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."
That's why (Score:3, Insightful)
Actually, it's obvious why they're getting bigger. (Score:5, Insightful)
As long as the powers that be insist upon making popular desktops do everything without the need of a shell window, then they are going to be bloated. I don't care how pretty KDE is, it actually irritates me when after a default install of it I have to go hunting through the menus to find the well-hidden shell.
This is what you guys get when you keep preaching that linux is just as friendly as windows so everyone should switch. You get the same kind of bloat windows has.
Re:Actually, it's obvious why they're getting bigg (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm trying to adapt to Linux, but it's painfully slow. I've got a 300MHz K6-2 with 192MB RAM, but I'm going to have to try a slim window manager because KDE bogs everything down. My complaint is that it seems there aren't many window managers that are in a middle ground. I've looked at several of the smaller window managers, and they seem way too spartan. They're barely better than a straight Xserver. Can't you get wallpaper, desktop icons, a Start menu, and taskbar without the thing sucking resources like a sponge? That right click program menu is a waste of time because you have to minimize the apps you're running to right click for that menu.
Re:Actually, it's obvious why they're getting bigg (Score:4, 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: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:That's why (Score:5, Interesting)
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:5, Insightful)
All in all you make a really crappy salesmen for Linux.
Re:That's why (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:That's why (Score:5, Insightful)
While I appreciate that GNOME / KDE aren't the lightest WMs, they're about the only ones that are proper desktops as far as mere mortals are concerned.
I'm sure you could get similar functionality by cobbling a WM, a terminal app, some kind of file browser, etc. I've put up with that kind of crap on Unix for 15 years when lesser machines such as the Mac, Amiga, Atari ST etc. had it way back then. I'm glad that the mainstream has finally left that kind of mentality behind. It doesn't stop anyone using GNUStep or E or CDE or whatever, but unless you are seriously strapped for memory, or the box lives most of its life unattended there is little point.
Personally I just enjoy having a proper desktop because I despise screwing around in some config file to add a lousy icon or to change the screen resolution, or having to run mix and match apps to be able to browse files, networks, printers etc. when they are all inconsistent with each other and the WM. Give me GNOME any day.
I use gnome because I like toys but... (Score:5, Insightful)
Just because someone has no need for a gui doesn't make them elitist. The grandparent post was mainly refering to experienced computer users. Obviously a beginner needs more help, but experianced users who use DEs (I use Gnome myself even though I like to think of myself as hardcore) do it mainly because it looks nice and it has gimmicks, that's why I have always either used Gnome or KDE and am not planning on giving them up.
One can achieve a lot through a text interface, it is not the only way to do things, but it is a legitimate way to do things, and for many people it is the most efficient way to do something. File operations are especially fast from the console. Things like spreadsheets and video editors can be invoked through the console with FVWM just fine.
I agree with the grandparent. If you have the skills to live without one, using a DE is a personal preference. I have chosen to use one because of my playful instinct and the grandparent has chosen not to use one because of their desire for efficiency. These are both legitimate causes of action.
Re:That's why (Score:5, Insightful)
- The "nobody needs a GUI anyway" elitists
- The "nobody needs anything more than fvwm/twm/WindowMaker" elitists
- The people who wish Linux was more like MacOS, only cheaper
- The people who wish Linux was more like Windows 95/98/2K/XP, only cheaper
- The "I use my computer to do stuff, not just recompile my goddamned kernel" crowd
I could go on, but you get my point. Nobody's ever going to be truly happy, and everyone's going to find something to bitch about, despite the fact that GNU/Linux/*BSD/Open Source/Free Software gives us all a frightening array of options that will allow us geeks to build exactly the operating environment we want. This is our reward for being the "smart kids," and the only thing it costs us is a little time and effort.Apparently, though, there are some who feel that somehow they're owed this level of flexibility, but with easy, one-click installtion, too, as if the latest installers should simply read our minds and know how we want everything configured. OK, maybe that's not the mindset - what these people actually seem to be thinking is, "my way is clearly best - why can't everyone just make it work like that?" Grow up, people. Seriously.
FWIW, I just installed Mandrake 10 on my 400 Mhz PII (256M RAM, 60G total HD) at home. For the first time I decided to make a real effort to use my Linux box as a desktop system. For the most part I've been extremely successful. The vast majority of what I use my PC for is net-related, and 98% of what I did in WinXP I could do in Linux. I was already using Mozilla as my browser and e-mail client anyway, etc. But there was absolutely no doubt that KDE runs slow as ass on a system of that vintage. I look forward to the day when I can just drop $500 or so on a nice, cheap 3 Ghz system to replace that old dinosaur. But for now I'll continue the experiment and enjoy life in Linux-land, despite the fact that that old machine would run Win98SE a hell of a lot faster than it runs Linux/KDE right now. If I really need to I can fall back to my 1.1 Ghz, 512M RAM Duron running XP.
Re:That's why (Score:5, Funny)
"Four terminal windows at the same time."
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: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:5, Insightful)
Re:That's why (Score:4, Insightful)
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?
Re:That's why (Score:4, Insightful)
Do people honestly use file selector windows and drag and drop, and find that more efficient than tab completing in a terminal window?
What do you mean by 'more efficient'. It takes less time? It takes less energy? Are you saying you get a stiffy because you you burn 1 less calorie every 10 minutes using tab completion compared to drag n drop? Please explain what you mean by 'more efficient'
Do I just need more practice?
I think you need a life and a more open mind. Not everyone uses computers to be "efficient." Do you measure the worth of everything you have or do in your life by it's efficiency? If you do then I feel sorry for you.
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.
Many window managers, few tools (Score:5, Insightful)
Err, no. I've used more window managers under various *nix systems over the years than I care to count including Openview, Motif, Openlook, DCE, fvwm2, blackbox, WindowMaker, KDE2, KDE3, and Gnome.
They all run fine if you shut off the extra eye candy, fade/slide effects, transparency, skinning images, etc.
There are no CD player docklets on my desktop, nor midi managers, MP3 rippers, or anything else that wants to periodically check to see if it needs to do anything. If I need it, I'll start the app required at that time.
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. Even WindowsXP has the same problem -- you have to shut all the junk off before it'll respond with any kind of speed.
As to memory requirements, I'll just point out that the window managers being compared don't include all the audio and internet hooks that KDE or Gnome do. Modern users expect those hooks, and they take space. Get over it.
Re:That's why (Score:5, Insightful)
Attitudes like this? The parent merely speculated about why one might make one choice (a full desktop) over another (a leaner window manager). I use Gnome and am not the least bit offended; I like the eye candy. You don't see attitudes like this in the Windows community only because there are no such choices. We simply do as Microsoft says.
A ton of registry hacking? (Score:4, Insightful)
Ye gods, I mean, most shells' installers even change the key for you!
Mind you, this is coming from someone who is using Litestep as a shell and a heavily modified command line as a file manager, but come on... no need to exaggerate what you just did. Maybe it is just because you were too "anti-Windoze" to realize that Windows is actually not nearly as difficult as you make it seem. Linux isn't that difficult either.
*(This is, of course, only for NT4/2000/XP - Under a 9x, you don't even open the registry to do it!)
Re:That's why (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:That's why (Score:5, Insightful)
I love Window Maker -- it's great, and i prefer it to GNOME or KDE any day...
However, for someone switching over to Linux from Windows, GNOME or KDE would be a better choice. It's much closer to what they are used to than Window Maker. They will be having to learn enough new things. KDE and Gnome still have their place. Personally, I like KDE, but that's just me.
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
Compared to Windows (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Compared to Windows (Score:4, Insightful)
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).
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: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: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.
Not my experience (Score:5, Funny)
A student approaches his master and asks him: Master, how come my 3GHz Hyperthreaded four processor system with 2Gb of RAM feels so slow, yet I never hear you complain about your old 386? Doesn't it run slower?
And the Master responds: A hare will think the grass is dead, while a turtle might see it grow. A penguin on the other hand, doesn't even know what grass is.
The student was immediately enlightened, went home and programmed a web server on his Commodore 64.
Stupid Apologists (Score:5, Insightful)
In light of the Windowes System Requirements, is this really that big?
Why does it matter what the requirements on the box say? KDE/GNOME are as slow or slower than windows when run on the same hardware! So the fact that windows has hich system requirements doesn't excuse the fact that Linux has higher ones.
But it isn't as heavy if you don't run those Desktops and applications.
That is not a fair comparison. It is easy to be lighter weight when you don't do as much.
If you need to do everthing that you can do in windows, then Linux is signifcantly slower (mostly footprint and loading time) than windows.
But Windows preloads thier applications.
That is a good argument for Mozilla vs. IE on windows, but in most cases is not valid. Like the submitter stated, even third party applications tend load quicker on windows that most linux applications do in windows. I have used Linux for years and I can't tell you how many times I have gotten tired of the slow responsiveness of KDE and GNOME and have reverted back to my old TWM (or even more lightweight) ways. Where-as on the same machine Windows 98 or 2000 were quite responsive (just not very usefull for what I was doing).
Secondly there is no reason that Linux could not preload common applications to make them run faster, and if that makes the system more responsive they should do so. But I really don't think that would completely solve the problem, it would just make the boot time longer, and boot for a Linux desktop is already longer than for Windows XP or OS X.
So basically it comes down to the fact that it is (relatively) easy to write full-featured software and it is easy to write light-wieght software but doing both is hard. Microsoft is doing a better job than the open source desktops in that regard.
Re:you are missing the point! (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:you are missing the point! (Score:5, Insightful)
On the other hand, desktop software still often uses less resources than Windows, and if it doesn't we have lesser pretty alternatives - old GNOMEs, fluxbox, etc etc.
Me, I prefer the midpoint of XFCE, as it is minimally bloated, but still quite pretty.
Well duh (Score:4, Insightful)
I haven't heard someone say they use Linux because it's somehow "lighter" since about 1997. The face of computing has changed, and the Linux distros have changed with it. More and more users are using Linux because it's getting more feature-rich. This is not a bad thing.
Re:Well duh (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Well duh (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Well duh (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm not looking to flame or troll, only looking for some objectivity.
Re:Well duh (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't think this definition is inherently unreasonable.
Re:Well duh (Score:5, Insightful)
The fact is that on my home machine, in Windows 2000, I have more free RAM and faster boot up times _with_ IE loaded (if nothing else as a desktop/file manager), than in KDE _without_ Konqueror loaded.
There are no two ways about it. KDE isn't "feature rich", it's a piece of badly-programmed bloatware. Even if you turned off all the "features", it's still more bloated, slower and less user-friendly than Windows with all of that turned on. (In fact, even than windows with 6 pieces of spyware of your choice.)
Note that so far I'm only talking about KDE, not about Linux in general. Yes, I know, you can run another dektop environment. I'm writing this in XFce myself, so, yeah, I know already.
The problem comes when you need to load any app that's based on KDE. Then all the bloated beast is loaded into RAM. Not only then there goes your machine's RAM, you also get to wait several extra seconds for all that KDE bloat to load. Not "features", but hundreds of megabytes of pure library bloat, which you can't turn off. Whoppee.
Now say a friend tells you to also run some Gnome program. Whether it's Gnomeeting, Evolution or whatever, it doesn't matter. You're now _also_ loading the Gnome libraries in memory, alongside the KDE ones which already were making your machine swap. Whoppe. The RAM and CPU manufacturers must be doing cartwheels for joy by now.
Now also add Mozilla and a few others who can't just be a browser or whatever, they also have to have _yet_ _another_ set of their very own GUI widgets and bloated libraries.
Then edit something in OOo. OOops, yet another case of its own libraries. It can't even freaking use the perfectly good font rendering of X, it just has to come with its own font directory and libraries. And manage to look _worse_ than X's font rendering. (To its defense, though, it's just as retarded under Windows too.)
Well, not to sound only negative, here's my constructive suggestion for the day: if you're going to advocate Linux, might as well get a profit out of it. Buy shares in some memory manufacturer
My experience is different (Score:5, Insightful)
... to put it mildly.
I see exactly the opposite, and so do my coworkers, who primarily use Windows. Starting a year or so ago, they've all been pushing hard to get us new laptops with 1GB of RAM, because the tools we use just don't fit in 512MB... on Windows. On Linux, I can run DB/2, Websphere Application Server and Websphere Application Developer in 512 MB without hitting swap... with swap *off* if I want to, whereas their machines with the same stuff running grind continually.
(Note: To run with swap off, I have to use a different Window Manager... KDE pushes me over the edge and into mild swapping -- nowhere near as bad as on Windows, however).
As far as the size of KDE, well here are my numbers: With Linux 2.6, X and blackbox running, my laptop (Debian unstable) consumes 28MB of RAM just after boot, excluding disk cache and kernel buffers. With KDE 3.2 instead of blackbox, that number rises to 114MB, and that includes a hidden Konqueror instance, a bunch of systray apps and one GNOME app. So KDE plus some GNOME consumes 86MB more than blackbox, which is a very minimal WM. That's a lot, but it's hardly "hundreds and hundreds" of MB. Starting openoffice pushes that up by another 20MB. Mozilla (full suite) is about 40MB.
Getting back to the Windows comparisons, with Linux and KDE, my system runs acceptably well with 128MB of RAM, swapping a bit, but not too badly. With Windows 2000 it's horrible with only 128MB. It boots up okay, but as soon as I start trying to run more than one app... ugh.
With 1GB (hey, I may not *need* the RAM like the Windows users, but I'm not going to turn it down!) in my new laptop, I never yet seen my box even touch the swapfile, even with KDE, Mozilla, OpenOffice, WS, WSAD and a couple of small GNOME apps running. After being up for a while, I always see nearly 100% of RAM in use, but that's because Linux uses it for disk cache, which is a good thing.
Meanwhile, my colleagues running Windows can push their 1GB machines into swap -- although it's difficult.
Since my basis for comparison is machines running a certain set of heavyweight development tools, it's possible that the difference isn't actually Linux/KDE vs Windows, but rather the implementation of those tools on the two platforms. However, since the bulk of the tools (and the part that consumes lots of RAM) is all implemented in Java, and therefore is the same code, it's hard to see how the tools could differ that much across the platforms.
So, I'm not saying you don't see what you see, but something is clearly different, because I see completely different behavior on both my Debian and my Gentoo systems (the Gentoo box consumes less RAM than the Debian boxes for the same set of running packages, at close to the same versins).
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:Well duh (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't use Linux desktop because it's lighter (at least not KDE & Gnome)... but I do still love the fact that I can have a fully up to date and function operating system on my old first generation pentiums with 64-120 Megs of RAM which act as firewalls/webservers/databases/fileservers and the like.
I hate that there's no current version of windows which can make those boxes usable to do anything.
Re:Well duh (Score:5, Insightful)
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...
Slackware (Score:5, Informative)
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!
Re:Windows XP v. KDE or Gnome (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Windows XP v. KDE or Gnome (Score:4, Insightful)
Another thing, if something "seems slow" to the user, then for all intensive purposes you might as well say "it is slow". If it gets the task done faster, but leaves the system unusable for 2 seconds, who cares? thats 2 seconds that you are forced into "serial mode" instead of a "parallel mode" of work.
You make a good point, I just don't think it can be a general statement.
Re:Windows XP v. KDE or Gnome (Score:5, Insightful)
Isn't that the point of a windows-based system?
>XFree86 seems slow because it renders the whole process poorly
So how isn't it slow? How does a display system just "appears" slow to the user, but it actually isn't?
>if you actually measure these things, XFree86 is faster.
And what measurement is that?
If it appears slow, why isn't it slow?
Re:Windows XP v. KDE or Gnome (Score:4, Insightful)
The only evaluation criteria of a GUI is user perception, not "number of widgets per second" or "number of window moves per second". User perception is notoriously hard to measure, however, so people tend to revert to the "number of X per second" style measurements. Such measurements are useless, unless they can be tied to user perception (such as "more widgets per second makes the system feel more responsive").
Re:Windows XP v. KDE or Gnome (Score:5, Insightful)
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:5, Insightful)
> when I'm in WinXP the system is a lot more fluid
> then in KDE or Gnome.
I did the KDE/Gnome thing for a while, until one day when I was dorking around with some opengl stuff and playing with some test apps.. I think at the point I noticed the problems with KDE or Gnome the most was when I was testing a physics library that's out there.
Under Gnome or KDE (default config, though under Gnome I did kill off as many services as I could) I would quite literally get 3-5 fps on a test app that was dropping blocks out of the air and bouncing them around. It was unusable. On a lark, I swapped to twm for a few minutes to see if the issue was my machine or the window manager.. instant 50 fps boost running the same program. I've now sworn away using KDE or Gnome, and settled on one of the "lightweight" managers out there.
I'm sorry, but if the desktop software is that inefficient then there's no way linux is ever going to improve its status.
no, they aren't (Score:5, Interesting)
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: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.
So? (Score:3, Insightful)
Those people that want mean, lean systems can install the distro they prefer. The commercial distros need to complete with other commercial operating systems, including Windows. So if they need an equivalent amount of memory, I have no problem with that.
I for one... (Score:4, Funny)
Fluxbox (Score:5, Insightful)
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
Re:Mainly the startup times... (Score:5, Insightful)
And why do you think that MS Word pops up instantly? Think about it - it's a large program split over multiple files, all of which have to be accessed before the program can be run.
Now consider how long it takes to open a New window in OpenOffice.org once it is loaded.
Finished thinking? Good.
At this point, you are hopefully at the right conclusion - MS Word is already mostly loaded when you clicked on it to run. Almost all MS apps preload large sections of the core functionality in a standard install to improve responsiveness once the system is up and running. Alas this approach is also taken by a load of other apps on Windows with the net result that even though the desktop in Windows XP pops up faster on boot than previous iterations of the Windows OS, it can often be a couple of minutes before the hard drive stops popping and thrashing and the system becomes quiescent (and usable).
Real start up times for apps are difficult to gauge even when they aren't preloaded. OpenOffice.org is a slow starter although it is leaps-and-bounds better in version 1.1 than it used to be when it was first released and I hope that the improvements in start time continue . That said, on days when I'm writing a lot of documentation, it gets loaded in the morning once and gets used all day without complaint. If I accidently shut it down, most of the files used are still in the linux file cache and restarting it is a matter of a couple of seconds of turn over.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
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
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.
Answer (Score:4, Funny)
True, but it is a fact of computer programming (Score:5, Insightful)
Sadly it used to be that you could run Linux on just about anything. I install all my servers with out any kind of X environment because it pigs up too much space. It is a pain too because RedHat automaticaly installs all sorts of crap that is unneeded, so I have to remove it after a generic install.
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
The point is... (Score:4, Insightful)
Linux has the Option (Score:4, Funny)
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.
KDE (Score:5, Insightful)
Is Linux less demanding than Windows? yes it is. If you want to, you can run the latest whiz-bang desktop from Gnome or KDE, and the performance will be roughy similar to Windows. Or you could use some lightweight UI, like Xfce. If you decide to run som graphics-heavy UI with lots of eye-candy, it's your choice, and you should expect it to be somewhat slower than some lightweight UI would be. But you have the choice.
I for one think that the progress of features and eye-candy should not be held back by that guy who still runs Linux on his 200MHz Pentium. If he wants to, he can keep on using the UI he currently uses, or switch to some lightweight UI. Or, heaven forbid: upgrade his machine! If you have the hardware, you should have the ability to put that processing-power to use by using some kick-ass UI with lots of eye-candy.
Sad but accurate (Score:5, Insightful)
He's right. It *is* a shame that Linux needs more memory and CPU power than XP, yet still feels slower. It's also more annoying, btw.. in the time I've been writing this response, Rhythmbox with the mp3 gstreamer plugin, playing an mp3 from a samba share, has dropped audio three times for a second or more. My coworkers laugh at me when they send me
Linux as a desktop os is bloated, slow and unreliable. As as Linux on the desktop advocate, I often feel like a vegetarian... sure, it's virtuous, but I'm stuck eating pasta and potatoes instead of lamb chops and meatball sandwiches.
I'm just not sure of the solution. The author of the article is a little bit glib when he says "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." Easy to say. Hard to do. I know the Gnome developers and the rest of the thousands of people working hard for little or no money on the OS collectively known as GNU/Linux are doing their best to pay attention to elegant design and careful coding. The problem is that as many voices as there are screaming for elegant design... there are as many voices screaming for mono, java, and other "next gen" development tools.
Don't worry (Score:5, Funny)
Missing the point (Score:5, Insightful)
There is a huge segment of the market with 64-128M PCs who don't want to be forced to upgrade their hardware just so as to run XP. If Linux could run responsively on that much memory, it could own that market. But instead, modern distros are too slow.
For this segment, Fluxbox, dillo etc. are not an option - they need the user friendliness of a proper desktop environment (help browsers, tooltips, proper word processors etc). KDE and Gnome could provide that - but they need to control the bloat.
To be fair, I hear KDE has improved a lot in this respect, and my mobile PII with 192M is reasonably nippy running Gnome and openoffice. So improvements will come.
But talking about the command line and fluxbox and all that is just irrelevant.
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.
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.
KDE / GNOME roots (Score:5, Insightful)
When I saw GNOME under development, I never thought to myself, "self, now that GNOME thing looks to speed things up". Never once did it even occur to me that all that PrettyFactor would be light on memory or CPU. Is the Linux Desktop getting heavier and slower? If you use GNOME or KDE or any other "user friendly" desktop environment, yes.
I've got a 486/66 at home running a mail / web / name / shell server. He's keeping up pretty well, but I must admit that console dselect takes a minute longer than I would prefer to start up. For his every day tasks, even keeping up with updates, it's more than enough-- so really, this is a question of the GUI end of things.
I wonder how well it would work to introduce one of those reviewers to a very well set up and themed tvtwm2 or whatnot. You know, without all the Kapps or Gapps. I bet the reviewer says it's snappy as a rubber band, but it doesn't do anything (most of those setups don't have any easy to find buttons, you have to click on a blank background to start anything). I think under that environment, Moz, OO, Wine, etc. work, but the plethora of free apps that make Linux interesting to the hobbyist seem to take advantage of the easy to use Glibs and Klibs. The reason for the "bloat" (i.e. heavier and slower) is the added functionality and eye candy.
You can take your lean and mean Linux Desktop, but don't expect it to run all the pretty apps nor expect it to have anti-aliasing and PrettyFactor3.0.
A big part of this (Score:4, Insightful)
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
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:speedup tips (Score:4, Informative)
Remember kids, the only thing that separates the experts from the idiots is that the experts actually RTFM.
Memory is Cheap (Score:4, Insightful)
What's the problem? RAM is cheap and fast. It's natural to see apps such as KDE and Gnome and the Windows GUI use more of it.
Also note that "Linux" is only a kernel... not an OS. Many on
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).
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.
Easy to Find Out (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Linux on Older PC's (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Linux on Older PC's (Score:5, Insightful)
TZ
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).
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Comment removed (Score:5, Funny)
Re:That's because you didn't properly tune it (Score:5, Insightful)
True, but then again they didn't do it for Windows either. Regular users don't care to dig that deeply into their system, they expect it will simply work. If it doesn't work at least as well as Windows out-of-the-box, well then there is another Windows user.
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.
Re:This is a good thing... (Score:4, Insightful)
Since when? I can't think of anything that makes that a rule. Sure, CPU-intensive applications won't work on old, slow machines (what makes them "crappy" btw?), but why is it that programs which don't have any more features than their predicessors need to waste several orders of magnitude more RAM and CPU power?
What does Mozilla do that Netscape 3 didn't? What is it doing with all that CPU power? Dillo isn't fully developed yet, but it's well on track to get all the features a browser needs, all while being incredibly easy on resources.
What is it that Evolution, KMail, and Mozilla-mail and all the rest need all the massive resources for? Sylpheed does practically everything a MUA could need to do, all while using a fraction of the resources of the more popular ones.
Why is it that OpenOffice needs massive ammounts of RAM and CPU power? Abiword uses practically no resources by comparison, yet it has many of the same features. Sure, it's not done yet, but how could 25% more features mean a program that takes 1000X as long to start-up?
Nobody is complaining that they can't play-back Divx video on their 100MHz system... Everyone is complaining that many programs have massively high resource requirements FOR NO REASON AT ALL. It's not as if GNOME is now made up of full motion video, animated graphics, etc. It's doing all the same things it was doing years ago, yet it's taking more resources to do all the same things...