Re: the same page

[Dick Porter <dick ximian com>]

On Thu, Dec 20, 2001 at 03:05:18AM -0800, Seth Nickell wrote:
> > Theres no reason that gnome 2 (or 3 or 4 or 5) cant include both the bloatware
> > eyecandy for the yanks with loads of cash and GHz athlons,  and also sane
> > alternatives for the rest of the world.  For example, nautilus is very
> > pretty, but gmc will do the job if you run an "obsolete" machine.
> 
> And that's just great, except that gmc has serious usability problems.

Theres nothing wrong with gmc that cant be fixed, given the will to do it.

> In most circumstances it fails to be useful both to hackers who like
> lots of powerful features and/or the shell (and won't be using Nautilus
> either in all probability) and is simultaneously too obscure and hard to
> use for novices. IMO, gmc was the worst piece of the GNOME desktop and
> desperately needed to be replaced.

... but in the event it can't be fixed, we should replace it with a
similarly frugal alternative.

> 
> Also, there's a lot more slowing these systems down than the "eyecandy".

[ Summary: lots of useful code abstraction has a performance penalty ]

> slow things down. All sorts of useful techniques like signals,
> components, and libraries have associated performance penalties. Most of
> GNOME's "performance problems" stem from a layer effect rather than
> flashy features and graphics.

Flashy features and graphics arent the only problem.  I just picked on
nautilus because its the obvious example of a huge step up in system
requirements (granted its also a huge improvement in features).

> 
> A lot of slowness can also come from subtle issues. Getting the last 15%
> can indeed be a costly endeavor. For example, GTK2 will be doubled
> buffered which will (probably) have an increased memory load; or the use
> of anti-aliased fonts is going to slow things down some. Want a system
> without those things? Sure: use GNOME 1.2.

Wrong answer.  It should be possible to configure GNOME 2 to not do
double buffering and anti-aliased fonts.  I'm not suggesting we get all these
nice new features for free, or that those of us with large wads of cash
should forgo them.

> 
> Of course, GNOME could be a lot faster and many of these layers aren't
> as optimized as we'd like. Bonobo has seen a lot of substantial
> performance fixes. Sure it would have been nice if these were fixed in
> the first place, but a lot of things only come to the surface with use.

One point that I forgot to make just now is that a GNOME 2 that runs
acceptably on a P-200 with 32M of RAM will be blazingly fast on a GHz box.
The optimisation work certainly wont be wasted effort.

> > 
> > New releases fix bugs, provide new features of used applications, and
> 
> Bugfixes is a reasonable argument. At some point these "new features"
> are going to cost something. When is the right time to add
> anti-aliasing? When is the right time to add good i18n (probably very
> important to those villages in Nepal!)? When is the right time to add a
> virtual filesystem?

Adding these good features to the codebase doesnt meant that they should be
used all of the time by every user.  And when they are disabled they should
not cause the rest of the system to bog down.

> 
> > generally say that we care about accessibility to the less well off as well
> > as to the physically disabled.  Think 3rd world projects to provide IT to
> > Nepalese villages, for example.  They will often be running on 2nd hand
> > cast-off hardware: if GNOME is too bloated, then they wont be using it and
> > we lose out on a whole market share.
> 
> Or they'll use XFCE or an older version of KDE or GNOME. There is also a
> worthwhile distinction between free software and a company. Companies
> *have* to find markets, even small ones if they are going to survive. A
> lot of times this is a compromise and means they won't be able to get
> the whole enchilada. How many contenders to Microsoft have eventually
> been relegated to niche markets and then eventually fade away? 
> 
> Do you think they just happen to hang on to that niche market? I bet a
> lot of times they realize that they aren't going to get the whole market
> given x sales, y development costs and z cash reserves and change their
> focus to "suriving" instead. I'm interested in gunning for the big
> picture, maybe capturing strategic small markets as they align well with
> our talents and product (for example, 3D graphics and CAD might be a
> market that aligns well with GNOME for historical and practical
> reasons). 

Frankly, the market of ex-windows users (or 3d graphics and CAD users) is
totally insignificant compared to the market of people that have never used
a computer before.  Bearing this in mind, and the fact that the evidence
seems to be that once someone has chosen a particular system they are
very unlikely to change to a different one, GNOME as a project should aim
to be that first choice.  With the reality that the wealthy parts of the
world have made their choice, and the poor parts havent, then it seems
obvious (to me at least :) ) where we should be going.

> 
> The reason that I believe focusing on being the low budget alternative
> is the wrong approach is that you're setting yourself up to be destroyed
> by a natural tendency. Hardware is, on average, getting faster than
> slower. Those 2nd hand cast-offs the Nepalese village gets in two or
> three years will be a lot faster than the machines they got today. If
> we're not growing and expanding to use that power they will look at
> GNOME and say "wow, that's primitive compared to FoobarOS 2004". 

I don't think the hardware upgrade rate is going to be that fast.  There
are many times more people without computers than with, so if the agencies
distributing these cast offs do their jobs right then the donations will be
spread thinly rather than upgraded often.

And note than I am emphatically _not_ saying that we shouldnt exploit new
hardware power.  What I _am_ saying is that we shouldn't insist on it, but
that we should just use it if available.

> 
> The marked exception to this is when something is prohibitively
> expensive for a *large* market, that is to say that something is
> relegated to niche status because of its cost. An example of this would
> be the Macintosh vs. the Xerox Alto. But here's the thing... operating
> systems don't comprise enough of the cost of the machine for them to be
> the prohibitively expensive element at this point.

Thats not the case for the free(ish) cast-offs we were talking about just
now.

> GNOME being free and running on old hardware would not open up a market
> that's even nearly as large as the market Microsoft and Apple are
> targeting today.

My assertion is that the old hardware market is huge.

> 
> Why did Cyrix get screwed? Why didn't AMD? I think a big reason was that
> AMD realized they needed to push forward as well as down on prices. If
> you're not pushing forward, you won't have anything to show when the
> "time is right". The way technology tends to work, one of the best ways
> to push prices down is to push forward. Weird, but tends to be true. 

Hardware is slightly different:  Faster hardware makes fast software run
faster (obviously), or slow software run acceptably.  I'm arguing that
GNOME 2 should be configurable to run acceptably on slow hardware, which
means that it will be fantastic on fast hardware (or have all the bells
and whistles turned on and be acceptable on fast hardware.)


- Dick

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