On Thursday 26 May 2011 05:50:14 Walter Dnes wrote:
> On Wed, May 25, 2011 at 07:13:41PM +0200, Volker Armin Hemmann wrote
> 
> > On Wednesday 25 May 2011 08:46:48 Indi wrote:
> > 
> > and have you ever heard of 'code reuse' or 'modularity'?
> > 
> > It seems - no.
> > 
> > Because KDE itself might be huge. But once loaded the apps are pretty
> > small - because they reuse code. kmail does not have its own html
> > engine. It does not matter where you type your text etc pp.
> 
>   Sorta like Internet Explorer in Windows.  It "loads" a lot faster and
> lighter than Firefox or Opera.  That's because ie.exe is merely a "front
> end" to a bunch of libraries that are loaded at boot time, which
> contributes to the boot process taking do long.  Starting ie.exe takes
> hardly any time, because 90% of the app is already loaded.
> 
> > Overall KDE uses LESS ram then most 'lightweight' solutions. Because
> > xterm&abiword&some odd pager&thunderbird don't look so good anymore.
> > 
> > This gem is a couple of years old, but still a worthy read:
> > 
> > http://ktown.kde.org/~seli/memory/desktop_benchmark.html
> > 
> > 
> > Read it. Seriously.
> 
>   I don't know how good "exmap" is, but my personal experience is quite
> different.  Between Fall 1999 and Summer 2007 I had a Dell Dimension
> with a 450 mhz PIII and 128 megs of *SYSTEM RAM* (no not the video card).
> It was actually quite usable to the very end, with Blackbox WM, and
> running a few apps.  Meanwhile, KDE (and GNOME for that matter) would
> take forever to load and make the system crawl after that, even with 1
> or 2 apps loaded.

I remember running Slackware on a Pentium 1 100MHz laptop with 128M RAM.  The 
speed was of course glacial unless I was running only a console with no X.  
KDE would load and run, as long as I didn't push it too much.  Fluxbox was 
more respectable.

In contrast, MSWindows NT4 would load and run better as it was a more light-
footed OS.  MSWindows 3.1 was blisteringly fast and MSDOS, well ...

However, life moves on and with the cost of hardware coming down software has 
moved towards larger, all bells and whistles, DEs.  The change in design 
philosophy from KDE3 to KDE4 made things worse for those of us who do not want 
everything and the kitchen sink thrown in, but still want to use some KDE 
apps.

Thankfully, the move to the KDE meta ebuilds has provided some compensation 
against a full blown monolithic KDE.

Personally, I'm grateful that Linux devs continue to develop exceptional 
software and so I don't have to use MSWindows.  On the other hand I have 
always preferred more lightweight WMs to the full enchilada of KDE and Gnome 
and wish that KDE devs retained the KDE3 design philosophy, or afforded us a 
light(er) option.

PS.  I'm not sure that Linus is using Gnome.  I recall him bitching that the 
Gnome design approach (which unfortunately KDE imitated) was not the right 
direction to evolve linux in.
-- 
Regards,
Mick