Linux needs a diet?

Deebster · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 16 Nov 2003 Posts: 126

Interesting article from OS news:

nahpets · Posted: Sun Jun 13, 2004 6:52 am Post subject:

I'm not so sure about this article. I have dual boot on my machine and I find WinXP takes a long time to log in a user cause it has to load all sorts of apps on startup (antivirus, windows update, etc).

I find that in general, my system runs then same in WinXP or KDE. My "feeling" is that Linux runs smoother when I have lots of apps open, which is probably due to superior mem management.

placeholder · Advocate Joined: 07 Feb 2004 Posts: 2500

The person that wrote that might have used Linux for a while, but obviously isn't aware that there is a lot more than Red Hat out there and Linux runs nice on older machines. I mean, since when was 192mb of RAM a lot? :roll:

I suppose I just really can't see the point.

superjaded · l33t Joined: 05 Jul 2002 Posts: 802

Heh, Fedora Core comes with GNOME 2.6 by default, does it not? That easily gobbles up 100-200mb of ram so, yeah, 256mb is probably a minimum if you plan on doing anything at all with the platform.

I'm sure KDE3 is about the same, although I haven't played with the environment enough to really be able to get a grasp on its memory usage.

But saying "Linux" needs a diet is just silly. If Linux is bloated because of userspace programs such as GNOME or Evolution, then so is every other *nix that runs these programs.

And comparing GNOME 2.6 to BeOS is just unfair. Be died like, what, two years ago? A year or so after the release of BeOS5 PE? True, BeOS was quite responsive for what little I've used it, but that's the point -- there was very little I could do with it. I remember having a GeForce card of some sort and I couldn't even get drivers for that (obviously).

Actually.. I'm mistaken, doing a little research, I found out about an article on pcworld about FreeBe dated 04/10/2000! Why the hell is this guy comparing a four year old OS (as good as it could have been) to the release of a DE that has only been out a few months? I always thought it was a given that things get larger as they go on, not smaller.

And I definitely don't think XP is usable with 128mb of ram, especially if he hasn't tweaked it at all to get rid of unneeded services or eyecandy. That's no different from using a WM instead of a fullblown DE.

Deebster · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 16 Nov 2003 Posts: 126

playfool · Posted: Sun Jun 13, 2004 9:08 am Post subject:

Well looking at Microsoft's technical solution to those problems, namely tying the kernel and userland tightly together, with all the security risks and ugly hacks that brings with it I must say I prefer using a bit more ram here and there.

Anyways, people are actively profiling GNOME and KDE to find performance bottlenecks, and there's an effort to make valgrind able to test the kernel (I dunno how they plan to do that though).

But yeah we use a bit more ram if you use a big DE like GNOME and KDE, but with that comes the option to replace your webbrowser, use whatever office suit you like. Replace the office suit on Windows and it will be dogslow as well, because of the way Microsoft designs their stuff..

Anyways, RAM is cheap, security and good design isn't.

tomk · Posted: Sun Jun 13, 2004 9:22 am Post subject:

Moved from Off The Wall, please see this topic:

https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=184039
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