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Post by **windhound** » Fri Jun 17, 2005 12:08 am

aah.. true.. not much runs on less than 400mhz now..

sh0e · Post by **sh0e** » Fri Jun 17, 2005 12:15 am

im still running stuff on less than 200mhz over here
youre hurting my feelings.

Post by **The Beatles** » Fri Jun 17, 2005 1:16 am

I'd just like to say that I'm running Knoppix fine on 64 MB and 233 MHz. True, X was flickery, but I reniced it to -19 and it's fine. Also, I generally use galeon instead of firefox.

Post by **windhound** » Fri Jun 17, 2005 1:54 am

200mhz machines are now, what, almost 10 years out of date..
go on ebay and get yerself a decent box for fairly cheap...

I've got a P 133mhz laptop, and while it works great for wordprocessing and prehaps internet if you use dialup on an external modem.. if thats all you use a 'puter for that works I 'spose...

Post by **Devari** » Fri Jun 17, 2005 2:53 am

Knoppix runs slow on my old 400 MHz/192 MB box... Of course, I guess it runs slow on anything that doesn't have 2 GB.

But, as a side note, you can easily run linux on a 233 MHz/64 MB box - I have one. X and company aren't great on there, but it would make a fine server.

Post by **The Beatles** » Fri Jun 17, 2005 3:22 am

Mine's an AMD if it makes any difference. And yeah, you can't run too much, but yes you can run small useful apps fine. ROX-filer, icewm, galeon, pico, kppp, etc.

Post by **windhound** » Fri Jun 17, 2005 3:35 am

just from reviews, current AMD chips are supposed to be quite a bit better than Intel's P4 line..
I've got a Pentium M 1.7ghz in my current laptop.. she's faast.. and now that I've got 3D acceleration my graphics card works in linux too.. yay for yum and livna.org...

edit: and I 'spose I should have said not much /new/ stuff will work on less than 400mhz.. Windows XP barely runs, Fedora as well.. Knoppix works alright I 'spose..

Post by **The Beatles** » Fri Jun 17, 2005 3:51 am

When you consider that someone released Linux on a floppy, with X, then you realize it /is/ possible to have a kernel, shell, graphical server, window manager, browser, and email client on an uncompressed floppy, taking up 1.2 megabytes of space; or MenuetOS which is more unconventional but also radical, then you realize that we are running a lot of bloat.
Consider that a single GTK paint requires so much overhead it's not even funny. First the OS will probably interrupt it a few times and context switch it. Next it will look at your current theme and invoke that (in a sandbox, of course! and the theme itself will probably mess about with images so many times). It's memory protected, so all memory access times are doubled. It has to create messages and pass them to your X server. That parses it and contacts your graphics driver, which writes to your frame-buffer. And I didn't mention all the behind-the-scenes work done by GTK, the tons of system calls, the /tremendous/ overhead of validity and sanity checking, buffer overflow checking, bounds checking, memory mapping overhead, useless stack variables because of it's written in a high-level language (that is, C or C++, and don't get me started on C++), the X routines that protect users from each other and that protect the user from rogue X applications, the fact that your window manager is notified.... I could go on....

And yet it happens faster than you snap your fingers. Imagine how it could run if components of the system were closer to each other and we had a chain of trust amongst code portions, no useless stack variables, and.... I could also go on....

Still, it works.

[edit]typo and addendum about C++

Post by **windhound** » Fri Jun 17, 2005 4:21 am

but with 300+ gig hdds being made for reasonably cheap, most people arnt worrying about the size of the OS.. and with 2-3+ ghz processors beginning to become standard in PCs processor usage isnt as big of a deal either..

(most) people like flashy OS's that do things easily, even if inefficently.. (the exceptions being Gentoo users =-P)

though if there is one thing that both Gnome and KDE need to do is reduce reasource hogging.. Gnome /idled/ at 35% of my cpu.. I had the xfce panel running in gnome with the cpu graph on and I thought it was making a mistake.. but nope.. (xfce idles between 0-7%)

btw, what do Gnome and KDE do that make them that much clunkier than others like XFCE, Fluxbox etc? they just feel heavy when they run.. heavier than even a properly tuned windows xp system...
Nautilus does the automount (atleast for Gnome) and I've got that running in xfce now..

but eh, for a Free OS I'm quite happy with it.. =-D

Post by **The Beatles** » Fri Jun 17, 2005 4:54 am

It's not just disk space being wasted, but CPU time and main memory. Gentoo users btw use /more/ disk space, as CPU optimizations often cost in program size.

Post by **Devari** » Fri Jun 17, 2005 4:56 am

Windows also tends to idle at rather high amounts - and my partition is spyware/virus free!

GNOME is just kind of sucky, I guess. I'm not sure why it consumes so many resources. KDE is "heavy" because of a tradeoff. It wants you to use its applications, and has reusable things called KParts in memory. K applications will run MUCH faster in KDE; it is meant to be practically all you need aside from the Kernel, bash, and some assorted tools. If you want to use primarily non-K applications, XFCE is probably best. K applications run not near as well there, though.

GNOME idling that high... Are you sure? GNOME is clunky, but not THAT bad.

As for me, I rank them as:

1. XFCE
2. KDE (Not too far behind - I love many K applications)
3. GNOME (Distant!)

[edit] CPU usage and memory usage are FAR more important, in my opinion. Disk space can be cheaply upgraded; memory and CPU (especially) can cost a considerable amount more.

Post by **The Beatles** » Fri Jun 17, 2005 3:16 pm

Did you know that XFCE can be configured to start KDE services at startup (I think it's under Session) so that your K apps run as fast? And it's still overall faster than KDE alone. xfce4-panel is much lighter than kicker.

sh0e · Post by **sh0e** » Fri Jun 17, 2005 3:48 pm

(albeit way back in the day with linux from scratch) i had nothing but pure gtk apps and blackbox.. it was far faster than gnome and kde
both of which i could not stand

Post by **The Beatles** » Fri Jun 17, 2005 4:06 pm

fluxbox is alright, but I love my nice XFCE features. Being able to drag windows from one pager desktop to another is always fun.

Post by **windhound** » Fri Jun 17, 2005 5:55 pm

and being able to ram windows into the side of the screen to get it over one workspace is spiffy.. and if you maximize a window, you can still grab and resize it.. (whereas in about everything else you have to click 'unmaximise' or whatever to beable to change its size..
the panel is extremely nice as well..
xfce is quite nice.. and Fedora + Yum gave me my dependencies (even though it didnt come packaged anymore

) so that it installed easliy..

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