Goals for 2.10 - desktop-wide profiling

[Maciej Katafiasz <mnews22 wp pl>]

Hi hackers,

Now that 2.8 is out, it's time to set off for 2.10 goals. One of the
issues I'd particularly like to see addressed is current GNOME's
unfriendliness towards low-mem setups[1]. There are still very common[2]
machines with 128MB or 64MB of RAM, especially in corporate
environments. It's a shame they cannot be used to host GNOME,
particularly given very near end-of-life for Win98 and NT which are
currently run on most of them, pushing companies into search of future
paths. For such installations, not having to upgrade entire machines
base is very significant factor when considering possible migration
paths, and many companies are indeed evaluating possibilities of moving
to open source solution. It's great chance for advancement of FLOSS
deployments, and one that won't happen again very soon[3].

So, getting to the point, what I'd absolutely love seeing done in 2.10
timeframe is desktop-wide, coordinated effort to profile and optimize
entire GNOME, so that 450MHz w/ 64MB scenario becomes reasonable[4] to
run GNOME on. First part, ie. 450Mhz is very well fulfilled today,
running even on something like 300Mhz isn't big deal. 64MB, OTOH, is
nowhere near even imaginable. Getting it to the point where it's doable,
and keeping that through subsequent releases would rock even harder than
spatial Nautilus[5]. 

Let's do it, and kick some low-end asses out there!

Cheers,
Maciej

[1] Honestly, it's proactive hostility rather than simple lack of
friendliness
[2] Like, say, my sisters' machine with 64MB which I'd totally love to
install GNOME on, but which currently runs shitty unmaintainable Win98,
because there's no other choice for desktop for non-technical user on
this class of machines
[3] And really, corporate desktops or not, it still sucks incredibly
badly not to be able to replace Win98 with GNOME on my sisters'
computer. I mean it
[4] Where "reasonable" is defined as "it's possible to perform usual
office-type work on it, without excessive intensity, but without
serializing everything into only-one-window-open-at-a-time either"
[5] As even so much rocking software as Nautilus is doesn't rock very
much when you can't use it :-\

-- 
"Tautologizm to coś tautologicznego"
   Maciej Katafiasz <mnews2 wp pl>
       http://mathrick.blog.pl