in a shorter time. The stuff they create usually works and make sense. Sure not everything is perfect on KDE (does anything perfect exists ?) but the annoyances on KDE are far less than on GNOME and this fact is rewarded to KDE with huge numbers of users. GNOME’s second problem (primary is the broken framework of GNOME, secondary is the huge egos of many developers) is the community. You can’t compare the KDE community with the GNOME community. It’s like two different worlds met each other. While I recall huge inflamatory, slandering and highly offensive and insulting comments coming from GNOME and primarily developers which makes it nearly impossible to
a) contribute to GNOME
b) talk with developers
c) exchange experiences
Without that it ends in regular inflamatory stuff. On the KDE side it’s exactly differently you can have a dispute with them, you can even disagree with them and you can exchange experiences with them. And if you have a little clash with them then it’s usually forgotten two days later. The entire KDE community is far more friendly, open and openminded. Something the GNOME community needs to learn. Maybe GNOME would result in a better desktop if there wasn’t so many big egos involved. People who are hardly trying to re-invent themselves with every new release cycle of GNOME. There is much more I can say here but I doubt that many people who read OSN would understand the problems around GNOME to actually get what I am trying to say.
John, I hadn’t had that joy with DIA around 1999 when I was still at university.
I hope you don’t mind my fair comment on DIA but I never found it useful or reliable enough to get work done. As a former student I relied on a program like DIA to draw diagrams for university but the problems with it was simply too big to deal any further with it. Often it’s so, that you need to urgently draw something and then DIA simply fails for whatever reasons and then you have no time dealing with finding the problems and thus switch back to some drawing tool you know from university.
Even now I wanted to illustrate some problems found with DIA and I already made a few screenshots but then during work it crashed again and stopped bothering with it anymore.
My problems with DIA so far (and this is going over years):
a) Instability during working. Even now when I wanted to save a document or print into a file DIA crashed on me and the saved file ended up in 0 bytes. This was years ago a problem and this seem to be a problem now too. It doesn’t crash on first save, nor does it crash on the second but if you save a couple of times or print into a .ps file (yes you can do this with the printing option as well as exporting the diagram) it crashed.
b) I recall when I had to draw an UML diagram that I was called for dinner and saved my document so I can continue working on it once finished. After the dinner I came back into my room and loaded the document up again and I got an error message that the saved data was corrupt. Of course I was quite pissed off about this because I lost quite some amount of work done on this USE CASE diagram and instead spending my time redrawing the USE CASE diagram I of course wasted time in experimenting around with DIA to check whether these issues occour again (and they did).
c) The GUI of DIA is quite poor, you are presented with an empty sheet divided by blue lines. These lines are marking one page but you usually get 3-4 pages shown on one empty new sheet and I find this one quite irritating. Compared to the size of the objects you drag on the sheet you might assume that one page is filled up after draging a handful elements on it. Most people only want to paint one diagram that fits perfectly on one sheet and this is getting hard with DIA at least that’s my very personal opinion. Also the draging of objects and snapping them somewhere is quite sluggish and if you don’t take care enough you can easily drift out on the border and it paints another extra page on the left, the top, the right or the bottom.
d) The objects in DIA when printed out are quite ‘big’ the lines are quite ‘fat’ and the whole output isn’t really looking professional. This is valid if you use the application as is. You need to further alter a lot of things such as line stength and resize objects only to make the printout look more aesthetical. For example the lines and elements printed out with Rational Rose looks far more professional than the lines and elements from DIA. One day I had my professor asking me whether I made the printout with a drawing program (he refered here to Photoshop) you know drawing elypsis, lines and so on. I told him that I was using DIA a quite famous program on the open source architecture and he stopped further comments.
e) Sometimes the elements chosen from the Toolbar are looking differently to the elements that get dropped to the sheet which makes it quite confusing. Of course the functionality of the element is given so smaller cosmetical issues can be taken without issues.
f) When reporting problems with DIA to bugzilla and this finally sums everything up is a pain too, the way the maintainers are replying to their users and those who spent time reporting bugs can be summed up as totally rude. They have a way to reply to their audience that wants you to stop reporting anything anymore. Well I tried reporting around 4-5 things over the past years and then finally concluded that it will be better to leave them with their own destiny.
I know that DIA is the only application of its kind for GTK+ and GNOME but the application made a really poor impression on me and all the issues I encountered made it an application that I’d better not recommend others to use. You can do some graphs with it but then you really need to watch carefully what you are doing. The amount of random crashes, the GUI, the aesthetics, the default behavior of elements (big objects, lines are too thick, the overall printout once finished) aren’t really hitting. I therefore looked for alternative programs primarily for GNOME or GTK+ but wasn’t able to find anything and then later on I looked for applications on Linux and came to Umbrello and Kivio which finally got me going and my work done. Even the printout with Umbrello and Kivio came closer to the results from Rational Rose or Visio. DIA has a long way to go and I think some SUN people should be thrown towards DIA to improve it. Make it show one single sheet on startup, a bigger sheet but one page, make the objects dropped on this sheet a bit smaller or at least in a ratio that don’t make them too big, lines should be thinner and anti-aliased, and there are many other issues, small ones but you get hold of them once you are seriously using DIA to get some really important stuff done.
So far this is from my very personal experiences I had with DIA.
And my third comment in the row.
Most GNOME developers use MacOSX anyways so they have a working desktop OS to get their stuff done. GNOME has grown more a hobbiest project that they keep working on rather than working on it because the urgent requirement. But the requirement and need for a really working desktop has been lost for them. What purpose does it make to work on a desktop if you don’t really need one because you get a better one with a different OS you use ?
I recall years back when most GNOMER’s started hacking on GNOME. They hacked on it because there was a need for it but these days most of those ‘kids’ have grown and have families, they work for a company, get the bigger money and are able to buy something they ever dreamt about. They bought a nice PowerBook from Apple, installed MacOSX ontop of it and are enjoying the great commercial applications that come bundled with it. No hassle with different distros, no pain with package managment, they get work done. Now with the better job at the hand, that some might got through their open source contributions they don’t need to prove themselves anymore. They found a good job, do the work they are ordered to do, get the cash and feel the real life with all its quirks.
Someone else who recently had a point of resignation formed this in better words than I am able to do maybe you like to read it on your own:
http://usefulinc.com/edd/blog/contents/2005/04/29-gnome-no-fun/read
I mean this also explains why GNOME feels so incomplete, sluggish, half backed, wasted. Now let’s get back to normal daily busines. Maybe a better programming language used inside GNOME would have solved a lot of issues. As said above KDE and GNOME developers are just cooking with water. But you can cook better if you have the better toys to heaten up the water. OOP was the solution for them, the rapid application development, creating more useful and better applications in shorter time frames. That’s KDE. Maybe MONO will solve something for GNOME in the future but I only see the GNOME community to get split up even more once it makes it’s ways into GNOME. Not to mention that MONO is not portable to other architectures – someone told me it’s due assembly language used inside MONO to create MONO.
you must have been running a distro that packages gnome and dia really bad. i have been using dia alot and have never ever had any of those problems that you describe.
so pherhaps you should try i more gnome centric distro.
or maby use a computer that dosent distorts reality
> you must have been running a distro that packages
> gnome and dia really bad. i have been using dia
> alot and have never ever had any of those problems
> that you describe.
That’s no problem of packaging, that’s a problem of broken application and clueless developers.
> so perhaps you should try i more gnome centric
> distro. or maby use a computer that dosent distorts
> reality
How does using a gnome centric distro solve the issues inside DIA ?
Maybe you like to read the feedback given by other commentors on DIA. You also find my above comment quoted there too (basicly it was a cut and paste that saved me time typing). The users find DIA to be slugish, not trustable, broken, horrible, crashing. And it’s no secret.
http://software.newsforge.com/comments.pl?sid=48199&cid=116548
i still find it wierd since i never have had those problems. i would not know how gnome centric distrubutions solve it pherhaps patches. i have showed dia to alot of friends that got intressed and started using it to non of them have ever had any complaints.
pherhaps they have had some really bad realeses and i have gotten lucky to miss them i dont know.
I posted a comment on page 3 and didn’t retunr until now. Damn, seems like i missed the flamewar party.
in order to assist the anonymous guy (IP: 84.129.236.—) in his need to return to reality, here are my views.
i used to be a KDE user. i think kde/qt has a good architecture with regards to kparts (although all the rest is antiquated, such as arts etc) with great documentation for QT, and semi-good integration. but that wasnt enough. kde and qt have several major shortcoming that make it less commercially popular, and which the long suffering developers need to address. i’ve tried gnome and i decided that i liked it better. there are several problems with KDE that i found:
-KDE is buggy. i find it difficult to use the applications because many of them can’t seem to stay up long enough to do anything with them. the Crash-Master(ie konquerer) must be thee most bug-ridden and unnecessarily bloated application on the whole of linux to date. in comparison, i find gnome to be rock solid stable. nautilus has crashed on me only when i transferred 5000+ true type fonts from one folder to another whilst playing xsoldier. at least its predicatable. kde apps(especially the crash master) tend to crash randomly.
-while i find gnome to be snappy and responsive, i find kde to be horribly slow. i still have KDE on my pc in its own partition. gnome takes 6 seconds from login screen while kde takes 17 seconds to load.
-gnome looks so much more professional. there was a survey done recently where they took a large number of passers-by and asked them which desktop they preferred the appearence of between gnome and kde. in almost all instances, gnome was considered to be the most attractive. no matter how many theme-manager themes, styles, colour schemes, and window decorations i amass on my pc, i can’t seem to de-uglify kde enough to look even half as good as gnome. there’s something about the natural appearence of kde that is off putting and unprofessional. it always looks far too fisher-price and in-yer-face. this is perhaps one of the many logical reasons why, despite there being no major licencing issues with qt anymore, that all the big businesses are rejecting kde and favouring gnome.
-kde is horribly confusing. while i find gnome to be intuitive, logical, and a pleasure to work with, i find kde to be anything but. the kde developers should concentrate on simplifying the control centre and the rest of the confusing mess that is kde. then they should provide users with the option to click on advanced settings instead of forcing users to require a Phd in orienteering in order to use it.
-kde is bloated. gnome is more granular. this has the advantage that i don’t end up with 25,000 crappy paint programs that i don’t need when i install kdelibs and kdebase. with gnome, i can pick and choose what i want to install. this also helps to keep the size of gnome down. its also the reason why gnome is far faster and responsive than kde.
-kde applications are mostly amateurish compared to gnome. this is my biggest gripe that is stopping me from wanting to use kde instead of gnome. apart from kdevelop(which i like a lot), there isn’t a single half-decent kde application that can come close to its gtk/gnome equivelent. abiword is better than kword. gnumeric is better than kspread. any equivelent kde apps better than gimp? no comment. k3-d > kpovmodeller. nvu > quanta. any kde equivelents better than dia? no, i thought not. and the list goes on and on and on.
hopefully the kde developers can sort out all of kde’s many many problems(not least the lack of speed issue) for a future release, but i’m not holding my breath. i would like to like kde more than i do, so that can both develop on kde and use it too. gnome is the platform of choice for me, both for development and usage. the kde developers have years of work on their hands to make it usable (or at least as usable as gnome or OS X). i wish them the luck that they’ll inevitably need.
> To prevent his comments from disappearing he even
> posts them multiple times to the same news.
The comments had to be reposted multiple times (and honestly the contents was more than accurate and correct and valid) but some asshole moderator did
a) removed them (not just moderated them down)
b) some moron users who felt offended (assholes like you primarily) kept moderating valid arguments down. but not because they might be technical wrong, no because they felt insulted in general because someone said something bad (or the turth) about GNOME.
Feel free to moderate my comments down. I spent a lot of my spare free time supporting GNOME in the past and I know how the thing really is and how it’s in real life. All the good bits and bites like:
a) contribute code,
b) talk with developers,
c) fill in bugreports and many more I’ve done over and over.
It only results in offending responses and asshole behavior of the majority of GNOME people. Sick dumb jerks that behave friendly in the public that have nothing better to do than promote and sell GNOME as the ultimative solution, while it’s horrible broken, useless and just a waste of time. It only causes dozens of ‘Linux not ready for the Desktop’ articles show up over and over again. GNOME is useless get it finally!
“while it’s horrible broken, useless and just a waste of time.”
it seems very strange that ALL big business(after reseaching what their users want) are ignoring kde in favour of that ‘broken, useless and just a waste of time’ desktop that you call gnome.