Is the Linux Desktop Getting Heavier and Slower? 1555
Johan Schinberg writes "Bob Marr wrote an interesting editorial about what many of us have have noticed lately: the three most popular Linux distros are getting "fatter" in terms of their memory footprint and CPU demands for their graphical desktops. Fedora Core 2 isn't usable below 192 MBs of RAM while Mandrake and SuSE aren't very far off similar requirements either. There was a time when Linux users would brag that their favorite OS was far less demanding that Windows, but this doesn't seem to be the case anymore. Modern distros that use the latest versions of KDE and (especially) Gnome feel considerably heavier than before or even than Windows XP/2k3. Sure, Longhorn has higher requirements than XP (256 MB RAM, 800 MHz CPU) and the final version will undoubtly be much more demanding, but that's in 2-3 years from now. For the time being, I am settled with XFce on my Gentoo but I always welcome more carefully-written code."
flux? (Score:1, Informative)
Slackware (Score:5, Informative)
It's up to you how fast you want your desktop (Score:4, Informative)
Linux will be slow if you are running KDE with a truckload of panel applets. But this also applies to Windows: The more processes that are running, eating memory and using CPU cycles from time to time, the slower tasks you need/want to do will seem. This is obvious. It's also a matter of configuration and choice of Linux distribution.
I use Gentoo but that's just my prefernece. It's much faster than other distributions for two reasons: A) I compiled it from source optimized for my hardware and more importantly B) the big placebo effect and pride that follows A).
XFCE is another very good light choice for a desktop. Rox is a great file manager and much more snappy than Konqueror, Nautilus and other giants. I assume this too applies to Windows software, not that I got much knowledge of that OS -- I've heard it's gotten pretty spiff since 3.1 (last I've used, anyway).
Another important Linux performance issue is RAM, many people fail to realize the amount of RAM you've got is just as important as how fast your CPU is. This, obviously, depends on what tasks you are doing, but if you count overall performance memory _is_ important. Like with all OS: Once you start swapping your tapping your fingers and getting annoyed.
That's enough for now, since I want 3rd post (I asumme there's been like 20 new during the time I used to write this, but still...)
Performance Work (Score:5, Informative)
One thing you have to realize is that most users _want_ their desktop to do more. There's a reason only a small fraction of users still use TWM; it doesn't do what they want it to. And, if you want more features, you have to realize that it will require more resources.
That said, there is a lot of code out there that was written first to Just Work(tm) with little thought of performance. Good practice indicates that, while you should keep performance in mind, real optimization and fine tuning should be done last.
Current work for performance improvements in GNOME including sharing data between processes (say, icon themes), reducing system calls and X requests during startup, and general speed improvements in the various library calls used to make the applications actually work.
More help is _always_ appreciated. There are several Plans of Attack available from GNOME developers who know what needs to be done but don't have the time. If you want to help implement those the other developers and users will be quite thankful.
WindowMaker (Score:3, Informative)
I'd love to use something like KDE or Gnome, but every time I give it a try, it's just so bulky and slow, comparatively.
That's because you didn't properly tune it (Score:2, Informative)
I had an old Dell notebook, Latitude XPi IIRC. Ran Windows 2000 albeit sluggishly... With a custom kernel and install of a recent RH/Fedora release it ran like a charm.
I don't think I've ever heard anyone describe their system with 128mb RAM and "ran XP happily" in the same sentence before. Definately friends of mine who have done plenty of PC repairing in their day would agree.
My suggestion is to install an older release of RedHat and just run up2date. Still not good enough? Try Gentoo.
Don't mark Linux off as a loss until you've properly tuned it. The same could be said for any OS for that matter.
Just my $0.02
sluggish window manager? switch window managers! (Score:3, Informative)
(My only beef is that for some reason fvwm is no longer shipped with Fedora. I have no idea why. As far as lightweight window managers go, it's probably the most popular, and it's a single tiny RPM.)
GNOME (Score:1, Informative)
Such editorials are hard to take serious since they are build up on basicly NO deeper knowledge of the matter. Most people I met so far are full of prejudices and seek for excuses or explaination why they prefer the one over the other while in reality they have no slightest clue on what parameters they compare the things.
If people do like the gance ICONS over the functionality then it's quite ok but that's absolutely NO framework to do such comparisons.
I do come from the GNOME architecture and spent the last 5 years on it. I also spent a lot of time (nearly 1 year now if I sum everything up) on KDE 3.x architecture including the latest KDE 3.2 (please note I still do use GNOME and I am up to CVS 2.6 release myself).
Although calling myself a GNOME vetaran I am also not shy to criticise GNOME and I do this in the public as well. Ok I got told from a couple of people if I don't like GNOME that I simply should switch and so on. But these are usually people who have a tunnelview and do not want to see or understand the problems around GNOME.
Speaking as a developer with nearly 23years of programming skills on my back I can tell you that GNOME may look polished on the first view but on the second view it isn't.
Technically GNOME is quite a messy architecture with a lot of unfinished, half polished and half working stuff inside. Given here are examples like broken gnome-vfs, half implementations of things (GStreamer still half implemented into GNOME (if you can call it an implementation at all)) rapid changes of things that make it hard for developers to catch up and a never ending bughunting. While it is questionable if some stuff can simply be fixed with patches while it's more required to publicly talk about the Framework itself.
Sure GNOME will become better but the time developers spent fixing all the stuff is the time that speaks for KDE to really improve it with needed features. We here on GNOME are only walking in the circle but don't have a real progress in true usability (not that farce people talk to one person and then to the next). Real usability here is using the features provided by the architecture that is when I as scientists want to do UML stuff that I seriously find an application written for that framework that can do it. When I eye over to the KDE architecture then as strange it sounds I do find more of these needed tools than I can find on GNOME. This can be continued in many areas where I find more scientific Software to do my work and Software that works reliable and not crash or misbehave or behave unexpected.
Comparing Nautilus with Konqueror is pure nonsense, comparing GNOME with KDE is even bigger nonsense. If we get a team of developers on a Table and discuss all the crap we find between KDE and GNOME then I can tell from own experience that the answer is clearly that GNOME will fail horrible here.
We still have many issues on GNOME which are Framework related. We now got the new Fileselector but yet they still act differently in each app. Some still have the old Fileselector, some the new Fileselector, some appearance of new Fileselectors are differently than in other apps that use the new Fileselector code and so on. When people talk about polish and consistency, then I like to ask what kind of consistency and polish is this ? We still have a couple of different ways to open Window in GNOME.
- GTK-Application-Window,
- BonoboUI Window,
- GnomeUI Window,
Then a lot of stuff inside GNOME are hardcoded UI's, some are using *.glade files (not to mention that GLADE the interface buil
Suse 9 on A 233 (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Linux on Older PC's (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Linux on Older PC's (Score:5, Informative)
Personally, if I needed to do such a thing, I'd run with either Gentoo or Debian (depending on how much memory you could get for it).
With Debian, you should go for the base install, then use apt-get to retrieve what you want. Keep it minimal: play with X and blackbox, fluxbox, XFCE, etc. You probably won't be able to get away with gnome/kde.
With gentoo, first set up a large swapfile, second do the install, third 'emerge ccache', fourth emerge x, and leave for a bit. I was able to get gentoo on a very similar laptop a year ago or so. Ran pretty well.
But the best suggestion I have is to google for some memory. I found 128 meg sodimms for $40... That would get you up to 192mb, which will help you a lot. The box tops out at 288mb (2x128mb, and onboard 32mb).
Re:It's the infernal "Desktop Enviornments" (Score:5, Informative)
kdeinit starts KDE applications by forking and then loading them as shared libraries. Because kdeinit itself links to the kdelibs, it allows a much more effective sharing of kdelibs (and its dependencies) between the applications and avoids unneccessary initialization.
In other words, it reduces startup time and memory usage.
Re:Compared to Windows (Score:3, Informative)
XP is comfortable at 256Mb and above.
Try Slackware or FreeBSD (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Slackware (Score:3, Informative)
If I need to install on anything smaller I use BeOS, got it and the office suite for $10 at fryes, and firefox runs on BE
Re:Linux on Older PC's (Score:2, Informative)
I have used this one on a similar laptop. Worked fairly fine. I did have an issue with the default X not supporting the video chip (CT??? something) However, you could choose to install an older version of X which ran fine.
Vector linux [vectorlinux.com]
Hope it works for you.
Re:Those are minimum reqs (Score:3, Informative)
Hardware requirements
Desktop Required RAM Required CPUfluxbox/idesk 32 100 MHz
XFCE4 64 200 MHz
Gnome 1.x 64 400 MHz
Gnome 2.x 256 600 MHz
KDE 3.x 384 1 GHz
These are general rules of thumb. KDE will start on a Pentium 100 with 64 MB RAM, but it will run horribly slow.
For a hot new box with lots of RAM and a fast CPU I recommend KDE 3.x or Gnome 2.x. Gnome is bloated and KDE is even more bloated. This is great, but all those fancy features demand more cpu and ram.
XFCE4 is a very nice complete fast and lightweight Desktop Environment and is probably the best choice for old, but not anicent hardware. The ROX desktop is another good light choice.
For really old hardware you should use something simple to draw icons on your desktop (like idesk) and a fast window manger like fluxbox (based on blackbox), waimea or icewm
Re:Well duh (Score:2, Informative)
and text editors are a bad choice for showing bloat, most ascii editors are so small that you can fit the half dusin on a good old floppy. hell windows comes with two as default, notepad and the more feature rich wordpad. i personaly dont consider that bloat. what i consider bloat i stated above but i can again define it, its when you get half a ton of features you dont want with no option to not have them installed. compare what your avarage windows install allows you to select away on install to what your avarage linux install allows, you will be surprised...
Re:Compared to Windows (Score:5, Informative)
I beg to differ.
It doesn't have as good window manager themes as GNOME, perhaps, but it has Keramik, which is widely advocated as "The best" KDE theme. It uses GTK, so all of the GTK themes for GNOME are availabe to XFCE.
The idea of XFCE is that it is relatively lightweight yet still fast - and I believe they have realised this goal. It is not as lightweight as, perhaps WindowMaker or BlackBox, but after trying those I thought "UGLY!" and left.
It's true - I like my computer to look good, although this doesn't serve much of a purpose, it's nice to see smooth curves and gentle highlights.
Re:Compared to Windows (Score:2, Informative)
Also, I have Debian and Windowmaker on my 486 laptop with 20Mb RAM which is just about usable though like treacle - I can't even install any of the NT operating systems on that due to lack of CDROM drive, and Windows 95/98 (copied via parallel port and laplink) is much slower. 3.11 works nicely though, shame it's useless
But yeah I agree, Windows 2000 is a lot more stable, but I find Linux to be more stable, the last time I saw a kernel panic that wasn't a boot disk problem was 2 years ago on my K6-3 with the stock kernel being unable to turn off the PC after shutting down, recompiling the kernel fixed it. Win2k, OTOH, BSOD's a few times, and refuses to even run on my XP PC like I mentioned before.
As usual, it depends (Score:2, Informative)
Regarding KDE and GNOME, I have noticed that KDE's performance has improved on the same hardware over the last few releases while GNOME's performance has degraded.
I spend most of my time on Gentoo with KDE, but I use a variety of window managers, from time to time. My system is very nice so I have not noticed any problems. I did recently retire a Pentium 200 Linux server, not because it couldn't do the job but because I no longer needed it. I don't run a GUI on my servers, though.
why windows NT4+ feels faster (Score:3, Informative)
having done this spared a lot of context switches, so it has a positive impact on performance.. at the price of a lower reliability. at my knowledge this compromise wasn't made on linux, i don't know if this eventuality was studied.
for more, look for win32k.sys on these pages:h tml [windowsitlibrary.com]
h tml [windowsitlibrary.com]
http://www.windowsitlibrary.com/Content/356/01/2.
http://www.windowsitlibrary.com/Content/356/01/3.
Re:you are missing the point! (Score:1, Informative)
Kde can be bloated, if you let it. Unlike Windows, you don't have to install everything.
Signed,
A Happy KDE User since 1998
My solution (Score:2, Informative)
I've setup a button bar at the bottom of my screen with my most commonly used apps. It took me some time before I got all the mime-types and associated programs setup the way I wanted, but it went pretty smoothly (and then I used unison to keep the settings in sync on all my machines). I'm quite happy with it, and much more productive. It also lets you type arbitrary shell code to run a file through right there. IE: Select a bunch of files and then type !for $a in "$@"; do foo; done, so I get the best of both worlds. btw: I setup root-tail to watch my .xsession-errors file so I can see any results on my background.
Couple this with fluxbox's tabbed windows, keyboard shortcuts, and multiple workspaces and I'm quite happy.
Re:Compared to Windows (Score:3, Informative)
Nathan
lean fedora = cobind (Score:3, Informative)
It uses xfce, and only gtk apps.
Re:Mainly the startup times... (Score:5, Informative)
Oh really?
Here's an experiment for you.
Download Process Explorer from www.sysinternals.com.
Load Open Office.
See all of those highlighted DLLs in the process tree? They're DLLs that the Windows application loader had to relocate because some idiot who doesn't know how to develop software for Windows decided that "hey, it can't be that hard", and didn't bother to learn how the operating system works.
This can increase your load time by a factor of 20. (Not to mention that they have many more DLLs than they should conceivably need - they went overboard on refactoring everything).
Now, the rest of the experiment. Do the same thing with MS Word.
Oh look! NONE of the DLLs are highlighted at all. NONE of them required relocation. NONE of them required the application loader to spend a lot of time repatching the image to a new address in memory. What's more is that you can now use BIND to improve load speeds even more - by a factor of 5 for each DLL.
Mozilla recently started making changes to do the same things in their builds. Guess what? Now, with Mozilla, you don't need to use QuickLaunch any more. And it's not because Mozilla is "pre-loaded" - it's because they finally woke up and decided that hey, Windows might just not work like Linux, and they should perhaps fix their app to work well on the platform they're targetting.
Conclusion:
Those who don't grok Windows are doomed to poor performance.
Those who are arrogant enough to believe that most Windows developers are jumped up VB programmers will write code that runs like shit on the Windows platform.
Re:That's why (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Well duh (Score:3, Informative)
As they say, the nice thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from!
Why do I need 5 different font rendering libraries loaded in RAM at the same time?
You don't. Most applications use the freetype library. In Linux, the library is loaded once, IIRC, no matter how many applications use it. And in any case, it's only 523k (on my machine).
If I've installed a whole CD worth of freeware TTF fonts, now even 1 GB of RAM is too little.
Well, if a CD is 650MB, you'll need at least that much, not counting the stuff that the font engine needs in order to render those fonts in various styles and sizes. FWIW, Freetype (as used by KDE and GNOME) loads fonts on demand.
E.g., all the sound daemons....
ALSA isn't a daemon- it's a hardware interface. Sound daemons (like ARTS) provide functioanlity above what ALSA offers- like software-level mixing and effects. It's the only one I'm running right now, no bloat here.
Re:Library bloat (Score:4, Informative)
I ran a test on our systems here, the average for a Gnome application is around 85% shared, so only about 15% of the RAM is actually new memory, that doesn't stop Gnome having a large memory footprint overall though. I imagine it would be similar for KDE.
Re:Actually, it's obvious why they're getting bigg (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Is the problem Java/Interpretive Languages (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Actually, it's obvious why they're getting bigg (Score:5, Informative)
Christ, why are you running KDE on a K6? XP would bring that box to it's knees too. You need to use a lightweight window manager like IceWM or XFCE. KDE (or GNOME) has never had a goal of being "lightweight" so far as a know. IceWM offers a Win98-sh WM and pretty good about staying off the CPU, ditto for XFCE. You should be able to get a decent system running if you stay away from not only KDE and GNOME desktops, but their apps as well since they tend to launch a hefty support layer with them. Stick with QT, GTK, and Motif apps and it should work fine. FWIW, I had the exact same CPU in a box I gave away 2 years ago. It was a fine starter system when I bought it in 1996 and the fact that it run pretty much unaltered for 6 years is pretty impressive for what was a low end system when I bought it.
Re:Actually, it's obvious why they're getting bigg (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Compared to Windows (Score:3, Informative)
Not to get in a pissing match here, but I run XP Pro on all 3 of my Home machines:
: Athlon 2400+ (512MB DDR)
: Athlon 1700+ (256MB DDR)
: Celeron 300a (128MB PC-100)
XP installs and runs just fine on them all. I did recently up the memory on the 300MHz machine to 256, which has made the desktop a little faster to use, but it wasn't exactly intolerable before. I also dual-boot that machine with Mandrake 9, and I did decide to go with IceWM, as both KDE and Gnome were sluggish, even moreso than XP. I may have been able to tweak them some, but for as little I actually use that machine..
I assume the the majority of differences lie in what users perceive as "slow."
Re:Compared to Windows (Score:3, Informative)
You "could" run XP comfortably on a 400MHz K6-2 w/ 128MB RAM or you DO run it comfortably? If you are running XP comfortately on that hardware, you simply aren't running XP. It just isn't possible without serious tweaking. XP alone needs about 128MB of RAM BEFORE you run any apps.
-matthew
Re:That's why (Score:5, Informative)
For most of its existance, the people working on the Linux kernel has focused on making it a reliable server OS. An old computer running Apache or some other webserver (for instance) under Linux could serve a lot more visitors faster and with less stress than a beefier Windows machine, which is why sysadmins and others who are more used to the server side of computing thought that Linux was faster. However, the kernel was not as well suited for multimedia or interactive programs. Some audio players for instance had a "stuttering" problem on some machines - they were not given enough CPU time to play the sound smoothly. The only way to get around it was to start it the multimedia program as root and set the program to a higher priority, but that was not very good from a security perspective.
With the 2.6 kernel we finally got kernel preemption, I believe this should make interactive programs feel more responsive (incidentally, Windows have gotten much better as a server OS as well in the meantime). Instead of waiting nicely for the kernel to give the program its next slice of processing time so it can serve the user request, the process can preemt other tasks to instantly get its turn when the user clicks a button. (I'm sure there are thousands of Slashdotters who have studied Operating System Concepts who can explain it better than I.)
The kernel preemption not perfect yet, I think I have read on some mailing lists that some people are experiencing a degradation of performance, especially on older hardware, but this should probably be ironed out soon.
Note also that Windows uses a lot of "cheats" (or clever programming, depending on who you ask) to make the system appear fast, for instance showing the login screen for Windows 2000 and its successors BEFORE the system has finished loading and all daemons have started running. If you are fast you can log in, but you can't really start any programs or do anything, because the hard drive and the processor are working furiously. However, you get the perception that Windows loads much faster than Linux, which shows the prompt only when it is ready to serve the user. And also we have the thing with IE and lots of other MS software being loaded in the background wether you ask or not, and only hiding the icons instead of unloading them when the user tries to "close" them thereby sacrificing memory to gain percieved speed for the user.
Re:That's why (Score:5, Informative)
I remember about hmm back before Linux 2, the speed difference was in the handling of interrupts(Windows back then also had ridiculously small memory space and virtual space limits). That's over 8-9 years ago WindowMaker/AfterStep were actually more in vogue than the KDE/Gnome offerings then, who were practically "upstart projects", Sun's OpenWindows ported to linux was also popular back then. Then Linux 2 came up, it was faster, stable, then Windows basically caught up, then Linux 2.2 came up, and added many features, and optimised some things, but the difference wasn't as noticeable, then 2.4 came up, and it was a speed demon, except for X(which to keep up with the windows improvements, needed video hardware acceleration support). Now with 2.6, and hardware accelerated graphics on a powerful machine, Linux is still a little faster, but to see the difference, you really need to do what most people only do with Linux: remove running programs you don't use. In some cases, the difference is pretty dramatic. Of course, it never really shows in competitive benchmarks(which usually use bare-metal machines, not pre-junked seven themes, iconbar/taskbar needs two rows just to fit installations). That Linux is less vulnerable to software accretion, because of better package managers, may also be a factor, but with lots of people reformatting every six months, in both camps, clueful people almost never see just how bad it gets...
Windows 2000 is probably still the fastest desktop for use(Windows XP is optimised more for boot time), provided you have an uncluttered system, and relatively recent/fast hardware(which is one of the reasons Microsoft was pushing manufacturers not to OEM 2000 with machines for a while when XP came out, it made XP look bad). As for linux desktops being slower than this, It's quite possible, depending on hardware(as an experiment, you might want to try windows 2000 and XP(in client mode) in a vmware windows, compare its graphics performance to linux clients) So far my testing shows Linux reacts better(speed wise) to the virtualized hardware, because the Windows speed boost come with directly hooking into the hardware, but when they go through the vmware shim, the fact that the linux kernel is smaller/leaner makes it edge out recent windows(Win98se is faster in the vm(smaller), but predictably, less stable). (Linux in a VM is actually faster in desktop performance than native kde-cygwin performance on that box, for that matter) This on an Athlon 1800+ with 756MB RAM host.
The fact that it's easier for Linux to switch to a lighter/less cluttered windows manager than for Windows(LiteStep is good though
Re:I disagree - the problems lie elsewhere (Score:3, Informative)
Not at all. If you aren't using your memory for anything, why should it sit around going to waste? It ought to be used to cache disk blocks.
This is a common misunderstanding. The memory used by disk and buffer caches is available memory. If some process needs memory, the OS will shrink the cache and give those pages to the process. The kernel won't even begin to swap until the caches reach zero size.
In other words, when you run "free" to see system memory usage, you must also count the "buffered" and "cached" numbers as available, because they are. It's the system doing what it should -- making the most use of the memory you have.
Believe me, the kernel's not stupid.
Just switched from Windows (Score:2, Informative)
let WinXP do two simultaneous network transfers: the _total_ transfer rate dropped (in my case) to 4 MB/s whereas it was 10 MB/s for one transfer at a time.
Under Linux/XFS I had running a 10 MB/s incoming network transfer and _concurrently_ a burst read from the same disk! I always had the impression that Windows is extremely bad at concurrent massive disk accesses. XFS is built for that. The performance is insane.
I just tested it:
cat'ing two 1 GB files simultaneously to
Copying a 1 GB file on the same partition gives 15.3 MB/s (65 secs), resulting in a total disk data throughput of 30 MB/s!
On the contrary, modifying access rights etc. is extremely fast on Windows since all such information is stored in the MFT. But for the average end user the access rights scheme implemented in Windows is nonetheless much too capable and therefore IMHO rather useless.
*BSD (Score:1, Informative)
Re:My experience is different (Score:3, Informative)
Starting openoffice pushes that up by another 20MB.
Sorry, that was a typo. Openoffice (just an empty writer document), raises system RAM consumption by 40MB, not 20.
I refurbish old boxes (Score:5, Informative)
Anyway, if you want something that's fast, friendly and usable, I've found an excellent combination to be ROX (rox.sourceforge.net) and Sawfish as the window manager.
I saw someone above who was trying to run KDE and GNOME on a 128MB K6/2-300... obviously that would be painful, but I've used a combination of ROX and Sawfish on top of Redhat 7.3 (might as well blatantly break the Redhat trademark rules since this is slashdot) with 32MB of SIMMs installed on a K6/2-300. It works great, and with Abiword, GNUmeric etc it's all someone on low income needs (or anyone else in general, for that matter).
Re:Actually, it's obvious why they're getting bigg (Score:3, Informative)
Install Knoppix! (Score:3, Informative)
OO still takes forver to load, but works fine.
Note: MS Office is much faster (loading) than OO, and Knoppix has a nice working Wine install, and captive NTFS (RW) support.
I run it on my k6/3 400 (upgraded) Presario 1250, 288m ram laptop. Knoppix is FAR faster than any other distro I tried.
For my "main" box I run MDK10 and KDE.
Re:Problem isn't GNOME or KDE, it's Linux and glib (Score:3, Informative)
Far more likely is that you were running more services in the background than you were on NetBSD.
Re:speedup tips (Score:4, Informative)
Remember kids, the only thing that separates the experts from the idiots is that the experts actually RTFM.
No idea what you're talking about. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Problem isn't GNOME or KDE, it's Linux and glib (Score:3, Informative)
Something's wrong with the Linux system...
I'm running Gnome 2.6, ThunderBird, Firebird and Gaim:
About 160M, which is more or less what you report with *BSD.
Re:Many window managers, few tools (Score:3, Informative)
The reason is simple: As long as Linux (or Windows) has to support some stupid framebuffer VGA card - the code has to be written to do it on the main CPU. So they write it that way.. and support an API for more advanced hardware.
Then the problem begins: Once you HAVE a way to do it without hardware assist... driver vendors get lazy and don't implement the API interface.
The PC industry has a LONG LONG history of hardware vendors who invest way too little in driver development.
Re:Actually, it's obvious why they're getting bigg (Score:3, Informative)
- A thinkpad 600 with 192Mb of RAM
- A VIA C3@533Mhz with 512Mb of RAM
Both are running Fedora 2 both are most definitely usable. There are only a few changes I've made to get that to happen - firstly I rebuild Gnome with gcc -Os, secondly I don't start up the 500 fascinating daemons I seem to get by default now days.
OpenOffice chugs on the TP600, but the VIA is very happy.
It's not quite the same as a dual opteron with scsi where "startx" produces the entire running desktop in 2 seconds.
I've also been benching the systems. The 2.6 kernel is snappier than 2.4, and Gnome 2.6 is using less RAM than 2.4. The biggest bottleneck is disk seeking - Gnome loads a lot of scatter little files when starting up and disk heads are still constrained by little problems like momentum.
With XFce I can go down to about 48Mb and have a snappy desktop. Open Office isn't very funny at 48Mb but XFce but abiword is usable.
Light usable browser? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Translation (Score:2, Informative)
Windows drags smoothly because it updates LESS FREQUENTLY with NO STUTTER. It spends more time per update, and therefore it is slower. However, the brain latches onto the stutter in XFree86, so you PERCIEVE its updates as taking more time.
Whether this is true or not I don't know; I haven't seen the benchmarks. But I have heard it before.
Re:That's why (Score:3, Informative)
And when the laptop caught fire, I moved the disk to a 486sx/33 with 8 MB RAM. FreeBSD still ran, but not vey fast. But still, much faster than any modern Windows OS, because it didn't run X at all at this time. And the computer was still very useful to me, which it wouldn't be with any version of Windows. I used it for writing a thesis i LaTeX. Yes, it originally ran Windows 3.11 -- even faster than FreeBSD without GUI, but a computer is hardly any use if it's not connected to other computers. You need net, and for net, you need NIC drivers. And for NIC drivers on a laptop, you need PCMCIA support...
The problem is, you can't compare the speed of OSes directly, at least not from desktop experience. Is Windows faster than Linux because IE opens faster than Mozilla? Mozilla isn't Linux, KDE isn't Linux. And so on. But if you want to, you can make Linux fast enough to be quite useful, most of the time. Beware, though: It might get you accusations of being a CLI snob. Just tell those who accuse you, that it's not only a question of 'the right tool for the job', it's about the best set of tools. The hardware is the basic tool that makes you decide which software tools can work.
Re:That's why (Score:0, Informative)
I don't think Win98 is ever an answer to any technical problem, no matter what. It may load fast on first install, but it always falters. It is the Ford Pinto of Operating Systems.
The PII you have should be plenty of horsepower to run Linux with a reasonable configuration. I have a feeling you are comparing this PII machine to a much faster windows box, so your perception is skewed.
One of the beauties of FreeBSD is that it runs well on old equipment (just like Linux). If you are inclined you should spend some more time looking into other options because I am sure you can install something FOSS that is faster than Win98. Turn all the pretty things off if nothing else, because anything is prettier than Win98.
Also I think we should add to your list:
People who think FreeBSD is all most people need.
People who like all operating systems and interface methods that specifically exclude any Windows Operating System up to and including Windows ME. These people also hate Mac OS 9 and below.
Re:Mainly the startup times... (Score:3, Informative)
Misleading (Score:3, Informative)
This can be quite misleading. If some other process is already using GTK on your system--like, say, the Gimp--then running your program does not really uses much more memory, because most of that memory "used" by your program (mapped to its process) is in the shared object which is already loaded anyway. (Provided your program is dynamically linked with GTK.) This is why adding memory used by processes can (and usually does) give more than there really is memory on the system, including swap. For example, run this from the shell:
It was supposed to be all in one big line, but it's ugly, so let's turn it into a script:
On my system, a Debian desktop with two weeks of uptime, it prints:
This machine has only 256MB of RAM and is using only 67MB of swap--this is hardly 1.5GB which is supposedly "used" by all of those processes.
Re:That's why (Score:3, Informative)
i run enlightenment, and use konqueror for filemanagement (especially transferring to remote hosts and vice versa).
this setup uses a lot less resources than a full kde desktop, i can tell you.