Re: desktop mem usage [was Re: Candidacy - Alan Cox]

[Bastien Nocera <hadess hadess net>]

Linas Vepstas wrote:

> On Tue, Nov 06, 2001 at 10:41:37AM -0500, Havoc Pennington was heard to remark:
>
> > I don't think it's actually that hard, and to be really snappy on good
> > hardware you have to be usable on bad hardware. 
>
> Hmm. Maybe I spoke too soon. Maybe I need to reflect this back to 
> Alan Cox.  3-4 years ago, I was running gnome-1.0 on a p-166 w/64meg 
> ram (doing development & other things) and performance was acceptable 
> (in fact, it was 2x faster than win95 on the same machine, which... 
> well, I'm not a poet, but it calls for some superlative that embodies 
> a whole rainbow of emotions and feelings.)
>
> Is gnome-1.4 worse, or about the same?  I mean the core of the panel
> loaded with some 'typical' applets & sawmill?  Can I then load up
> one copy of evolution and a copy of galleon and a copy of abiword
> without mollases'ing the system?  I dunno, I haven't tried.  Its hard to 
> be objective after living with a fast system, but, is it still zippier
> than win95?    If the answer is 'yes', then my apologies for my
> alarmist chime-in on alan's remark.


I used for about a year Gnome 1.2 on a G3 233 with 32 megs, and it was 
quite sluggish (but somewhat usable). Added quite a fair bit of RAM 
(don't remember if it was 64 or 128 megs), and it became much much 
better. I reckon that these days Gnome 1.4 is usable on a 300 -> 500 MHz 
class computer with over 64 megs of RAM.

De-bloating is a good idea for a bunch of applications, but you can't 
expect a full-fledge desktop to run nicely on a very slow machine.

XFCE for example is a nice desktop to run on this kind of machine, and 
using small applications instead of the bigger ones is a pretty good 
solution (for example, encompass instead of galeon, gnomecal and balsa 
instead of evolution...)

Unix systems like RAM... that's a fact.

Cheers