Consider these memory requirements for Fedora Core 2, as specified by Red Hat: Minimum for graphical: 192MB and Recommended for graphical: 256MB Does that sound any alarm bells with you? 192MB minimum? I’ve been running Linux for five years (and am a huge supporter), and have plenty of experience with Windows, Mac OS X and others. And those numbers are shocking — severely so. No other general-purpose OS in existence has such high requirements. Linux is getting very fat.
I appreciate that there are other distros; however, this is symptomatic of what’s happening to Linux in general. The other mainstream desktop distros are equally demanding (even if not as much as Fedora, for example Arch Linux or Slackware run Gnome on 128 MB, but not very comfortably when you load 2-3 apps at the same time), desktops and apps are bloating beyond control, and it’s starting to put Linux in a troublesome situation. Allow me to elaborate.
A worrying tale
Recently, a friend of mine expressed an interest in running Linux on his machine. Sick and tired of endless spyware and viruses, he wanted a way out — so I gave him a copy of Mandrake 10.0 Official. A couple of days later, he got back to me with the sad news I was prepared for: it’s just too slow. His box, an 600 MHz 128MB RAM system, ran Windows XP happily, but with Mandrake it was considerably slower. Not only did it take longer to boot up, it crawled when running several major apps (Mozilla, OpenOffice.org and Evolution on top of KDE) and suffered more desktop glitches and bugs.
Sigh. What could I do? I knew from my own experience that XP with Office and IE is snappier and lighter on memory than GNOME/KDE with OOo and Moz/Firefox, so I couldn’t deny the problem. I couldn’t tell him to switch to Fluxbox, Dillo and AbiWord, as those apps wouldn’t provide him with what he needs. And I couldn’t tell him to grudgingly install Slackware, Debian or Gentoo; they may run a bit faster, but they’re not really suitable for newcomers.
Now, I’m not saying that modern desktop distros should work on a 286 with 1MB of RAM, or anything like that. I’m just being realistic — they should still run decently on hardware that’s a mere three years old, like my friend’s machine. If he has to buy more RAM, upgrade his CPU or even buy a whole new PC just to run desktop Linux adequately, how are we any better than Microsoft?
Gone are the days when we could advocate Linux as a fast and light OS that gives old machines a new boost. BeOS on an ancient box is still faster than Linux on the latest kit. And to me, this is very sad. We need REAL reasons to suggest Linux over Windows, and they’re slowly being eroded — bit by bit. Linux used to be massively more stable than Windows, but XP was a great improvement and meanwhile we have highly bug-ridden Mandrake and Fedora releases. XP also shortened boot time considerably, whereas with Linux it’s just getting longer and longer and longer…
Computers getting faster?
At this rate, Linux could soon face major challenges by the upcoming hobby/community OSes. There’s Syllable, OpenBeOS, SkyOS, ReactOS and MenuetOS — all of which are orders of magnitude lighter and faster than modern Linux distros, and make a fast machine actually feel FAST. Sure, they’re still in early stages of development, but they’re already putting emphasis on performance and elegant design. More speed means more productivity.
To some people running 3 GHz 1G RAM boxes, this argument may not seem like an issue at present; however, things will change. A 200 MHz box used to be more than adequate for a spiffy Linux desktop, and now it’s almost unusable (unless you’re willing to dump most apps and spend hours tweaking and hacking). In those times, us Linux users were drooling over the prospect of multi-GHz chips, expecting lightning-fast app startup and super-smooth running. But no, instead, we’re still waiting as the disk thrashes and windows stutter to redraw and boot times grow.
So when people talk about 10 GHz CPUs with so much hope and optimism, I cringe. We WON’T have the lightning-fast apps. We won’t have near-instant startup. We thought this would happen when chips hit 100 MHz, and 500 MHz, and 1 GHz, and 3 GHz, and Linux is just bloating itself out to fill it. You see, computers aren’t getting any faster. CPUs, hard drives and RAM may be improving, but the machines themselves are pretty much static. Why should a 1 GHz box with Fedora be so much slower than a 7 MHz Amiga? Sure, the PC does more – a lot more – but not over 1000 times more (taking into account RAM and HD power too). It doesn’t make you 1000 times more productive.
It’s a very sad state of affairs. Linux was supposed to be the liberating OS, disruptive technology that would change the playing field for computing. It was supposed to breathe new life into PCs and give third-world countries new opportunities. It was supposed to avoid the Microsoftian upgrade treadmill; instead, it’s rushing after Moore’s Law. Such a shame.
Denying ourselves a chance
But let’s think about some of the real-world implications of Linux’s bloat. Around the world in thousands of companies are millions upon millions of Win98 and WinNT4 systems. These boxes are being prepared for retirement as Microsoft ends the lifespan for the OSes, and this should be a wonderful opportunity for Linux. Imagine if Linux vendors and advocates could go into businesses and say: “Don’t throw out those Win98 and NT4 boxes, and don’t spend vast amounts of money on Win2k/XP. Put Linux on instead and save time and money!”.
But that opportunity has been destroyed. The average Win98 and NT4 box has 32 or 64M of RAM and CPUs in the range of 300 – 500 MHz — in other words, entirely unsuitable for modern desktop Linux distros. This gigantic market, so full of potential to spread Linux adoption and curb the Microsoft monopoly, has been eliminated by the massive bloat.
This should really get people thinking: a huge market we can’t enter.
The possibility of stressing Linux’s price benefits, stability and security, all gone. Instead, businesses are now forced to buy new boxes if they are even considering Linux, and if you’re splashing out that much you may as well stick with what you know OS-wise. Companies would LOVE to maintain their current hardware investment with a secure, supported OS, but that possibility has been ruined.
Impractical solutions
Now, at this point many of you will be saying “but there are alternatives”. And yes, you’re right to say that, and yes, there are. But two difficulties remain: firstly, why should we have to hack init scripts, change WMs to something minimal, and throw out our most featureful apps? Why should newcomers have to go through this trouble just to get an OS that gives them some real performance boost over Windows?
Sure, you can just about get by with IceWM, Dillo, AbiWord, Sylpheed et al. But let’s face it, they don’t rival Windows software in the same way as GNOME/KDE, Moz/Konq, OpenOffice.org and Evolution. It’s hard to get newcomers using Linux with those limited and basic tools; new Linux convertees need the powerful software that matches up to Windows. Linux novices will get the idea that serious apps which rival Windows software are far too bloated to use effectively.
Secondly, why should users have to install Slackware, Debian or Gentoo just to get adequate speed? Those distros are primarily targeted at experienced users — the kind of people who know how to tweak for performance anyway. The distros geared towards newcomers don’t pay any attention to speed, and it’s giving a lot of people a very bad impression. Spend an hour or two browsing first-timer Linux forums on the Net; you’ll be dismayed by the number of posts asking why it takes so long to boot, why it’s slower to run, why it’s always swapping. Especially when they’ve been told that Linux is better than Windows.
So telling newcomers to ditch their powerful apps, move to spartan desktops, install tougher distros and hack startup scripts isn’t the cure. In fact, it proves just how bad the problem is getting.
Conclusion
So what can be done? We need to put a serious emphasis on elegant design, careful coding and making the most of RAM, not throwing in hurried features just because we can. Open source coders need to appreciate that not everyone has 3 GHz boxes with 1G RAM — and that the few who do want to get their money’s worth from their hardware investment. Typically, open source hackers, being interested in tech, have very powerful boxes; as a result, they never experience their apps running on moderate systems.
This has been particularly noticeable in GNOME development. On my box, extracting a long tar file under GNOME-Terminal is a disaster — and reaffirms the problem. When extracting, GNOME-Terminal uses around 70% of the CPU just to draw the text, leaving only 30% for the extraction itself. That’s pitifully poor. Metacity is hellishly slow over networked X, and, curiously, these two offending apps were both written by the same guy (Havoc Pennington). He may have talent in writing a lot of code quickly, but it’s not good code. We need programmers who appreciate performance, elegant design and low overheads.
We need to understand that there are millions and millions of PCs out there which could (and should) be running Linux, but can’t because of the obscene memory requirements. We need to admit that many home users are being turned away because it offers no peformance boost over XP and its apps, and in most cases it’s even worse.
We’re digging a big hole here — a hole from which there may be no easy escape. Linux needs as many tangible benefits over Windows as possible, and we’re losing them.
Losing performance, losing stability, losing things to advocate.
I look forward to reading your comments.
About the author
Bob Marr is a sysadmin and tech writer, and has used Linux for five years. Currently, his favorite distribution is Arch Linux.
If you would like to see your thoughts or experiences with technology published, please consider writing an article for OSNews.
The author is spot on and I’m afraid that if you disagree, you just may be a tad retarded.
Fedora shouldn’t be looked at as a viable alternative for Linux newcomers, it’s a test bed for RHEL. Red Hat admits this and is concentrating on Enterprise level sales.
A typical Enterprise sized install base is relatively made up of homogenous desktops. The image/load whatever… would be installed by the IT/IS department. Trimming a distro and then cloning it to each pc would be transparent to the user. Older PC’s can be used as terminals to application servers. But if you’ve worked in an environment like this, users always want the latest PC and really are more of a pain than the OS is.
People trying to squeeze life from an old PC will always be an issue. There are several distros designed to run on older hardware. RAM is simply to cheap to argue costs. Any PC that can’t be upgraded to 256 or 384 MB is to old for a desktop to have all the latest greatest apps. Sure I had an older PC and loaded Debian on it and it ran fine, but the feature list was limited.
Windows XP does starts quickly, but it takes for ever to shut down so you still have to wait. Slackware 9.1 starts from POST to login in about 30 seconds. And Slackware is one of the easiest distros to install. It’s a bit involved to configure, but this is a short learning curve.
XP’s sweet spot is 512MB, enough to handle any Linux distro. X is usually always the most resource intensive application in Linux. It would be nice to opt out of the Server – Client relationship of X and run a Presentation Manager ment for a personal pc that’s not ment to push a desktop to remote clients. And even in networked environments CDE, wmaker or plain X are the interfaces for remote desktop production. It doesn’t matter so much in remote admin since this is a small fraction of remote uses.
These are good topics to discuss. Resource demand has been an issue that has existed for quite a while… all the way back to the first computers.
Distros should learn from the best – Debian and Slackware. Obviously there are clones of these distros that are easy to set up and run.
I’m using pretty recent hardware e.g., this machine has dual AMD XP 2000+ processors, 1 GB of RAM, Radeon 9000 and two SCSI 160 drives running a Debian Sarge test. So, I don’t run out of resource. I find Debian runs better than 2000 or XP on this machine.
Sometimes though you have to look at what’s using RAM. Simply because all the RAM is being used doesn’t mean it’s not available to the system.
g9 out
A few years ago I tried installing RedHat 6.2 on my P166 with 64MB of RAM and RH was very sluggish. Windows 2000 ran quite fast on this machine and I could easily have 30+ Internet Explorer windows open at the same time during a typical web browsing session . When Mozilla first came out with tabbed browsing I was very excited about it but the startup was extremely slow compared to IE5. And it seemed to use more resources when running as well.
OpenOffice was also dreadfully slow compared to MS Office 97 which is what I had at the time.
On low end machines it seems that Windows handles swapping better than Linux.
I just hope that when Longhorn comes out it’ll be too slow for the majority of machines and that it makes Linux distros look a lot more tempting for older computers.
Obviously if anyone was paying attention, Mr Marr was comaparing apples to apples, competing product to competing product not MSDOS to Linux Kernel or WinXP desktop to Linux Kernel or Linux desktop to MSDOS. He was refering to everyday use with erery day software.
Admittedly by bosses wife still will only use an old 386 with MSDOS and Corel WordPerfect ver 3.0 or something like that because that is what she learned and it works and has WordPerfect has all the general features of the new stuff. Her machine has never had trouble loading network srvices or wasted time with them because they don’t exist.
But that is not realistic for eveyone else. Of course you can boot to Linux kernel and type a letter in no time but so can my boss with the 386 and MSDOS. (hows that for boot time and resource requirements)
The point is that Mr. Marr is right on and has a valid point. Linux with similar Apps should be matched or faster than XP with similar Apps. And not only that but be less prone to crash running smilar apps. Bloated code generally means slower performance and more prone to crash.
wtf happened here 400+ posts in what 1 day? lol
The artical I read was interesting and I read a lot of good comments. I tried Linux years ago and found it hard to use, drivers were a pain in the butt, uninstalling programs was hard. It just wasn’t like Windows. I hear Mac OS is easy but I don’t have tons of money to shell out for Mac hardware. Way back when when there were Mac clones I was going to build one but didn’t have the chance.
I use BEOS and I liked it, it was easy and a good OS. I see OpenBEos is around and maybe they’ll make something of it. If their smart they’ll do what I thought BEos should have done, not just marketed it as a multimedia OS but as an OS everybody can use for anything. I think if marketed right it could have given Linux a run for its money and may have even passed it. It was difinitly easier to use.
An OS should be easy for everyone, and you shouldn’t have to tweak anything. Drivers should be easy to install and uninstall, everything should be easy to run and configure and thats what Windows is for me. The problem I find with Windows is after you install and uninstall programs many times it gets slower and starts to have problems. Its better with XP than it was with 9x but it still has its problems. In the artical the author mentioned other Os’ which I had never even heard of, and I looked at their web pages and some lool nice. To make an OS compete with Windows it has to be easy to use and have a lot of apps and games. An OS to compete with Windows needs to give a reason to some of the major software makes to write software for it and so far it hasn’t happened. Microsoft keeps pining away as everyone hopes another OS gives it a run for its money but its not happening. Apple could port Mac OS X to the X86 machines or let people make Mac clones and be mostly a software developer and make hardware for people who want to spend the huge ammounts of money and keep making other inovative things like the Ipod. IBM had its shot with OS2 but lost it. The other option is that something big has to happen to make people want to switch. Like someone making an OS thats totally voice controled or make some other type of input divice thats better than the keyboard. Unless one of these things happens we’re stuck with Windows because either everything else is outdated or just to hard to configure for the average person. There is a little distro I’m going to try I hear is good and thats ELX, I hear its going in the right direction.
Windows may have its problems but its the best we have for now. It has the ease of use and the apps and games we all want.
Not trying to start a flame war, but I run FreeBSD 4.9 on my 4 year old machine and it feels a lot faster than any Linux distribution out there I have seen recently. Not really suitable for beginners, but then once you run it, it is really responsive, fast and gives you a solid impression. I always have a feeling Linux starts to crack once you put the pressure on it.
Old computers are old, and the fact that the majority of Linux distributions still run reasonably well on old (not older, but OLD) machines is homage to the Linux philosophy. BUT, it is time to give the developers some freedom. If you can make a great distro that requires 192 MB of RAM, why not? There will still be other distros for people who don’t have shiny new computers. Considering the average computer being sold today has at a minimum 256 MB of RAM, why worry when you are developing for a new crowd? Even average Linux users know how to tweak a system for some speed, but most newbies to Linux will have new computers, thus, not having to worry about tweaking. It’s like forcing yourself to use a 15 year old cellular phone because it does everything a phone should do and anyone can figure out how to use it.
I am a (relatively) newbie who absolutely hates M$. I kept reading about how fast and efficient Linux is, but that was not my experience. I have feared that Linux was hopelessly addicted to Moores Law. I desperately want to see Linux succeed and beat the pants off of M$. But in addition to good functionality, reliability and security, it would be nice to see some good old-fashioned mean-and-lean code.
I agree with the author, I recently installed SuSE 9.1 looking forward to the benefits of the 2.6 kernel but ended up reverting back to 9.0. My machine isn’t that old, it’s a 2.5Ghz P4 with 512 Ram and a GeForce 4 card and it was just hellishly slow to boot. The two main apps that would make or break a Windows competitor, OpenOffice and Mozilla are memory hogs and take forever to load and are so frustratingly slow in comparision to their windows counterparts as to be almost unusable. I’m no M$ fan, I also run FreeBSD on the same machine and that seems to run the same software much, much faster, so I know it’s an issue with Linux (the kernel – the BSD kernel I find much simpler to configure and much faster). Neither am I a newbie, I have been running Linux since Redhat 5.2 and have also recently tried Mandrake 10, Redhat 9 and Debian Sarge and have so far been so disapointed with the bloat and slowdown of each sucessive release that I have ended up using BSD and Windows XP as my main OS’s instead of Linux. It’s a sad state of affairs but unless the main Linux vendors get their act together and address the speed and bloat issue would-be Linux converts will just ditch it and stick to Windows. Linux out-of-the-box is just no competition to Windows out-of-the-box on the desktop . I still have to recompile my kernel and tweak init’s to get decent performance out of it, new users don’t want to do that and neither should they have to (Oh, and Gentoo is not an option for new users)
When extracting, GNOME-Terminal uses around 70% of the CPU just to draw the text, leaving only 30% for the extraction itself. That’s pitifully poor. Metacity is hellishly slow over networked X, and, curiously, these two offending apps were both written by the same guy (Havoc Pennington).
Hmmm! I once wrote in here that Havoc is the worst thing to hit the Linux Desktop in some time (in my opinion, of course), but I was reffering to his opinions on Gnome strategy et al.
Interesting to see that this also holds true in the case of code quality.
Just wondering if after 412 comments, many of them complaining about Linux performance, somebody is thinking on doing something. I mean, a “Citizens for Speedy OS” association or similar
What I mean is, things doesn’t change if nobody asks with enough strength for a change. If somebody is developing alternatives, encourage them, spread the word, contribute. Join other people that thinks as you do.
Give VIM a try, it’s likely to suit your needs.
I did – was using vim like for 2 years and I must say I hate it. Vim is very kewl (fast, best syntax highlightling I’ve seen, customization, etc) when it comes to work on 1 file at a time. But when u have to work on multiple files it’s really a bitch.
For that time I used Fluxbox + tabs and several terminals with vim inside but it’s just not that fast (in terms of working) for me as does one application with tabs, where I can fast switch between documents.
I have downloaded some scripts for directory browsing, semi IDE for vim, etc.. tried even Cream but they all suck big time.
The best thing about EditPlus I like is one shortcut: F12 (or whatever you set) – it switches between last two used documents – I can’t live without this feature. This is the feature I miss most in all editors for Linux.
My advice: if you have all hardware and use winblowz use EditPlus (www.editplus.com) under Linux stick to Kate (no tabs which sux, but it’s damn fast).
There is one answer to all the problems Linux has on the desktop (it’s doing well on other markets):
Standards.
Period.
That people are making such a fuss about Fedora recommending 256 MB, (same as windows XP) and stipulating a minimum of 192 (64 more than XP) and 3 years later too.
In 3 years, Windows XP was released, i got my frist computer and then my second for half the price of the first yet 3 times better, and then Fedora was released, and people want it to have lower hardware requirements than XP years ago. Please.
There is one answer to all the problems Linux has on the desktop (it’s doing well on other markets):
Standards.
Period.
Yes. Period. A bad case of PMS.
How on earth are “standards” going to better the issue under discussion, which is SLOW, BLOATED programs that use much memory, such as Mozilla, Open Office, DEs, etc?
Jesus!
I have a Toshiba Satellite 2710 laptop with P3 450MHz, 64Mb RAM, 30GB HDD. I am running Windows XP Pro on it just fine! I only experiance performance drop-off after I have the following running (at the same time): ZoneAlarm, MSN Messenger, FireFox (with around 30 tabs open – on Dial-Up), 3 – 4 MSN Chat Sessions, and 2 instances of Notepad.
I tried to install Red Hat Linux 7.3, Red Hat 9, Fedora Core 1, Mandrake 8 and up, and Libranet. Even after a Kernel Recomile (with appropriate changes, etc.), Minimal Services, and XFce instead of GNOME / KDE, and HDD Tuning. I had a Linux expert do the optimizations for me too.
Fedora would hang every time during the install, and all the others distros would run PAINFULLY slow. I could be waiting for ages just to open a directory in a window. I really want to use Linux, but this is my only machine (I travel allot). In a CLI setup, Linux is fast on this machine, but anything else – forget it.
It has 128MB (64 Onboard + 64 Expandable) chipset in it, but the RAMBUS is dead, so I can’t upgrade, or use the 64MB Extra RAM I got a few years ago. So I am stuck with Windows XP Pro.
So much for the “Designed for Windows 98SE / NT Workstation” sticker that I peeled off the case the other day.
I fully agree with the author and I do know myself that Linux is getting big and slower.
I remember I once installed Debian on my computer this summer… The computer was unstable and contained many bugs in KDE.
… I am happy to report I was able to convert at work with an IBM_300gl (which is a PII-300, with 128 ram initially). I did upgrade it to 256, the hard disk is a 4.2gb and it’s merrily running :
Xandros 2.0 Business Edition,
Apps:
LotusNotes_5.07 (crossover office), Firefox, StarOffice and typically approx 3-4 consoles.
TSR :
Kopete, KNotes, …
And it’s not _fast_ but it’s not particularly sluggish. Only Notes (a win-based software) redraws a little slowly – but aside from that it’s fine.
Hopefully, Xandros will stick on the straight and narrow and not follow the bloat – while still offering a very comprehensive desktop.
So the choice is still yours.
LB.
PS: http://www.xandros.com/products/home/desktopdlx/dsk_dlx_systemreq.h…
Havoc claims in his blog that accusations of his slow code are false:
http://log.ometer.com/2004-06.html#10
Specifically, that he didn’t even write the guilty code in GNOME Terminal. But the problem is, the latest versions show only *his* name in the About box, *and* in the Credits list. Who else should someone blame? Recent versions of GNOME Terminal are *dirt* slow and it astonishes me that anyone who’s used it for more than 10 minutes hasn’t noticed it.
Frank Furter wrote:
>Recent versions of GNOME Terminal are *dirt* slow and it astonishes me that anyone who’s used it for more than 10 minutes hasn’t noticed it.
No. If you have correct driver setup you won’t notice much slowness. It is a little slow, but nowhere near to dirt slow.
I’m a kde developer and I put big attentions on the speed of my applications. Moreover, I can assure you that kde speed and memory requirements (after a period of time in which they increased a lot) are getting better and better.
P.S. I have a 3 years old computer (PIII 866MHz)
Bye!
“I fully agree with the author and I do know myself that Linux is getting big and slower.
I remember I once installed Debian on my computer this summer… The computer was unstable and contained many bugs in KDE.”
Here’s a performance&stability tuning tip for Debian: you can install a stand-alone window manager (like Fluxbox or WindowMaker) and run your KDE programs from this window manager. After installing the “menu” package you can right-click the desktop and a menu pops up containing launchers for all your installed KDE applications. The “menu” program automatically updates this right-click menu every time you install or remove applications. (Don’t know if the RPM distros have similar “menu” program — they SHOULD have.)
The small window managers are much more stable and bug-free than the big desktop environments KDE and Gnome. They also load faster and use less RAM. With Debian’s “menu” program you can enjoy most of the benefits of the full-blown desktop environments with the low resource use of the small window managers.
If the bugs you’ve experienced in Debian are in the KDE applications you want to use (and not in the KDE environment), they are usually fixed if you wait a couple of days and then upgrade the buggy application. (Debian has Synaptic as an easy-to-use GUI for handling package management — installing, removing or upgrading packages.) Note: the bugs get fixed quicker if you remember to file a bug report.
When I first starting playing around Linux, it was Redhat, (5?) on a 486 100 with maybe 32 mb of ram. It was dog slow, but it ran. Oddly enough, it was better running programs as an xdm server, with an exceed session over a network. It wasn’t something I would have wanted over win95 (my desktop at the time), but it looked promising.
Fast forward to 2004, and seeing Mandrake 10 loading on an 866 with 256 mb of RAM. Very similar results. Slow, not as much as the old redhat on ye olde 486, but still much slower at just about everything than Winxp pro installed on a different partition of the same machine. This is progress?
And in the meantime, Linux distros keep changing so much and so often that it’s hard to use your old knowledge. I remember a cool utility that came with most linuxes, linuxconf. Now where the hell is it. Half the configuration tools in the Mandrake release core dump.
I think hobby OS’s like Sky and Syllable have a lot more hope at being usable than any of the major Linux distros. They’re all bloat, and each version adds two new bugs for every one they squash
>Don’t know if the RPM distros have similar “menu” program — they SHOULD have.
No, “menu” system is one thing that distribution as centralized as Debian can achieve. But MenuMaker, an automatic heuristic-driven menu generator does 90% of manual job done by Debian maintainers.
Check http://menumaker.sourceforge.net/ if you want to use lighter WM. It’s a must.
“seeing Mandrake 10 loading on an 866 with 256 mb of RAM.”
Wait till Longhorn is out, and try running that on the same PC… Exactly the same effect as running the latest Linux (6 months or something) on an old computer.
I’m not saying that Linux is faster than Windows everywhere, but it is certainly beaten in some aspects (Some applications loading times, ease of use (OK, if you came from Linux for the first time, to Windows it would be completely wierd – “So what am I suppose to do if the wizard fails?”) etc.), just like Windows is beaten in certain aspects (security, WM features etc.).
Expanding on the above, You cannot say that going to a terminal is “cheating” on usability. I can’t remember how many times I have had to go to the “Command Prompt” to sort things out, especially for ping, netstat etc.
Ben
The thing is that Linux is getting “there” earlier than everybody else, can you imagine the system requirements in OS’s in 10 years?
The article basicly says linux apps are getting feature creep/code bloat, and your response is when I run my linux apps under windows they aren’t any better/less bloated. No duh they aren’t faster and less bloated under windows. Linux was smaller/faster becuase it didn’t try to be pretty, it got the job done with minimal warm fuzzyness. Now that is has gotten on this whole got to be pretty kick it is growing to microsoft proportions. Microsoft’s code didn’t get as bloated as it is from straight bad programming, it got there by adding so many prettiness features that there was no way around the size.
You can actually run the Longhorn 4074 build on a P3 w/ 256mb ram. Disable the WinFS service and it’s as fast as XP.
That’s just cuz it’s basically XP wiht a sidebar though!
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I don’t believe that for a moment. I run XP Pro on an Opteron with 512M. If I’m running more than one program, it can take as much as a minute just to flip windows between programs. From my experience, XP needs at least 1G of RAM to run comfortably with multiple programs.
————————————————————-
Really?. I cant believe this dude!. How can u say Xp is slow with monster like this?. My Athlon XP 1900 runs great with 768 Mb of RAM, even when I startup both Oracle and MySQL servers. I also run Gnome@SuSE 9.0 and well, its pretty laggy but it keeps same laggy after starting plenty of programs. OOo, Multiple instances of Firefox, Xmms, Yast2…
One thing is true. I upgraded my Athlon XP 1900 from 256 to 768 MB RAM, and let me say one thing, XP with 256 RAM works like sh*t. XP is a VAMPIRE, it is really a VAMPIRE, just try to open up Media Player 9, ha, relax. Well Its true that my HDs are 5400 rpm but I just cannot understand how Micro$soft supports XP with 64 RAM, not even a 6 months old W98 works fine with this.
SuSE 9 on my machine works fast, I have nothing to say about it.
A. Stukov
I totally agree with the author. It has gone too far. A linux desktop should first of all be stable, efficient (performance wise) and of course usable. Eye candy and fancy features should not be first priority when choosing design/coding methods. In other words we should not do the same misstake as microsoft has done. I don’t remember exactly cause I haven’t been using mandrake or redhat/fc for a couple of years. But, then, I believe I saw something which actually tried to automate the updating by periodically searching for updates. Causing the system to slow down. I remember thinking that this stinks of microsoft ideas. Let’s agree on some linux values. Lets’s focus on what we say we’re good at. Namely stability and performace. Some people say it’s not the desktops who are at fault. And that it’s X that is the culprit. Ok, so there you have it. Why not gather forces and fix X?
I chose to add Linux systems at work because rather than buy new machines with win2K and pay for MS liscences, I could use Linux to make my retired PC’s act as efficient servers. As an windows admin with no Linux experience I needed the GUI to figure out what I was doing, so all our linux boxes run with the GUI. Well, we just decided to drop further Linux installs because of reports Fedora ran too slowly with the GUI on machines like our last batch of older Celeron ~700mhz systems with 128MB.
Unfortunatley Linux needs to run on old systems or I suspects most small businesses will not have a case for using Linux at all.
Hi,
my name is Edson and i’m a systems architect and developer who works for the Government in Brazil. I really have to tell that this is one of the best articles i’ve read recently. Here there’s been a lot of effort to migrate to Linux, because of the the high license fees that Microsoft software demands. I myself, tried to migrate totally to linux slackware 9.0 from my Win98 software. Because i don’t wan’na buy a new computer. But Gnome 2.2 was so slowish with my box ( k6 400 – 160 Mb Ram – 15 Gb HD) that i gave up. I really would like to get free of windows but i can’t afford using these modern distros. I still remember when is was at college and Linux ran very fast in my compter which made fall in love with the system, besides other beneffits. the third world countries are a big market for linux but these new distros won’t make their inroads in these markets with such heavy hardware requirements.
Remove any 3D driver on both Windows XP and any Linux distro. Now do better comparison. It seems some posters cive an unfair comparison when games like Quake 3 on Windows XP with optimized driver runs faster than Linux version without optimized driver.
How on earth are “standards” going to better the issue under discussion, which is SLOW, BLOATED programs that use much memory, such as Mozilla, Open Office, DEs, etc?
Still standards would be a good thing.
I agree somewhat to the premise of this article, that the mainstream Linux distributions are getting fat to an undesirable degree; Leaner is better. However, the arguments posted here amount to systems requiring a fair amount of RAM (256MB), rather than systems needing upgrading on the whole. That’s hardly unreasonable considering the latest “version” of Linux has come out three or more years after XP, and IMO is vastly superior. I reckon that in the next couple of years the main Linux desktop systems and applications will become leaner, so it’s a matter of an OS that can compete with Longhorn on functionality and usability yet requiring the resources of XP. That doesn’t seem dire to me.
For my d*ck-waving contribution, I’d like to say that Linux 2.6/KDE 3.2.2 with all the apps runs circles around XP on this machine (P4 2.8GHz, 256MB).
The biggest detraction from this article was the name-calling of Havoc. I don’t know anything about him, but it must be bordering on libellous (and downright unprofessional) to throw a name in like that? Especially when it appears that the remarks were false.
Let’s face it the benefits that Linux desktop provides over Windows XP, etc. must only be temporary. If, as many supporters seem to suggest, Linux Desktop achieves a market share comparable to Windows, how long will it be before users demand the very same functionality that bloats XP and introduces inherent security vulnerabilities. The reason spyware and virus don’t affect Linux is not because they can’t but rather because hackers don’t see the value in infecting less that 1% of the market!
About the “bloated” Linux distros like Fedora, Mandrake or Suse, you can remove softwares you don’t need. It is shameful that people fail to notice that many Linux distros have more applications available for installation than Windows XP. In that sense, I agree with the author Linux (here distro) is getting fatter. However, with the same PC specification (512 MB ram), I was impressed the speed of installation of Linux(Fedora Core 2 as model) with extra packages than Windows XP with extra packages(witout MS Office).
To do a better comparison, install Linux as server without Open Office and extra packages to compare with Windows XP. Both will got a fair comparison as they will run with the similar configuration>
Apache is popular than ISS yet has very few attack. So your argument that hackers attacks the popular distribution is erronous. The real reason for large amount of spyware and virus in Windows is how long it takes to fix the flaw in closed sources than open sources. With this, hackers won’t have enough time to fully exploit flaw in Linux than Windows.
I’ve been saying that Fedora and Mandrake are bloated for a while now. You think that just because you’ve posted an article about it that the fanboys will pay attention now?
Best of luck to you.
You can customize your own distro, can’t you? Was not Linux design with customization in mind?
Was not Linux design with customization in mind?
No. Linux was made with Linus’ 386 in mind. You are forgetting history in order to make a point. That never goes over well.
If you look at the history of linux distribution development over the last few years, you will notice that many distribution creaters have been playing the catch up game. They are trying to catch up to the Microsoft environment in terms of having the basic set of applications. This has caused a lot of compromises.
The first that comes to mind is OpenOffice. When it first was really available to Linux users, it was incredibly slow on older hardware. It hasn’t really gotten any better, just most systems have gotten faster, so it is less noticed. During that same time, GNOME and KDE both had full development going on for there own office suites. Both of these office suites were usable on old hardware. It was at this point that the compromise came in. It was decided that OpenOffice would be used. This slowed down or killed the development on many other projects that would have had the same functionality but have been orders of magnitude faster on older hardware and very fast on our current hardware.
As I sit here writing this on a P2-266 with a 128 meg of ram running FC1 in mozilla, I can tell you personally that I never open any OpenOffice applications on this computer. It’s just to painful. One of my first tasks when I got the system installed was to kill of gdm autostarting. I like GNOME and X, but it’s a killer on this old machine if I’m running FC1, but I’m reminded, Red Hat is no longer concerned with the issues of normal desktop home users. The Fedora Core series is not meant for that any more. It’s meant for the new business PCs, and only in the buyable form of Red Hat Enterprise whatever. As a user of Red Hat Linux, since version 2.0 I think it was, I’m beginning to give serious consideration to thinking it is time to move fully over to a different distribution that is more inline with what I’m looking for both home use and professional use.
OO.o 1.1 is noticably faster than 1.0. “It hasn’t really gotten any better” is an understatement. Still, Gnumeric is very well done with all functions in MS Excel and lightning fast recalculation engine.
On the other hand, QNX and BeOS run blazingly fast even on very old machines. It’s great to *say* everyone should use 256 megs of RAm, btu no, everyone shouldn’t, why should Joe Average even have to buy a new computer every 5 years? I can run BeOS5 fine with 32megs of RAM and a P166. Windows Xp runs sluggishly with 64 megs of RAM and a celery 500, but it’s not as bad as you peopel make it out to be, it’s actually quite usable. I had 128 megs in this 1.4Ghz box until quite recently, and *gasp* I didn’t upgrade for OO1.1, or Firefox, or even windows, I upgraded to play morrow wind. Now seriously, any half clean install of windows will run fine with much less than you people claim.
I currently have a 1.2Ghz Athlon with 512M ram. I did try XP Corp I’ll admit, but it ran HORRIBLY. It crashed so randomly and frequently (the BLINK/reboot type of crash, not BSOD), I was beginning to think I had hardware problems. I figured I’d slap Gentoo on there and see how things work. I initially ran KDE and it ran very comfortably (more-so than XP did on my hardware (btw, 4MB video card)), though not as responsive as I enjoy my desktop, so I went with an old favorite: Fluxbox.
Current state: Firefox/Evolution/Azureus, and a few other memory-hogs, and it will run them all at once VERY VERY quickly. I did do a few things to optimize performance, but I really can’t express just how wonderfully responsive and stable my machine is.
I say, who needs 3Ghz/1G ram just yet? I consider myself a huge tech. fanatic, and don’t need high-priced hardware to remain one.
From the Windows XP web site at
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/home/evaluation/sysreqs.asp
233-MHz minimum required
64 MB minimum supported
15 gigabyte (GB) of available hard disk space
Super VGA (800 × 600)
CD-ROM or DVD drive
Keyboard and Mouse
like ive said twice before…i set my mother’s computer up to do it with 128 ram and a 350 processor…runs great with messenger, ie, websters dictionary, and wordperfect all running at same time. turned off the crap and dont use an antivirus – who needs one with a good firewall and all the updates anyways? go to one of the antivirus web sites once a week and check your system online…its just as easy to reformat and start over if you got a virus you couldnt get rid of…
anyways this article was about the noob distros being fat(and as ppl have pointed out,hard to get all that you want working), not the ones like debian and slack so those ppl can quit posting…just my 2cents
If winxp runs on those specs, it will be dog slow. Also, you need to buy a decent anti-virus program As Soon As Possible. Shame on you for doing such a dirty trick to your mother!
antivirus software really isnt needed running 24/7…just like any linux distro , windows xp is pretty secure with a good firewall, updates, and some common sense web browsing…
by the way, i wish i could visually proove this all to you ppl, maybe you can go buy a system for 10 bucks like i did and try it for yourself, trust me, xp works just fine on older systems.
If the problem is a lot of old hardware is better turn it all in simple X11 clients and runs applications and desktop environment in a “powerfull” application server! By the way I used a simple Celeron 700Mhz host to serve X for ten old Pentium MMX 166Mhz machines.
You are forgetting history in order to make a point. That never goes over well.
Thanks for correction about history. However, my point about Linux being customizable (sp?) is still valid in this present.
I have used Linux as my main desktop for 5 years. Sometimes I need to boot Windows to use some specialist software. It is a pleasure to use Windows (until it crashes) because its apps are so responsive. I never thought I would say this (because my other computer is an Amiga 1200) but Windows apps are fast and light. Damn it, MS Word under Wine under Linux is faster than OpenOffice – showing that it’s not the kernel, or even X11 that’s the problem, but the multiple layers of bloat that sit on top of that. Every major Linux application seems to require its own GUI toolkit, and its own component object model.
I cannot recommend Linux to a friend who runs Windows 98 on a 200MHz PC, because it would be impossibly slow – even if he upgraded to the maximum amount of EDO RAM that his computer can use. Windows 98 is fast enough on this machine with 64Mb, but unreliable.
This thread should be required reading for software developers, distro vendors, and those who pretend that we can stop the 3-year hardware upgrade cycle by switching from Windows to Linux.
Hi
Most distros come with lots of fluff turn on by default.
I have just one PC…
P3 600MHz
256MB ram @ 100MHz
30 GB Weston Digital PHD 2048KB cache @ 5200RPM
Nvidia G4 MX420 64MB
The first encounter with Linux was Corel Linux SE
it was very slow. About 120 seconds to open Kate. My first reaction we that I had too many things loaded at boot.
Turning them off did not do much at all. I returned to DOS 7.1 (I deleted Win 98 after the constant crashing even with a default setup with no additional software installed)
The second was Redhat 7.2 It was great. There was some long 60 second pauses but it was not often. Back then I could not install nvidia’s old RPM drivers and Wine was not good.
The distro I use now as Suse 9.1 I am on the same hardware but there is no long pauses it seems to work as fast as Windows XP. There is no crashing. Wine and Nvidia have improved vastly. And the games under wine do not shudder
like they did in windows.
Note to make you linux distro faster.
1> Turn off services that you do not need.
2> Use a good FS like ReiserFS or Jfs or XFS
3> The Kernel 2.2.x is (*IMHO*) is a pain try to use a newer one if possible. Give compiling your kernel a try.
a. make oldconfig
b. make RPM
c. Double click on it and follow you distros
instructions.
4> If you have 256MB or more of Ram use KDE/Gnome/?
If you have 128MB or less use a lighter WM
Just my
2p + VAT
Another thing you can do if you have gcc 3.3.3 or newer
is compile the kernel by using the optimise for size this
will make the kernel image smaller so there is less cache misses
This author has done a good courageus work: to tell the truth; but there are some bastards out there (as always) who antagonize with this truth: Linux, really, IS GETING SLOWER AND SLOWER. Take note GNOME team; GNOME has always been known for being a bloat. People has spoken, the alarm is sounding, dont be deaf or stupid; what can we do, users? talk to programers. And this article is very welcome.
I am no a programmer yet, but I think the teams should do
an audit of there code and remove code that is no longer
in use. This should save a lot of memory
Photoshop is an incredible hog for memory. In windows 98 with 380 or so MB RAM and PII, it is unbearably slughish that it is impossible. Yet, look this incredible The Gimp. Under similar conditions, it beats Photoshop in speed. Lets hope that this champ keeps lean and dash, one of the best usefull tools for linux
Gimp is a great program but it has a lot less options
that photoshop (although the extra options do sometimes
seem useles)
Think X.org should make the next version of the server more lean. I have heard many arguments brake out over X. When running Gnome on Redhat 9 it was often using 149MB of ram when I was just in the desktop with no applications loaded. It is getting better now though as now it only uses 64MB.
If its to slow, upgrade your hardware. A bit more RAM, a faster hardrive (going fro 5400rpm to 7200 is definatly noticeble) or heaves forbit, give your CPU a mild overclock, I have my AMD CPU running ~400Mhz above stock, on the stock cooler, and it is rock solid stable.
OH-kay, lets see, in the spirit of competition, since many
3-6 year old computers are still out there, who will step up to the plate? microsoft, redhat, suse,mandrake, freebsd to some of us, an old computer is like an old classic car if it
works fine we keep it.New computers will always sell. make the product as you see fit But what a market opertunity if
you dont forget the “65 GTO” of computers that ran fast on low octane gas!!!!
Linux’s future looks positive for the long term, more and more gaming software developers are prodecing great games for both Windows and Linux, the security benifts of Linux are getting more people to convert and the price means no more breaking the bank everytime a new version of the os comes out.
However its whats happening now that doesn’t look soo great, now with the comarison with windows ill tell you my little story, I have an old p1-233 computer with an intel chipset with that auful limitation of only caching the first 64meg of ram, and windows seems to fill ram from the top down, so if you have 128meg ram, the computer will run slow until it fills up 64meg of the ram. For a little experiment I installed windows XP Pro with 192meg ram, The computer ran, however tasks didn’t run ver well mp3 playback would be choppy (this also happened with 98) when restricting the system to 64meg of RAM, the performance went up in some ways, and XP still ran if you could cope with large start up times for programs. I was surprised by the speed none the less. For a computer to be used just to surf the net, chat on instant messaging and some word processing/emailing it is fine.
It goes to show that microsoft, when they release an OS it is targeted to work with systems that are 3 years old (XP runs smoothly on a P2 with 128meg of ram) and Linux distros used to be even better than this. Now it seems that the distros that are easy to use like windows are reguiring more system resorces than what they really should. Its one thing to say RAM is cheap, however when DDR Ram becomes obsolete and you only have 1 gig of it, and this oporating system is asking for 4gig you will end up throwing away a perfectly usable computer just becouse the os is not optimised.
If Linux wants to grow as an operating system it needs to get over this hump and start considering the people who do not have the money to be continually pgrading there computers (its enough that games keap requring newer graphics cards that cost you $200 a year) we do not need are oporating system making it harder and it also being the CPU and RAM needing constant upgrades
As a gamer I am forced to use windows however even since windows mirged its stable NT OS with its main os line I am finding myself spening all my time in windows are relativly none in Linux as what I need is ofered in both os’s yet windows stats quicker, better hardware compatibility (although Linux is alot better now, driver support is still not as goodas windows, yet its getting there) and the main apps I use load/run quicker. I do not need all the junk that comes with mostly all Linux distros, then again I dont need all the junk that comes with windows however atleast it doesn’t effect performance as much.
To sum up, Linux is growing yet it is not getting any better, its great that free software can do soo much however unless Linux distros stop trying to make it easyier to use and look great with all that unneeded trasparency it will slow down in growth and again be only used by people who need its server capabilies that set it apart from Windows. Ease of use does not come from how good it looks, and im sure most people will prefer something that looks bland and runs quickly than something that looks awsome and lags while you are listening to your HDD crunch away.
(Linux distros will get past this, windows will overtake them again in the prize of slower OS yet how long is it going to take?)
You can find all types of old RAM here:
http://www.crucial.com/index.asp
Funny seeing all this talk about windows and linux running slow on X hardware config.. I’m running beos r5 on a 166p with mmx and 64mb ram. screams..
My faster pc (1ghz cel, 320mb ram) runs beos like a dream. I havent had windows or linux loaded on it in ages. Just couldnt stand not having REALLY responsive GUIs..
I can’t believe that only ONE person mentioned portability as an issue.
Yes, Windows XP and OS X are faster. But are they portable? Not at all. They are probably using hundreds of tweaks hardcoded in ASM to speed up some things. We had a proof in the past when WMP was faster with P3s because Microsoft hardcoded some routines for that platform. Forget CPU flags detection: if it was a P3, they used it. If it wasn’t, better luck next time, even if the AthlonXP/4 did supported the SSE instruction set.
Oh, yes, of course, there was a time when NT4 ran on four different platforms. But that’s old story. Today, Windows XP can run on two different platforms than x86: x86-64 and IA64. x86-64 is basically an extension of x86. I doubt they spent thousands of men-years for porting it. As for IA64… Look at the number of things that isn’t working out of the box: http://www.microsoft.com/resources/documentation/Windows/XP/all/res…
Yes, even WMP is not supported at the moment (note that this list might be outdated: I can’t really confirm anything on it as I don’t own an Itanium and I don’t know anybody that know anybody that know anybody that have one either).
GNOME/KDE runs on many platforms and many operating systems. There are probably some tweaks for each platform but I doubt there are as many as in XP/OSX. They simply can’t do them as it would be way too hard to develop and debug. Combine this to GCC that isn’t the most efficient compiler on Earth and you get what you get. Note that I don’t really bitch the GCC team: they are doing an incredible job. Still, many commercial compilers are faster because they use patented techniques and stuff like that.
Yes, most developers are not spending enough time in optimising and profiling. Yes, it’s sad that DEs and applications are taking more and more RAM. Yes, the users have the right to bitch on the quality of the product… yet I don’t think they have the moral right to bitch the developers directly unless they can do something better. And many users are probably still wondering if the light in their fridge stays on when they close it. Do you think these users would code something better?
I understand that most people don’t want to get directly involved with Linux to see it improved… but honestly, if you’re not happy with the current state of Linux and are not willing to improve it, stop bugging us and go with something else. Contrary to popular belief, Linux is not there to destroy Microsoft and Apple. It seems that many people just want something for free. You give the foot, the want the leg.
Like some regular posters here said, I wish there was a registration system. The signal-to-noise ratio is getting horrible and the moderation is craptacular.
There is one more problem: a localization. If you want Linux boxes to be bought outside of US and England, you need to localize them. Typically it is a business of small companies which work with the most widespread Linux versions such as RedHat. They would NOT work with other versions until they become widely used. It means that only overblown Linux distros will be localized. Keep in mind that usually PC boxes outside of US and Europe are significally weaker then those in US.
I’m not Linux user, but I carefully watch the progress in this area. Unfortunately Windows XP is still much more adequate for the common office tasks then Lunix boxes. IMHO, of course.
P.S. WindowsXP + OfficeXP + IE6 run smoothly on PentiumIII-800/128 Mb RAM. 256 Mb is recommended but not required.
I have a machine with a p3 700mhz and 512mb sd ram. I know how to use windows and linux. Now, what do I put on it? a Windows OS where I can get infected with viruses and trojans within a few hours? or install linux on it that’s more stable and I feel save when shopping online? And no! I have no money for buying those ****** virus scanner!
currently I ahve FC2 installed with gnome 2.6.0. gnome is working pretty nice, much better than kde.
by the way, FC2 is free! I won’t spend my money for the windows license.
thank you
Within the comments are people saying :
My XP w / 128 Mb of ram runs good or My XP w / 512 Mb of ram swaps constantly or My Linux system “feels” slower than my XP running 128 Mb of ram , BLAH BLAH BLAH etc….
THESE ARE ALL OPINIONS, PERIOD. Without real analysis and comparisons with different hardware setups, then it is an opinion and not based on facts.
If the author would have compared 2 or 3 computers with different hardware setups and then benchmarked XP vs RH9 (or whatever OS) running similar apps or with benchmarking software, then and only then would this article be worth the bandwidth it took up.
He might have simply wrote:
I FEEL like Linux is slower than XP, but I do not have 1 bit of research supporting my opinion.
or he could have wrote:
BLAH, BLAH , Linux, BLAH, BLAH XP
end of story.
That bout sums it up.
Don’t forget about one small difference between MDK, FC2,Slackware and Windows on the other side. You have to buy Windows and others are available for free. Remember that fact before complaining about MDK perfomance and Slackware user-unfriendliness.
Yes this is true! Windows XP RAM consumation can be minimized to 80M with antivirus and firewall – what can you do with new X’s?
And what you think, that Ive payed for mine XP?:-D
All new distros – mandrake, suse, are very “BEAUTYFULL” and free, but that is all….
The article mentions options of than Linux but says
that they are all immature. In reality, there are
mature options too. Up to two months ago I was running
eComstation 1.0 on a Pentium 90 w/ 64MB! Now I run it on
a faster machine (Athlon 1600) but it so much more usable
than Linux. I installed Fedora on the same machine to try
things out, after the seeing it was still orders slower
than eComstation I removed Linux all together. When it
doesn’t run as fast as eComstation I feel I’m wasting my
hardware.
For those who don’t know eComstation, check out:
http://www.ecomstation.com
It usable for all my needs which are pretty basic. Sure
some unusual h/w don’t have drivers yet and you don’t
have the same apps as in Windows (Work,Excel,etc.) but
you DO have options. In any case 95% of my use is
Mozilla which I think is pretty common these days.
– I
I’m a Linux guy (been pure Linux for 10 years now) but I’m ashamed by some of the comments here. So many comments are ridiculing the author, and saying memory is cheap, trying to define the problem away, etc etc etc. If you don’t face up to the problem, you have no right to throw stones at Microsoft.
Linux really is fat. This has been bothering me recently. I love Linux in some ways, but absolutely hate it in others.
Look at my supposedly “minimal” getty that is shipped with my distribution:
root 852 0.0 0.0 1484 356 tty6 S 07:27 0:00 /sbin/mingetty tty6
1.4M of virtual memory, 356K in core. And this is MINIMAL? A version with similar features but linked against dietlibc would consume just 20K. If we truly are skilled technical people, why are we not ashamed of this? And that’s just the tip of the iceburg. Why are we shipping binary packages that include documentation in /usr/share/doc that talks about how to build it? Not only is that needlessly bloating the disk footprint, but it looks unprofessional.
I blame the distributions. We shouldn’t just be packaging and repackaging the same ol’ shit. Software has a life cycle. At some point, it gets too old and brittle and bloated — REWRITE IT. I’m currently working on a “diet-coreutils”. GNU’s coreutils takes 7 meg on disk, currently. I’m shooting for similar features in 400K.
Why are we shipping distributions with assertions turned on? Why are we building with -O2 rather than -Os? (Small code == better cache usage == faster.) Why are we packaging and shipping garbage how-to-build files that the end user won’t care about? (Disk bloat == more in RPM database == slower installs.) Why are even the most trivial programs linked against the monstrous glibc (with over 6,000 symbols.) There is low hanging fruit that distro packagers could easily grab here. Why is no one bothering?
I’m currently repackaging my otherwise-favorite distro, to fix these sorts of things. I hope to embarass it into improving…
Come on, people. We can do better than this.
I’m running on a 550MHz 384 MB RAM machine, and for the most part, things run with a decent smoothness. I don’t do KDE or Gnome though. I’ve found that firefox seems to run a bit smoother than Mozilla for web-browsing. Also, as OpenOffice is really slow (although, I’m using the pre-compiled binary), LyX does a really nice job for typing up reports and the like and does hog nearly as many resources as OO. I also run Gentoo though. Although, Gentoo does give a step by step installation guide and isn’t really so hard to get up and running if you just follow the directions. (At least not on x86 desktops, my Mac 6500 seemed to be a bit more annoying.)
Of late there have been lot of concern that Linux is getting fat. On one hand there are people complain that it is slow to run new distro’s on a “older” system. On the other hand the there are people who feel that it is not linux, rather people who are configuring the system properly.
One thing that is very clear from the whole debate is that linux has come to an age. It is now able to deliver the applications to the users who want all the “cool” apps to run on there system and donot care a damn about the how much RAM it takes till the time it runs fast. Also it caters to people who have “older” configuration m/c and want to make good use of that. All that is needed is a smart installer that can detect the configuration and advice the user what to install and what not to install for performance on a particular system. This way every body is able to use their m/c’s to best.
After all it is all about choices. Isn’t it?
I am running XP Pro on an Athlon 750 MHz w/ 384 megs of RAM. I have 30 IE windows currently open, Opera 7.21 running with 54 tabs open , calculator.exe running,
paint shop pro 4 running, caller ID program running, a newsgroup program running, notepad.exe running, 3 windows explorer windows open, one file search window open …. and you know what? I am not experiencing any slow-downs or lag in performance due to swapping… my system is still fast and responsive (I don’t think Linux with GUI can do that, at present). At least I’m not feeling it when I’m working in my apps or switching from one app to another. Even when I do switch to another app, and XP does have to access the swap to bring the program into memory, it is very minimal and not totally unbearable, unlike my experience with Linux. I bought a computer with Lindows pre-installed, Athlon 1400+ CPU, 128 megs of RAM, and that machine ran slow when I had AOL, and 3 Netscape sessions running. The delay for waiting for the disk swapping was unbearable. For example, when I switched from one Netscape window to another, I had to wait over 5 seconds (felt more like 30 seconds) for the disk swap because when the disk swapping happened, it’d freeze the whole computer. I couldn’t stand the slowness and loaded XP Pro onto that machine, and now it runs fast, and I don’t have to deal with the long waits for disk swapping I did in Lindows. Even with 128 megs XP Pro ran fast on that machine. Everything I’ve reported here is true, and not sarcastic. I’m rooting for Linux, but there are still a lot of issues that need to be worked out, speed problems included.
As for the comments by someone else below, they must be living in another universe, cuz that’s not what I’m experiencing with XP Pro.
================================
I don’t believe that for a moment. I run XP Pro on an Opteron with 512M. If I’m running more than one program, it can take as much as a minute just to flip windows between programs. From my experience, XP needs at least 1G of RAM to run comfortably with multiple programs.
I’m not talking monster programs either. I’m talking about FireFox, Total Commander, and maybe something like Azereus. The disk thrashing on 512M is HORRENDOUS in XP Pro. By comparison, FC2 on the same machine is many times faster and more responsive.
The article is just FUD, and so are some of the responses. Lets hear a little truth for a change instead of blind astroturfing.
i have celeron 400 and 128mb ram.
i runing winxp pro. emule, opera, shareazza, 5x mirc, winamp, tvtuner software, ivisit, ftp server (argosoft), vnc wiever.
and what ?
winxp pro runing great. all is working nice. i have it runing for weks, i never stop it. but its true that i optimized it, closed unnedeed windows services. (it stop by itself when are no electricity)
and people who tell that you need 256mb to run winxp normaly, those are linux people, and dont know anything about windows xp.
i running kerio firewal and nod32 antivirus.
and people that hate microsoft/windows. please stop this. hate is not nice.
love will win the hate one day!
Try Damn Small ( http://www.damnsmalllinux.org ) it is specifically made to be light and fast — uses fluxbox, sylpheed, Ted, Dillo, etc.
After reading just about all of these posts I’ve come to realize that just about everyone is misusing the word Linux… but then again I know it’s being used in a gerneral sense.
I feel the core of these problems lay within the X code… Linux without the gui runs on just about ANYTHING. A terminal with no gui running Linux doesn’t take up much system ram or cpu.
Fix the Xserver and optimize the gui (gnome,kde,all the apps) and then look at the results.
I know we can just run fluxbox or xfce4 or some other minimalist WM, but even xfce4 takes up about 100+megs while in use and not idle. But we also don’t want to cut back on features just to get speed. As this defeats the whole purpose of comparing it to Windows.
One again. Fix the Xserver and optimize the gui (gnome,kde,all the apps) and then look at the results.
I’ve been using mandrake for awhile now. Prior to what I have now (AMD Athlon XP 2500+, 256 MB RAM) I had an old Dell (Pentium 2 400 Mhz, 128 MB RAM). I was using Mandrake 9.0 with this old machine and it ran like a charm, much faster than XP, which ive never thought of as getting faster (Win 98 is WAY faster than XP, albeit much buggier). My XP boot takes 4-5 min while Mandrake takes 1-2 and there’s no ads or security issues, blah, blah *really good stuff about linux here*. You get the picture. I frankly couldnt read this whole article since the first page was enough. I think if it’s a big issue that the user should simply buy more ram (its $40 for 128 stick and it will greatly increase your speed). I’m sorry if im ranting but I just couldn’t belive that he couldn’t run programs on fedora with 128 MB. The processor is not the problem i think and neither is the OS…RAM!
I am actually running XP these days, just because of what we’ve just read. I don’t get half the performance under any of the newer Linux distros I’ve tried, and they’re beginning to pile… I have tried many distros, and, actually, NO, linux did not convert me. All distros I’ve tried just gave me headaches and troubles, even though I learnt very well how to handle it.
For me, Linux have become an OS only for entusiasm. I, as well, am still dreaming of the OS that Linux ones claimed to be…
Last Fall I picked up an ancient IBM P90 with 32mb SIMM and a 500MB HDD for $5 at a garage sale. It still had the OEM Windows 95 OS loaded on it!
For the next month I tried to install one GNU/Linux Distro after another including Vector, Mandrake, Slackware, Gentoo, RH. All were set up to install with a GUI but otherwise with only the bare essentials. No success.
Just for kicks, I tried installing Windows 98SE and guess what? It installed on the very first try. Eventually sold the old box on eBay for $35.00.
Moral of the story: Side by side, Linux is not leaner and lighter than Windows. It is more versatile and adaptable in my opinion and ultimately superior for those reasons.