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."
Compared to Windows (Score:3, Interesting)
Windows XP v. KDE or Gnome (Score:5, Interesting)
My machine dual boots Win XP and Mandrake 9.1.
I'm using Gnome and sometimes KDE for Mandrake and when I'm in WinXP the system is a lot more fluid then in KDE or Gnome. I'm sure there are somethings I could to to tweak KDE or Gnome, but at least as far as Mandrake is concerned, out of the box, they drag ass!
Mainly the startup times... (Score:5, Interesting)
It doesn't seem confined to Linux either; I use w2k as my main desktop at home (also have an FC2 desktop and Gentoo on my server/router) and opensource apps seem to have the same long load times. I won't compare Firefox to Explorer for obvious reasons, but the delay is noticable. I use Agent (a closed source usenet client) and it loads in 2-3 seconds for me, in contrast to Thunderbird email client which easily takes 3 times as long. This is strange since Agent has much more data to load (subscribed to 15 newsgroups, some very busy and so have thousands of messages - including bodies on disk).
Once apps are loaded in Linux or Windows, they perform well; It's just a shame that the initial startup times are the first experience you have of an app, and if you're drumming your fingers, it's not creating a good first impression.
That said, I still prefer Linux
Linux used to be light as hell (Score:3, Interesting)
I totally agree with the poster about GNOME/KDE, though. I haven't run KDE since the 1.x versions. I currently use blackbox and I've found it to be very lightweight and, most importantly, it doesn't get in my way. It manages my windows - that's it!
I've tried XFCE, fvwm, windowmaker and many many more. I've settled on BB for now.
Sure seems like I should be getting more bang for my CPU buck though. What's been taking up all the space in software these days?
User Choice (Score:2, Interesting)
But what appeals to me is the option of not having to use a GUI. Being a long time user of U*NX and U*NX like operatiing systems, that is the biggest appeal to me.
what is more concerning to me is the lost of functions that some applications/programs are migrating to, for the whole "ease of use" thingy.
its a trade off (Score:3, Interesting)
If you want to compare to the 'old days of UNIX' we didn't go for all the extras that were not really *needed* , so yes, we were much more efficient...
But in today's consumer market, 'pretties' is what sells..
And keep in mind this isn't a 'Linux thing' it's the same story regardless of what you choose to use, if you start layering on a bunch of GUI stuff..
It's the infernal "Desktop Enviornments" (Score:3, Interesting)
While I admit that I've been evaluating Gnome 2.6 the past few days, and I've tried out XFCE, my consistent favorite is WindowMaker.
half the supposed benefit of Linux... (Score:2, Interesting)
I have an old eMachine 500mhz machine that is chugging along fine with Fedora, and I'd like to have it running forever since it's still a useful processor, after all.
If a Linux distro becomes as bloated and heavy as running Windows... well, there goes one of the cooler benefits of Linux...
GNOME heavy? (Score:3, Interesting)
See, this just comes across all wrong to me. I use neither, as both are too bloated for my tastes. But of the two, it's KDE and not GNOME that the slower and bloatier. I'm curious as to how anyone can see it the other way around. Certainly on all the hardware I've tried, KDE is measurably slower. As a completely unscientific test:
Linux on Older PC's (Score:3, Interesting)
Fr'instance, I have a Thinkpad 600 with 64 MB of RAM. The thing is just sitting in a box right now because I've been unable to find a distribution that will run gracefully on this machine.
And when you think about it, 64 MB is a still a helluva lot of memory to be incapable of running a reasonably current OS. I'm sure (and I sure hope!) that somebody could recommend a Linux distribution that's suitable for a machine like mine. But it says something that I spent at least a couple of hours looking at various obscure distributions, and couldn't find one that did the trick.
Re:Compared to Windows (Score:5, Interesting)
I have a 2x400 Celeron running XP and a 1.8Ghz Celeron running Linux.
Linux is obviously more rock solid and has a lot less problems with forced restarts due to updates and whatnot but I just don't think it responds as well as XP seems to.
I know, I know, the Slashbotters will tell you that MSFT plays games with how apps load because they are partially in memory or whatever... No offense but if I have to take a small memory hit to make my apps load faster than a machine with 1/3 the speed then so be it.
Re:Compared to Windows (Score:4, Interesting)
Back in the day StarOffice 5.2 ran about 10 times faster on a Windows 95 install than on a Linux install, I still don't understand that one. Am I the only person who liked SO5.2 desktop replacement system? Not that I don't like OpenOffice (it's my main office suite).
Why XFCE? IceWM is more like KDE or Gnome (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:That's why (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Well duh (Score:5, Interesting)
How can you take obvious evidence of people hating the bloat and how slow Gnome/KDE are becoming and say, "No, you're wrong."
That's exactly the attitude that drives people back to Windows...
Re:That's why (Score:3, Interesting)
I love Window Maker -- it's great, and i prefer it to GNOME or KDE any day.
However, i've used three (or four, depending on how you count it) x86 distributions with Window Maker -- Red Hat 7-ish, MDK 9, MDK 9.1 (which was actually considerably faster than 9 for me), and SuSE 9 -- and none of them were ever as snappy as Windows (XP, 2000, or otherwise). I've never understood what Linux people are talking about when they say that Linux 'runs faster' than Windows. I've never experienced that in my life, and i consider myself to be pretty computer literate (enough to know if i've got some crazy circumstance going on that makes that the case, anyway).
I don't know, maybe X and the various environments that run on top of it were faster during the period where Windows 95 and earlier versions were in use. But since Windows 98 came out? Never. :/
Re:Well duh (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm not looking to flame or troll, only looking for some objectivity.
Re:Linux on Older PC's (Score:4, Interesting)
It's a universal trend (Score:2, Interesting)
But really, though, this was to be expected. I use GNOME 2 as my desktop environment and I'm fully aware of the price I'm paying in system resources. You can't expect a windowing environment that uses SVG, pretty effects, and pleasing visuals to be thrifty with computing power.
Library bloat (Score:5, Interesting)
In order to save some memory on my system, I started rewritting the script into C, using GTK2 (a good excuse to learn this library). After implementing most of the functionality, I found that it took about 17MB. I wonder how much memory it would use if I ported it to motif (or athena widgets).
Things are getting better. I just ran the original script on my now FC-2 system, and found that it uses 8MB.
I realize that some of the memory in use is shared with other applications. I am starting to wonder if we have lost sight of memory usage.
no, they aren't (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Mainly the startup times... (Score:5, Interesting)
But if that's true, then why does word still load faster if I'm using the Crossover Office plug-in under linux? That removes all of the pre-loaded
Code tuning (Score:3, Interesting)
Couldn't agree more. (Score:5, Interesting)
I wonder if it would be possible to do a lot of the "toy" stuff so many people like (or use by default) without the high memory/cpu requirements? If it's just a matter of having the stuff to explore and play with, you'd think something like xfce or enlightenment would take off. But the toy concept seems to go hand-in-hand with eye candy, so we need to load the alpha blending code, the anti-aliasing font libraries, the scalable vector graphics rendering engine, the bitmap skins, all that junk into core, then we need the cpu to juggle the fading in and out of tooltips, animated menus, and big chunky kparts modules, parsing xml for every little thing, all on top of the work the user's actually trying to do.
Re:Mainly the startup times... (Score:3, Interesting)
You are categorically wrong.
Sure, MSWord may use _some_ services that are loaded in windows, like, hmm, maybe FileIO etc, but nothing specific to MSWord itself.
When you start MSWord, you're loading it from scratch, it is not preloaded.
Note that I am making absolutely NO comparisons as to what is faster or better, I am only trying to allay the FUD presented so we can look out on an even playing field.
Re:Library bloat (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:True, but it is a fact of computer programming (Score:5, Interesting)
It's easier to write a fat program that does XYZ than it is to write a sleek program that doex XYZ. But the past was a sleek program that just did X, so the comparison isn't exactly fair. This is why I disagree with Gnome's current trend of simplicity ahead of configurability. I don't think these two goals are mutually exclusive, and I believe it's important to make applications that scale downward as well as upward. A truly beautiful DE would scale up to where Gnome is now, which runs quite smoothly with all the features on a decent computer, but also scale down so that it ran as fast as Fluxbox or WindowMaker when you started disabling stuff. It's possible to disable features in Gnome, but doing so doesn't yield as great of a performance gain as it should.
That said, Linux thrives on choice, so installing a thin DE shouldn't be hard. If it's hard on RedHat, then perhaps you should investigate a better distro... =P
Re:you are missing the point! (Score:2, Interesting)
118 processes: 116 sleeping, 2 running, 0 zombie, 0 stopped
CPU states: 3.3% user 1.3% system 0.0% nice 0.0% iowait 95.2% idle
Mem: 515464k av, 454484k used, 60980k free, 0k shrd, 41000k buff
79256k active, 352392k inactive
Swap: 730948k av, 104308k used, 626640k free 295740k cached
PID USER PRI NI SIZE RSS SHARE STAT %CPU %MEM TIME CPU COMMAND
3220 trigun 14 0 16336 14M 13504 R 1.9 2.9 0:05 0 kdeinit
715 root 14 0 57964 35M 34860 S 1.7 7.0 1193m 0 X
5810 root 14 0 1072 1072 816 R 0.9 0.2 0:03 0 top
1 root 8 0 76 68 52 S 0.0 0.0 0:07 0 init
2 root 9 0 0 0 0 SW 0.0 0.0 0:06 0 keventd
3 root 19 19 0 0 0 SWN 0.0 0.0 0:00 0 ksoftirqd_CPU
4 root 9 0 0 0 0 SW 0.0 0.0 2:14 0 kswapd
5 root 9 0 0 0 0 SW 0.0 0.0 0:00 0 bdflush
6 root 9 0 0 0 0 SW 0.0 0.0 0:58 0 kupdated
10 root -1 -20 0 0 0 SW< 0.0 0.0 0:00 0 mdrecoveryd
11 root 9 0 0 0 0 SW 0.0 0.0 0:01 0 kreiserfsd
Not under heavy load, it just runs KDE 3.2.x desktop, mail server gateway, virus checking, yadda, yadda...
cat
processor : 0
vendor_id : GenuineIntel
cpu family : 6
model : 8
model name : Pentium III (Coppermine)
stepping : 6
cpu MHz : 803.621
cache size : 256 KB
I think that I'll stick with Linux/KDE. Apps start a bit slower than I'd like, but once they do, they're very responsive.
Re:That's why (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Well duh (Score:2, Interesting)
It is a good thing to keep as many peices of as many programs in memory as possible. This reduces page faults, which in turn increases response time and performace.
If more peices of programs are in memory, then the CPU can be active more often, without having to wait for slow as hell disk IO to read and write pages into and out to the disk.
Mandrake 9.1 on toshiba libretto (Score:3, Interesting)
On my main desktops, I run windowmaker with ROX-Filer, and they are lean and fast. I tried KDE and Gnome, just to see what they are up to when I did a recent desktop install. After a week of being nonproductive in these environments, I went back to windowmaker + ROX.
What I don't understand is WHY these things are getting so bloated. I can do everything I need and more with a lightweight environment like ROX. I see 0 advantage, or even ease of use of KDE or Gnome over what ROX + Windowmaker give me.
Re:Couldn't agree more. (Score:4, Interesting)
http://pekwm.org/
I needed a window manager that I could modify to
basically do things the way I needed them to be.
More of an information terminal / kiosk environment.
After searching and going through all the WM's
at http://xwinman.org/, someone on a LUG pointed
me to pekwm. I dropped WindowMaker and never looked back. These days it is the first thing I
install on an new installation.
Re:That's why (Score:3, Interesting)
Raw X11 apps on Linux, on the other hand, have always beaten Win32 apps for responsiveness in both startup times and runtime performance on every machine I have ever owned.
Where most of the "Linux runs apps faster than Windows" claims are made refer to long running, system intensive processes. This becomes more painfully obvious the longer applications, such as server processes, are left running. I have never experienced a case where similar long running applications haven't seen Linux completely smoke Windows.
Re:Well duh (Score:3, Interesting)
Bye,
Paul.
PS. This comment brougth to you with KDE 3.1 running happily on a mobile P2-400 with 160MB RAM.
(SuSE 8.2 Pro).
Re:Windows XP v. KDE or Gnome (Score:4, Interesting)
Given your last sentence, however, it is clear you're not even paying attention to what people are looking at doing or, moreover, at what level the problem rests.
Re:Windows XP v. KDE or Gnome (Score:4, Interesting)
I have written open apps and there was not noticable difference between running them in gnome compared to twm, and I use both. Furthermore, I remember setting up X to startup running quake3 with no window manager whatsoever, and only saw a 10% increase in performance compared to running in gnome.
Problem isn't GNOME or KDE, it's Linux and glibc (Score:5, Interesting)
In comparison, my 1.6Ghz, 512Mb desktop machine running Linux and GNOME 2.6 is noticably slower. The memory footprint with a similar list of apps running (Mozilla instead of Firebird) is around 400Mb.
Linux used to be great on lower spec hardware than Windows, but since 2.4 it has become bloated and slow. Glibc is also an incredibly bloated implementation of a C library if compared to those that ship with BSD's. The kernel bloat could be a result of the extra complexity ti run on mid-range, multi processor machines. Glibc's excuse is somewhat less easy to pin down.
Chris
Re:That's why (Score:2, Interesting)
but any window manager can put a spreadsheet and a graphics app on the same screen
I completely agree.
I use my Linux laptop for word processing and photo/video/audio editing. It feels so much better using fluxbox than Gnome or KDE. What some people call eye candy, I usually call big useless clutter, always getting in the way, trying to tell me how to run my computer.
By the way, I have chosen to install Arch Linux, a bleading edge distibution, optimised for i686, with a rolling release system. It almost never takes more than a week after a new version of a program is released, until there is a package ready. And one short command updates all new packages in one go. Even though there are a lot of packages available, the install CD dosn't come with either KDE or Gnome, since most of the users want a clean and powerfull system anyway.
That's just to say that I disagree about Linux getting very much heavier. It's just that Linux is about choice, and some people actually want Santa with his reindeers flying over the screen every 2 minutes, and some people don't. They can all get what they wish for.
Re:Compared to Windows (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:GNOME heavy? (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually, yes I did it for both, specifically to ensure that it was cached like you say. I just started one line too low when I cut and pasted.
What about the compiler? (Score:2, Interesting)
Choices (Score:3, Interesting)
For those of you who don't want all the extra goodies provided by KDE or GNOME, at least some distributions (Mandrake and Redhat that I use myself) provide a handy desktop switching tool that lets you easily switch to a lightweight (with correspondingly fewer features) window manager.
I make good use of KDE features, especially with Konqueror. I am endlessly frustrated by the user hostility of Microsoft Windows (and others) when I can't split the file manager into multiple panes for easy manipulation of files across directories and other networked computers within the same window.
That by itself is a killer feature that I am loathe to have unavailable.
I disagree - the problems lie elsewhere (Score:3, Interesting)
I disagree that the desktop is getting worse for both KDE/Gnome. . . I think that the memory issues are a little more complicated than that.
My real gripes with memory management are four-fold.
On a seperate note, I've noticed that KDE overall has gotten faster and more efficient, not slower in the last 3 releases. I've seen the opposite in Gnome.
Gnome unfortunately has never been memory efficient for me and seems to have a ton of memory leaks (I love the look of it and I'm rooting for the team - maybe except for the mono guys - , but it feels really cobbled together to me and I can't stand when it bogs down because of memory leaks here and there). I also don't see mono as the fix for that -- better memory management for the individual components would suffice.
Also 192 MB of RAM is much higher than the usable minimum for Mandrake 10.0 + KDE. I use 128 MB of RAM with a newish KDE (two minor releases behind - so the newer once should be even faster) and it is quite comfortable (it is better than both the current GNOME and the later versions of GNOME/KDE). I've used gentoo on the same machine in the past and it was even faster. The only thing that I do is use "aterm" instead of the bloated terminal shells (gnome terminal and kterminal are both ridiculously bloated and offer almost nothing over aterm) -- it makes a big difference.
Re:The fault lies in using C (Score:3, Interesting)
speedup tips (Score:4, Interesting)
here are a few:
- on KDE, a different style really matters. 'matters' not as in 'use -fomit-frame-stuff', but as in 'it really matters'. stop using keramik/plastik and use light V3, or QT windows. you will notice it very quickly, both in speed and in memory usage (very significant)
- watch out with konq's process caching. keep an eye on the memory usage of cached processes, and if you see they are too leaky, disable konq proces caching. konq starts up quickly without caching anyway
- tired of people saying 'its the nvidia drivers' for every performance problem ? i have to confirm this. I'm not talking about FPS in games or so, just basic GUI performance. for example, try the RenderAccel setting (also try disabling it, there are some problems that seem to occur only in some situations)
offcourse, all of this is not an excuse, but at least it can offer some relief. i am no fedora user, but i wonder if some simple research on fedora could point out where the (perceived and real) slowness is coming from... i remember seeing success stories like "colorful KDE3 performance on low-end hardware", and i run KDE3 at home on a 233mhz 128mb ram at home (debian). But i also saw a (very) slow mandrake installation.. it must be possible to find out the cause.
what tools could be used to investigate ? like xrestop, strace, profilers (but i have no idea how to profile a whole desktop and not a single application)
ow, and some problems i'd like to know more about:
- openoffice painting slowness. i can type quicker than openoffice can paint in some situations, in other situations its very quick. it doesn't even seem related to document size
- gtk double buffering slowness... it started since gtk2, i don't know if it improved much (i don't notice it anymore on my new-faster pc, but i can see it in other setups)
- some KDE apps (like kopete and kontact) have slow dropdown menu's, others have quick ones. very strange, i tought dropdown menus are just basic QT stuff
Re:That's why (Score:4, Interesting)
Right now I'm using pekwm, which has no eye candy (can't even seem to get many of the themes to work), but is stable and fast, and gives me tabbed windows which I do see as a major benefit for the type of work I do (and yes, I am a software developer). It also gives me flexible and powerful key bindings, which I find more efficient than a toolbar/panel what have you.
I just am waiting to see what Gnome or KDE (or even XFCE) have to offer as far as integration. What actually works better? What actually saves you time?
Do people honestly use file selector windows and drag and drop, and find that more efficient than tab completing in a terminal window? Do I just need more practice?
This is why I use multiple window managers (Score:2, Interesting)
If I am playing a CPU intensive games like Unreal, then I use the game itself as the window manager. So I basically have nothing but X and the game running.
alias startut "xinit
Re:Missing the point (Score:3, Interesting)
With only 128 MB of RAM, you can run KDE within reason. In this case, the user attempts to run three basic tasks on his system (web browsing, e-mail, and an office application) simultaneously.
Mozilla was chosen for web-browsing. OpenOffice was chosen as the office application. Evolution was chosen as the mail client.
These apps are memory intensive. Since they don't share any of the desktop widgets that KDE offers, they consume additional memory for additional widgets. The combination of heavy apps plus most recent KDE plus 128MB of RAM in the system = crawl.
I figure that if the user used equivalent native KDE apps, this wouldn't be such a problem. Konquerer + KOffice + Kmail makes for a significantly smaller memory footprint to accomplish the same tasks.
Roll your own -- Fix the problems.. (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Actually, it's obvious why they're getting bigg (Score:4, Interesting)
Christ, why are you running KDE on a K6? XP would bring that box to it's knees too.
No it wouldn't. My father ran a test XP system back out when it was still Whistler on a 400MHz or so Pentium II system with 256MB of RAM. It ran absolutely fine.
XP, for the most part, will work fine on older systems provided you have at least 192MB of RAM. Any less than that and you'll be forced to swap to run any pretty much any application. As long as you have plenty of RAM, you should have no problem running Windows XP, even on older hardware.
If you could get a useable experience running Windows 98 or Windows 2000 on your system, you should (with enough RAM) be able to get a usable experience with Windows XP.
Re:Mainly the startup times... (Score:3, Interesting)
Now, one really important thing to realize is that the different modules of OOo are not yet independent. While OOwriter took 16 seconds to load, I can later open OOimpress in 3-4 seconds because the OOo libraries are cached. Once OOo is further modularized and switches to using standard KDE or GTk libraries, load time should be drastically improved.
And of course, even today, how much does 256Mb. of RAM cost today? $30-50. (vs.) $300-500 for MS Office. I can live with that until OOo is improved.
Re:That's why (Score:5, Interesting)
That depends. When you are going to copy/move a bunch of files that have a name startign with the same chars, a commandline copy/move will be quicker..
If you have a directory with 500 files in there, and you need to copy 30 of them with wildly different names, but created on the same day, it is often easier done and faster with a gui.
I use both a lot, and happen to use KDE 3.2 as window manager/desktop environment at the moment. What KDE offers for integration that I really notice? Well, not much.. but I bet that is because of me using it mostly as an advanced program lauyncher with lots of eye candy.
On the other hand.. at times I am very happy with the integration of file/directory/cvs/pdf/ps/whatever browsing and the support for spell-checking of form input and such.
The main reason for having KDE as default desktop is that I am not the only user of this workstation, and when others use it, they are usually rather happy to find an environment that looks and feels familiar even when they are mostly windows users.
And yeah, I could still give my own account a different window manager but heh. I also 'support' those peopel, so it really helps to use what they are using also.
At times I need speed and memory and I need X.. guess what, I usually just start twm (not even vtwm or such) if I need a window manager at all.. Usually this is for playing games so who cares about a window manager in such a case anyway.
Easy solution (and a good idea for reasons of security as well), have a special game account that gets a very minimalistic desktop and as much machine resources available as possible..
For all practical purposes, my machien has the power to run KDE and OOo and a bunch of browser windows and terminals. Thats what I need for my work usually, and in that KDE is not getting in the way at all.
Oh, and I like konsole and konqueror.
Well, I introduce WM to newbies... (Score:3, Interesting)
It is true that GNOME/KDE is more similar to Windows systems that most newbies are used to, but they are also more complex than WM, and also less solid and consistent (yes, the core tools can be quite stable, but beginners still get into trouble in some small parts that don't work as well). Also, since they look similar to Windows, any differences, and especially lack of features in certain parts, become more annoying. With WM plus MC, since everything is so different, beginners are rather delighted to see some of the nice features of them, such as virtual desktops and Ctrl-S in MC, and every feature mentioned just works. When they are getting mostly comfortable with the system, I encourage them to use vi/emacs instead of newer, more Windows-like but less solid and feature-filled things, just for the same reason.
My notion of "newbies" includes my classmates in a university and my parents in their 50s. They can pick up new things pretty quickly, but if anything doesn't work as advertised, or works inconsistently (I don't mean applications with different widget sets, which is ugly but acceptable to most --- my papa can use Protel 3.xx for DOS quite comfortably even though he uses Windows most of the time --- but rather things that works sometimes but doesn't work in other circumstances), even relatively experienced users like me will get annoyed, let alone beginners.
Just act cum grano salis (with common sense) (Score:2, Interesting)
have been hijacked to my parents' room and I would
install there Linux to be able to do
video-conferencing with them.
I selected Suse 9.0 for the task, bought the
local retail version in the (vane) hope that
they could read the fine manuals, and I started
installation during the Easter holidays when I
went there.
During the installation, there was an option
about the graphical environment:
*) No graphics
*) Light version (No KDE)
*) Uber Ultra Eye Cady Fat Colesterol Kde
Or something similar, I do not remeber in the
detail, but I could select a less heavy DE than
kde or gnome.
So, I stand back, and look the machine:
amd 2400+, 256MB, nvidia 440Mx, and I say,
it's ok, it can do it.
And it did.
Now, if it was a PIII 733, 128MB, riva TNT 16MB,
I do believe I would have chosen the middle option
(windowmaker maybe?).
It would have maybe been less user friendly, but
for the few tasks my parents have to perform
(e-mail, web, gnomemeeting) would have been ok.
So, if you are installing on an old hardware
a new distribution that it takes pains to give
you a "wonderful" gui experience, is really so
strange to find that it goes slower than
a previous version without special effects,
tooltips, whatever?
So, next time Suse 9.0 (or now 9.1) is installed
on an old machine, is it fair to ask the
machine to behave correctly with a load that
exceed its capacities? Or would not have been more
logical selecting the offered choice of a light
environment?
Just my thoughts.
Best Regards
Re:no, they aren't (Score:3, Interesting)
It's perfectly possible in windows. Games, especially, can run in the background fine. I do wish people would stop thinking up what they imagine Windows to be like, then spouting it as some sort of fact. Windows users read that, realise it's completely made up, and get a bad impression of linux types. It only serves to help windows, not linux.
Bloated only when you don't tweak your system (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:True, but it is a fact of computer programming (Score:2, Interesting)
This is (one reason) why higher level languages are so nice. They give you MUCH smaller executables, as everyone has standardized on the same libraries, namely those that came with the environment. There is just much more code sharing in Java or
Spending more time adding features? (Score:3, Interesting)
And little time devoted to optimizing. That's what it looks like to me, whether it's Gnome,KDE, or OOo. Mozilla was painfully slow while they were in the adding features more, but once they took the time to sit down and start identifying the bloat, it got better (still not perfect). Look at Nautilus as another example. The first iteration had lots of nifty features, but it was slow. Alan Cox got frustrated with this, profiled the code, and then sent the Nautilus team the profiler output and suggestions to speed it up. To me, this sounds like something that the project team should have already done. Why did it take a widely known hacker like Alan to make them take notice?
Maybe there should be some Code-Bloat Nazis that are independant of the various major projects . They would analyze the software for speed, memory footprint, etc. and then report back to the developers where this is room for improvement.
Re:no, they aren't (Score:5, Interesting)
Its sometime possible with Windows to multitask with games (I play most of my games in windows, the only reason I keep it around). Some games will lock up if you switch to another program. And if it works, it does so in a kind of clunky manner as far as switching back and forth, as opposed to CRTL-F7, CRTL-F8 which is how I do it in Linux. You have to press the Start button or do Alt-Tab, it kind of feels like your doing something you shouldn't. Sometimes the resolution gets messed up. You can't right click on the game's icon in the task list and get a regular menu dialog. Other weird things like that.
Now admittedly with both Linux and Windows I've recently been having problems multitasking with games (and running at 100% CPU generally), but its cause its hot and humid and I have no A/C. So its not really the OSs fault at all. I will say that one of my windows-bashing friends who doesn't have much experience with Linux will blame Mr. Gates for just about any computer problem. One advantage of a multi-boot system is that its easy to see what problems are due to your software and which are hardware related. My computer crashing is closely tied to the season, which seems somewhat ironic (Computers, the symbol of modernity, still having to battle the season like some peasant farmer... of course if I had A/C...)
As far as the article this is linking to, the guy obviously doesn't know what he's talking about. I've used Linux since about 1999 and its never really been more efficient at GUI apps. With Linux you have the option to stick it on an old computer and make a decent low-use server (not an option with Windows and its always-on GUI), which is probably where the confusion arises.
Re:Compared to Windows (Score:2, Interesting)
Have to disagree with you there. Here's why:
I support about 150 users of XP and 2k. Why oh why do applications quit working after awhile on these machines? The funny thing is, the way I fix it is by deleting their profile on that machine. Once that's done, they log back in, windows creates a new profile, and all runs perfect. WTF.
I do agree that the BSOD's have all but disappeared with XP (not 2k though). BTW, I've never had to delete my
Re:Well duh (Score:3, Interesting)
I was actually thinking about this subject last night, and I wondered if there is a way, since these are all free software / open source, to choose one library, whether one of the four, or a fifth library that is lighter and faster, and then create "duct tape" functions for the other libraries. This way, you could link your GNOME- and KDE- based apps, Mozilla, and OOo with this one library. Each would think that it has its own widgets and crap, but all of the calls would end up in the one true library.
I thought that if, say, this were done to convert QT calls into GTK calls, then someone would end up implementing duct tape to convert GTK calls to QT calls, and eventually, we'd end up with duct tape functions that convert from any of the libraries to any of the other libraries. This might seem like overkill and a waste of time, but I think that if such a thing happened, you would truly have the "choice" that everyone is talking about, because you could choose which library you like, and the others would map to that one. It could become part of your overall desktop theme.
Re:Compared to Windows (Score:4, Interesting)
And I might get some arguments here, but I think a bit of that can be contributed to the fact that optimizing a screen refresh algorithm may not be *cool* to an open source programmer, but writing some nifty transparency-laden eye-candy is. Who wants to write boring, optimized, no-credit, non-visible code? Few people. Unless they *have* to. And who *has* to? People whose bosses demand it and whose paychecks depend on it.
I think perhaps with the growing popularity of Linux, we are getting more "Rock star" programmers who would like to say, "Hey! You know that nifty GL-accelerated, Rotating Sphere login screen in the new 4.6 KDE? I *wrote* that! In, like, 10 minutes!" As opposed to, "Hey! You notice that 2% performance increase in the latest release? Well, I spend 5 months analyzing that code and re-writing it from scatch to implement a double-buffering scheme to provide that."
I may be missing the whole open source mentality, but personally, *I* don't have enough self-discipline to make myself devote a lot of time to a boring, bug-ridden problem, when there's more *sexy* coding that needs to be done. But maybe that's just me.
Re:I use gnome because I like toys but... (Score:1, Interesting)
Same features, less bloat (Score:3, Interesting)
The parent poster is perfectly correct. As everyone else's distro works harder and harder to out-bloat Windows, Slackware continues the original Linux ideal of a bloat-free, yet feature-rich, OS distro.
Part of MS's advantage is that it's run by a single set of libraries that get loaded in the OS at the start. They may not be good libraries, but they're ONE SET of libraries. Linux has plenty of good ones, but you need millions of them; every programmer of each individual app wants to reinvent the wheel or use something obscure, so memory use goes straight to the bad place. Users are forced to be smart about what they run, and Slackware definitely helps with that more than larger distros, which takes everything and the kitchen sink, and dumps it in the user's all-too-willing lap. "Sure, I'd like to install (?:G|K)Louse-Picker .0009a! Who knows, I might need it someday! Oh. I guess I need to install 300 dependencies...well Linux is always faster than M$, so I guess installing all those on my 300MHz 128MB Dell won't hurt it a bit!"
I don't feel much sympathy for all the RedHat refugees. If you want Windows, just get Windows. I know you won't be as hip then, but trust me, your personal computing experience will be better. Or buy a Mac; then you'll be even cooler than if you used Linux on a PC, if a little bit poverty-stricken.
Re:That's why (Score:3, Interesting)
No speed cmplaints here--sure, it's not blazing, but nothing is what I'd call slow.
One subjective thing that might contribute to perceptions of slowness is that Linux applications, when asked to start, generally do nothing for a few seconds, then spit up a window ready to go, while Windows ones create the window first and then load the application piecemeal.
Re:This is a good thing... (Score:3, Interesting)
Would you mind showing me a quote from Linus or the GNU folks stating this? Because from what I've seen over the last ten years, Linux and related software are supposed to be different in that they are "free-as-in-speech" programs intended to be used by people who want alternatives to proprietary software, and usuability of the software on aging hardware was never a concern. While it could be extrapolated that this freedom also allows the user to compile lightweight versions for older systems, that part is up to the user, no the developers.
There are plenty of Linux distributions and free/open source programs meant to run on old hardware. But those are mostly specialy created by people who want to run on older hardware. They have never been in the mainstream, and have certainly never been the guiding force in the Linux/free/open source community.
Re:That's why (Score:3, Interesting)
Two words: IO Slaves.
I use Solaris more than Linux, and was so happy today when I got KDE 3.2.2 installed (was previously using KDE 2.x on that box).
KDE's "IO Slaves" allows all KDE applications to make use of a very extendable low-level (for a Desktop Environment) system in KDE for browsing filesystems and opening files. For example, like WIndows 200 onwards, all KDE applications can open/view/save files which are located on a remote FTP server. As time goes by, more protocols are added to the list that IO Slaves supports. I routinely access machines at work from home (and vice versa) using KDE's SFTP IO Slave. It lets me view the filesystem of my workstation at work as if it was my PC at home, and with almost the same speed and responsiveness.
If it wasn't for that feature, I'd probably be using one of the minimalist Window Mangers.
Trolls to left, Flamers to the right, stuck . . . (Score:5, Interesting)
I've read most of the comments here at my default +5, and I have to say, I don't see how so many trolls and blatant lies got modded so high.
I know what you're thinking. You're thinking "oh, he's just another Linux elitist who's going to condenscedingly tell me what to do." And you would be wrong.
I'm not going to tell you what to do. I'm going to tell you what *I* do, and see if I can make any sense of the garbage that's getting posted here.
I use Debian GNU/Linux (isn't it obvious from the sig?). Stable. Not unstable, not even testing. With a 2.4 kernel on P4's with a minimum of 512MB of RAM. And they all fly.
I program. I write software for Navy weapon sims. I write software for my company on the side. I play NeverWinter Nights on my machine with an ATI Radeon 9700 Pro, while scanning photos, reading email and administrating the servers for my company and personal use. All of this flies, and [Microsoft] Windows doesn't even compare. And yes, I use Windows (ever heard of NMCI?). MacOSX? Don't make me laugh; I've used it, I've programmed in it, I used to administer a whole lab of it. It's slow and buggy. GNU/Linux runs fast and smoothly on the exact same hardware. GNU/Linux doesn't crash (unless I'm doing some obscure kernel hacking), and it doesn't "stutter" when I'm playing MP3's while image editing a 500MB file in GIMP.
GNU/Linux allows me to do more and more things at the same time. GNU/Linux makes things possible that I never would have imagined possible on Microsoft Windows or Apple Mac OS X.
But you know what? None of this matters. The only thing that matters to me is that GNU/Linux is Free as in Freedom.
I don't know why you guys are having so many problems with GNU/Linux. All I can say is that I've had worse with Windows an MacOSX, and even if I hadn't, I would _still_ use GNU/Linux, because it's Free. Fortunately, in my not so humble experience, GNU/Linux is better in every sense of the word.
Re:That's why (xfce4 Me-too) (Score:5, Interesting)
The extra 'goodies' plugin packages are great too.
http://xfce.org
Re:That's why (Score:3, Interesting)
Not accurate, not even close. (Score:3, Interesting)
Very friendly software works just fine on older hardware. I know that Debian testing, with KDE 3.2 works just fine on 450 MHz and 128MB RAM. I'd even go so far as to call it snappy. I've used Mepis [mepis.org] on machines as low as 233 MHz. Sure, OO was slow on that, but any reasonable company can use it's old "server" to provide that via terminal services to machines of this class.
More importantly for business is the that XP is just the beginning of what Microsoft pushes. Not only does a company have to buy new hardware to run it, it also has to purchase "servers", CALs and other eXPensive junk. Free software has and still makes better use of hardware and has a lower TCO, regardless of what Fedora does.
I use KDE 3.1 because... (Score:3, Interesting)
As for Enlightenment & other window managers, I don't use them because I don't know how to configure various software packages just to watch various multimedia files. I can't underscore this enough. I kind of gave up watching video clips on this box, but it turns out that KDE or Opera offered me the choice of watching a certain clip. It asked me if I wanted to use a certain package to watch it. I was surprised because I wasn't even aware that it could be so easy. You're probably wondering why I would check in 1st place if I don't expect it to work. I checked in hopes that something accidentally got set properly & it'll just work; well, it is going to work, because I'm upgrading KDE with the relevant packages right now.
If you already know which software is used for which media files, then I encourage you to use a lighter environment, but as for me, I really need to get a system that is preconfigured. I've tried Blackbox, twm, swm, lwm, fvwm, & probably others. Because of the apparent lack of documentation, I just can't seem to work Blackbox & twm. I honestly don't know how people can recommend Blackbox & twm in good conscience. As for Enlightenment, I don't understand why people use that when there is KDE & Gnome. When I tried this, last millenium, it seemed to be part of KDE & Gnome. Now that KDE doesn't seem need it anymore, I don't bother with it.
I don't use Gnome because the documentation is difficult to read. It seems geared to describing tasks that I have no interest in, while KDE's documentation is towards telling me what such 'n such app is for & what I get to do. "You have to do..." vs. "You get to do...". I would argue that KDE's documentation is a delight to read in & of itself, whether or not you want to accomplish the relevant tasks. A list of chores vs. fun & productive stuff.
Re:Many window managers, few tools (Score:3, Interesting)
In other words, modern window managers give you the option of leaving all the glitzy CPU-wasting eye and ear candy enabled, or you can have it fast.
Now here's something I've never understood that perhaps can be cleared up for me.
Why the hell aren't these graphically intensive things like transparency, skinning, fade/slight effects being offloaded onto the graphics card?
Graphics cards were *DESIGNED* to do this kind of thing, be it 3d or 2d. New computers have upwards of 128MB of video memory alone these days, now surely that's plenty for your application's screenbuffer needs?
Personally, I use Kahakai as my WM, with a few candy-like gdesklet apps, and I like the speed. But some things are still slow that really shouldn't be, such as moving/resizing a large window.
Anybody ever thought of doing an OpenGL-powered desktop? Or hardware-accelerated SDL desktop for perhaps even a little bit extra platform-independence?
Maybe this is planned for the next X server?
I would *love* to know why this kinda stuff isn't about.
Dragon Drop can be better than command line. (Score:2, Interesting)
With a command line interface, I can view each picture, one at a time. I can find and delete the really bad ones, but it is a slow process. And, when I get to the end of the 100 pictures, I recall that I have around 12 pictures of Bob. I don't need that many, so I should pick the best 2, and delete the rest. The pictures of Bob are evenly distributed through the 100 pictures in total. So, it takes another pass through the 100 pics to even find the 12 ones with Bob, and then I need to compare them to see which ones I like the best. This would probably require me to write down the file names and my comments on a scrap of paper as I go through them.
With a GUI, I view the entire directory at a glance, using the thumbnails. Then I multi-select the ones with Bob them, and copy-drag them to a folder named "Bob" (he is vain, and wants them all). Then I drill down into a few to get a better look. I can see all the thumbs at once, so it is easy for me to decide which ones to keep and which to delete. Then I drag one from the image viewer app onto my mail program to e-mail it to someone. Likewise, I can drag some onto my HTML editor to add them to a web page I am creating.
Command lines are great for many things (and I do normally use the CLI), but they are really bad at visual or graphical tasks.
Also, CLIs are great for frequently used commands. Once you get old enough to start fogettting things, you find that you can't remember the command you want. With a GUI, you can troll through the menus (and hopefully the menus are well designed, so you don't need to look under "Window" for the command to adjust the colour). With a CLI, you try to guess what the command is, or use "apropros" and try to guess a good keyword to search with. (As an exercise in futulity, try to use "apropros" to find the program that displays images).
Re:My experience is different (Score:4, Interesting)
Here we run at least 1G on all machines, so whether you are running Linux or Windows the only thing that gets us into swap is our own huge appliations, which are compiled from the exact same code. It is pretty obvious that when memory runs out on Windows the machine and our app is dead, and it will switch from taking 1 hour to complete to 9 or 10 hours. On Linux when running the same thing the difference between going into swap or not is to go from 1 hour to maybe 1.5 hours. (note this is Win2K and RedHat 7.2, things may be different in newer systems).
What this means is that hitting swap is not so obvious on Linux, thus it may be hiding the fact that it is doing so.
In my experience memory usage of Linux running a desktop is now greater than Windows. Gone are the days when it was as much as 10 times smaller (remember runing FVWM?). The only reason we can keep our memory usage by our graphics programs the same size is that Linux is much better behaved when free memory gets tight.
Re:That's why (Score:2, Interesting)
I agree, we need to watch it or the "bloat" one of the reasons i dont use windows, can come to linux.
Re:Mainly the startup times... (Score:3, Interesting)
Windows's main strength is that it is not fragmented. If you need an IPC mechanism, it has ONE as opposed to 10 different ones. If you need a toolkit, it has ONE toolkit. If you need to save settings, it has ONE mechanism for doing that. Since you don't have 30 different crappy libraries for doing one thing, it takes up less memory and less CPU time.
Stop trying to justify Linux's problems by lying. You only make yourself (and other linux users) look stupid.
Re:Trolls to left, Flamers to the right, stuck . . (Score:3, Interesting)
Sure, performance sucks, but not as bad as OSX.
It's a Unix system so you can do more with it than you could with Windows.
You are obsessed with the GPL...
Am I wrong?
For performance improvements, switch to FreeBSD, and use a different window manager that isn't so horribly bloated, and doesn't have such a terrible interface. I personally recomend Blackbox, but there are tons of others to choose from that do quite a good job as well.
The reality of this... (Score:2, Interesting)
I have an Athlon 2500XP with 512mb's of RAM.
I do not run linux, I run FreeBSD. I use a custom compiled kernel that is about as stripped down as possible.
Gnome 2.6 is just not that fast. Traversing my file system through Nautilus is slow.
Kde 3.2.x is also not that fast. Traversing the file system is pretty quick but the applications themselves are not.
Everyone seems to be talking about progress, but what I want to know is, what progress are we talking about? GASP they have added a side tab! GASP they have added thumbnails! The basic framework for these applications is the same! The file manager's mostly have pretty similar looks. What features could have been added to cause the need for an extra 2ghz of processing power to rival the speed of our old graphical *nix systems?
Oh yeah... that's right, little to nothing!
If you really mess around on a well customised desktop you had on some old hardware (kde 1.x anyone?) and look at the speed, then compaare that to your brand spanking new 2.5ghz system (kde 3.2.x) you should notice that you have just added 2ghz to your system gained a few useless features and have no speed increase.
Also, in the article the comment about Gnome-Terminal is dead on. Can anyone rightfully explain why Gnome-Terminal is as slow as it is?
Must be all the INSANE features it has! Like... oh yeah it doesn't really have any INSANE features, it's just slow as hell on brand new hardware.
Re:That's why (Score:2, Interesting)
Playstation 2 with Linux kit 294 MHz, 32MB RDRAM, 40GB HD.
Posting with FireFox running under Fluxbox. I've followed lots of the usual window manager/app advice. I used to run KDE1 then switched to fvwm2 and now fluxbox. Recently I've been using the Rox Filer as my graphical file manager when I need one. I try to run only one RAM intensive app at a time, either Firefox or Thunderbird but not both. I have dillo 0.8.1 but I haven't found an SSL patch for it yet.
I've ran an older gnome on it but it's way too slow even slower than KDE2 is on it. I can't stand windowmaker, which is the default GUI on an out of the box kit.
I've listened to streaming mp3 with xmms.
I am no Linux guru either, I am not a programmer and the kit was my first exposure to Linux. I had it useable for what I wanted to do within a week tops. My first compile was AbiWord
Develop targeted Linux distros (Score:2, Interesting)
They will both use the same kernel, but will have different default install settings and one will have more focus on supporting the desktop.
This clear split will aid in the developement and adoption of Linux by focusing Linux developement on two clearly defined audiences.
- Desktop users don't need all of the server features. In theory you could say that software such as MySQL, Apache, sendmail, and so forth don't even need to be included in the desktop version.
- Server users aren't using a distro that is bogged down by the desktop gui and apps.
Desktop developers should be working on making it perform as fast as possible. I know that I am pretty frustrated with my Linux desktop experiences due to the speed issue.Lastly, the desktop user version needs to be very easy to install. This is an area that Linux developers need to take seriously (such as skipping the disk partioning step by having completed by the installer invisiably to the user, unless they select to do it otherwise).
Re:That's why (Score:3, Interesting)
With KDE and GNOME, while a screenshot may look similar to a Windows desktop, the use, operation, and configuration of it is FAR different.
I strongly believe that people could learn to use XFce in a fraction of the time it takes them to learn to use KDE/GNOME, plus they will have a far faster desktop that is simple to understand, and doesn't do weird things behind their backs...
Hell, If Windows-like is what you want, give people fvwm95, which clones the look of Windows very closely...