Re: Gnome 2.14 Module Proposal: Deskbar Applet

[Eric Larson <elarson novell com>]

On Fri, 2005-10-28 at 00:29 +0800, Davyd Madeley wrote:
> On Thu, 2005-10-27 at 11:05 +0200, Beno�Dejean wrote:
> 
> > come on : open gnome-system-monitor / top and sort by resident memory
> > usage :)
> 
> Quite simply. We do, and we don't care.
> 
> There are some things that are so incredibly cool and featureful, that
> perhaps we just have to take the memory hit. If you want to run an
> operating system written in 1995, please feel free. 10 years on, perhaps
> we can afford to spend a little bit of memory to get some really kick
> arse features.


One thing to consider is that this might make for a good experiment to
see how this affects GNOME's user base. It might be worth it to include
the applet and see what kind of response there is. It might be
worthwhile to consider adding a "beta" module to gnome that lets users
try the coolest new features of GNOME and let them comment on their
thoughts. 

My point here is that keeping memory usage and performance at a
reasonable level is important, but only in within the scope of a user's
experience. Saying 22 Mb of memory is too much because it is 22 Mb
doesn't make sense. Saying 22 Mb is too much because most users average
256 Mb of memory and run OO.o along with firefox and evolution, making
paging to the disk consistent is a much more powerful argument. Of
course there is no way to test this or get these statistics but it would
make sense to have a census of sorts to count what our averages really
are. 

Specifically with the deskbar applet, I think the fact that it is only
an applet that is not required, makes it an excellent candidate to
include as a beta for users to see what the response is. 

Eric