RE: Goals for 2.10 - desktop-wide profiling

["Eugenia Loli-Queru" <eloli hotmail com>]

> 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,

I am with you on this one Maciej. Currently, Gnome is marginally usable on 
128 MBs for basic tasks (if you have to have OOo, web browser or Evolution 
open it is not usable). I know first hand, one of my machines had 128 MBs of 
RAM and it was /just/ loadable, while Fedora really needs 192+ MBs, even if 
at this time XP still requires 128 MB and Win98 64 MB (sure, Fedora is newer 
than these OSes, but that doesn't mean that they don't still compete in the 
corporate space).

And some GTK+ speed profiling wouldn't hurt either. Gnome-applets are using 
lots of memory too. All these issues are very common discussed on forums by 
gnome users, I think it's time the gnome core devs to listen and be 
realistic about it and start profiling.

There was a time where the Linux desktop (with KDE/Gnome, in 1999) was 
pitched as "lightweight" compared to Windows 2000 and Win98/ME. But this is 
not the case anymore for the last 2+ years and the Linux corporate desktop 
could be gaining advantages if KDE/Gnome were more optimized.

> Perhaps this would be assisted by establishing a performance or 
> optimisation team...

That's an excellent idea Jeff. :)

Rgds,
Eugenia

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