Minimum specs, "funky" defaults, and old machinery

[Telsa Gwynne <hobbit aloss ukuu org uk>]

My rambles about deskguide and tasklist in the panel reminded me of
something else which I thought should be separate from that reply.

What minimum specs are people here assuming Gnome will run on? 
I would love to know what people develop and test on. 

I have whinged about thumbnails being on by default before, particularly
on IRC. But people don't seem to care. "It makes no difference on my
computer". 

So here's the current 1.2 FAQ entry, which is pretty much the same as the
FAQ for 1.0, and which I think requires updating for 1.4: 

   Q: What are the basic system requirements if I want to use GNOME?

   A: A computer running one of the flavours of UNIX, Linux, *BSD and so
   on listed above, which is also capable of running the X Window System.
   You can get by with 16Mb of RAM, but 32Mb is much much nicer and
   probably what most people would consider a minimum now. Many people
   like more. As for space on the hard drive: you will certainly need at
   least 30Mb to install core binaries. If you want to compile the
   sources yourself, you're looking at 200Mb.

(http://www.gnome.org/faqs/users-faq/installing.html)

This is clearly a lie these days. I am running the beta on a couple of
machines with specs from pentium-III/500Mhz/128megs to a Cyrix MediaGX
("almost a pentium")233MHz//32Mbs.

Nautilus appears a little slow on the fast box (that's my laptop) to 
the extent I haven't dared try it on the Cyrix, the machine which 
inspired the "How to speed Gnome up" section in the FAQ and on which
I use windowmaker with no bells and whistles, no file manager, no 
pixmap themes, no transparent gnome-terminals, etc etc, blah blah blah.
And definitely no thumbnails on the deskguide. I don't run Netscape on
it, I don't install the Gimp on it, and for a laugh I tried Mozilla once
and it stopped being funny rapidly. Lest anyone think I'm picking on
Nautilus, I'll add that I tried evolution on this box, too. It is not
an experience that makes me think my mail-reading will be enhanced on
a slow machine when I was used to a console client before. 

And here's what happens on my Cyrix when I look at top and that deskguide.

One workspace, two plain gnome-terminals, so little else running that
in a 80x50 terminal top doesn't reach the bottom. Start top, let things
settle down.

deskguide is eating 0.3% CPU. Perfectly respectable. 

Set deskguide to do thumbnails. Takes a minute or so for the thumbnails
(by design, I understand that) to draw. All the time, deskguide is now
4.something% of CPU. Ugh. Okay.

Leave things to settle down. Watch top. Still 4.x% of CPU for deskguide.
Wait for ten minutes. Only once in that time, with -nothing else going on
but top-, does deskguide drop to 3.9%. The rest of the time it's 4 
something. 

Eventually remove thumbnails. top drops down to showing 0.x% again for
deskguide's cpu usage. Almost immediately. (Memory usage is similar, but
people will only start lecturing me about RSS and Share and stuff so I
am not getting into that: I'll just say I watched RSS, Share, mem %age 
and Size all double, basically.)

I have a good idea of what that Cyrix "feels like", and to see deskguide
using as much effort as my window manager and more than gnome-terminals
by default strikes me as stupid.

I suggest either thumbnails should not be on by default, or we should
admit that Gnome is no longer intended for "that second computer which
has been resurrected to test this Linux thing on" and that you now
need specs greater than the machine my sister still runs Win 3.1 on. 
(She recently upgraded that to 16megs.)

I would also like very much to know what "anything running X with at
least 16megs" should be changed to -- and who else is actually using
Gnome (productively, not "oh it seems to run. Okay, fine." on machines 
like this. 

Telsa