Could the greatest desktop environment be a free one?

[piratePenguin]

I've been a gnome lover for a long time ('lover' is a bit deep, I've just stuck to it because it lets me do my work and it comes with ubuntu, and in years I've had no problems), but I've always had a huge appreciation for both the gnome and kde desktop environments and I think anyone who says their copresence in the GNU/Linux world is degenerative just doesn't get it.

Anyhow. KDE 4.4 was released recently - I still havent used it (it is a lot of effort to try; I pretty much consider switching DE almost equivalent to switching OS (and I would install kubuntu even if I dont need to), but it looks like it's time to do this)

http://kde.org/announcements/4.4/ They're polishing up (KDE 4 needed it the last time I was using it) while innovating away. Seems like a serious desktop to me. They also now have a netbook edition which seems particularly impressive. (since I use an eee pc I will probably use this)
http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=kde+netbook&page=&utm_source=opensearch

OS X has been the DE to beat* and maybe KDE has upped the ante? Startin to look like it.


* hugely subjective; but in any case OS X has an advanced (from a technical point of view but Im not sure about this from a power user pointof view) and polished interface, gnome has a simple interface that does its job good, and kde has a powerful and sexy interface that is coming together

[worker201]

KDE has looked better than gnome for a long time now.  For now, I just can't imagine anything being as awesome as OSX.  I guess I'd have to use it for a week or so to know for sure.  And that isn't likely to be happening anytime soon.

[Aloone_Jonez]

KDE also hogs more resources which is bad for people with older computers.

I'm an XFCE fan myself.

[Lead Head]

Last time I used KDE it was indeed very bloated and quite a hog. I hope the 4.x versions are bucking that trend a bit.

[adiment]

I know ram is cheap is these days but as far as KDE 4's resource usage goes, its on par with vista. 560mb idle? I only have 1gb of ram. 

I do like KDE4 looks though and it runs very smooth.

Right now I'm using a very modded gnome, but looking into Openbox or XFCE. Looks are still important to me though.

[Aloone_Jonez]

560MB is over half your memory gone which is a hell of a lot.

A lot depends on what divers are loaded. If I remember rightly XP Home in safe mode uses around 70MB on a 512MB system but it's as slow as hell because there's no accelerated graphics and crappy generic drivers.

XP gnerally uses around 110MB of RAM without AV or a 3rd party firewall running.

I've recently upgraded my motherboard to an Asus A8N-VM CSM which has a NVIDIA chipset with hardware firewall and it uses just under 200MB with the drivers loaded, not that it's a problem as I have 1GB of RAM.

Fedora Core 12 with XFCE running uses around 120MB of RAM when idle.

[worker201]

I've never actually researched this, or collected any cold hard evidence, but it has always seemed to me that Windows XP (and possibly other OSes) scales its resource usage to system availability.  Meaning that it will use 20% of RAM, whether you have 512MB or 4GB available.  (Maybe not so much use, more like set aside for itself.)  My one and only piece of evidence for this is that when using a fat computer (dual Xeons, for example), processor-heavy tasks are noticeably faster, but everyday OS tasks (copy, paste, drag, context menus, etc) are not.  There's probably an upper limit to how much it will use.

But again, I can't confirm any of this.

[Aloone_Jonez]

I haven't found that to be the case.

It's true that XP uses less memory when you have under 128MB, in my experience it doesn't use any more when you have more memory. For example, I upgraded from 256MB to 512MB and the amount of free memory seemed to stay constant. When I upgraded the motherboard, performed a repair install, it used a bit more memory (probably around 120MB and this was with 1GB of RAM) because of the different drivers and repair enabled some services I'd previously disabled. I only noticed it using more memory after I'd installed NVIDIA ForceWare (a hardware firewall), at first I thought I had a virus, then I realised what it was.

If you have other programs running, (e.g. 3rd party firewall, AV and even OpenOffice quickstarter) they probably will use more memory if you have it because it can make them faster.

[worker201]

Yeah, I suppose it's difficult to figure out.  So many programs run as services or agents or residents that it is a chore to even put the computer in idle.  And a user with more resources is going to be less concerned about resource consumption -> allowing those residents and agents to set up shop in the system tray.

[Calum]

I've got an IBM M50. XP runs on it moderately slowly (but bearably) and XFCE4 runs on it under various ubuntu systems, at about the same speed. It's pretty pathetic actually, linux has become the bloatware it promised never to become. I can't run GNOME or KDE on this, and haven't been able to for years.

[Aloone_Jonez]

I've got an IBM M50. XP runs on it moderately slowly (but bearably) and XFCE4 runs on it under various ubuntu systems, at about the same speed. It's pretty pathetic actually, linux has become the bloatware it promised never to become. I can't run GNOME or KDE on this, and haven't been able to for years.

I Googled and found that it only has 256MB RAM which I think is the problem.
http://compreviews.about.com/cs/desktops/gr/aaprIBMTCentM50.htm

I was happy with 256MB (minus 8MB for on-board) graphics until abut three months ago when I upgraded to my brother's old graphics card, then I saw a 256MB module on ebay for £1 so bought that too.

That machine lasted me for another two months until I got my brother's old PC which has 1GB of RAM, I was going to upgrade to 4GB but I decided not to bother as I rarely use the full 1GB as it is.

Your hard drive might need upgrading to SATA, although the spec' I found says it's 7200rpm  so it shouldn't be too bad.

In retrospect I wish I had upgraded my old machine to SATA because I needed a new drive and IDE drives are now more expensive and SATA controller plus a SATA drive would have cost the same as the crappy IDE drive. Unfortunately I didn't look into the cost of upgrading to SATA when I bought the new drive, oh well live and learn.

I had a quick look on ebay and someone's selling a 256MB module for £2.75 only including P&P. I strongly recommend getting a cheap 256MB module - I doubt you'll regret it.

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/PC2700-DDR333-184-pin-256-MB-DDR-RAM_W0QQitemZ310203731938QQcmdZViewItemQQptZUK_Computing_ComputerComponents_MemoryRAM_JN?hash=item4839954fe2

[worker201]

I've got an IBM M50. XP runs on it moderately slowly (but bearably) and XFCE4 runs on it under various ubuntu systems, at about the same speed. It's pretty pathetic actually, linux has become the bloatware it promised never to become. I can't run GNOME or KDE on this, and haven't been able to for years.

I Googled and found that it only has 256MB RAM which I think is the problem.

I think you may have missed Calum's point entirely.  Then again, maybe I did too.  But the first thing I thought of when I read his post was the scene from a few years ago, when Linux was promised as a revival.  Linux ran well on old hardware, whereas Windows XP required all this extra RAM and HD space.  Some Linuxes still do run on old hardware, and can help revive an old machine by turning it into a dedicated ftp or dhcp server or something, but only in non-graphical modes.  Anything involving X is now massive.

And why?  Probably has to do with that "Linux on the desktop" thing - bulk it up in order to impress home users.  Also, that whole "big hardware leads to big software" thing - Linux may have tried to avoid that trap at the start, but it's hard, because you can do so much more with more space.

I suspect we're going to have to accept that most all OSes are relative to current hardware.  And the best option for old hardware is an old OS.

[piratePenguin]

Ubuntu runs extremely fine on my eee pc, that I multi-task on for hours every day. (When I purchased my eee pc I thought it would be much more crippling to depend on it, but even when I needed to run a Windows virtual box as well as other things I learned the difference between an eee pc and a €1,000 laptop from a performance perspective is small for almost everybody)

Then again low-grade modern computers always have at least 1 gig of cheap ram.

Btw, Kubuntu struggled a little bit on this hardware but it worked, now that there is a focus on KDE and GNOME (gnome 3 is coming and has lots of innovative plans btw) working better on smaller-than-laptop devices, I'd be expecting each release to have bigger priorities for performance work (particularly from kde at this stage in it's release cycle for kde 4). So I'm expecting when I try Kubuntu 10.04 it will work pretty good.

[Aloone_Jonez]

I think you may have missed Calum's point entirely.  Then again, maybe I did too.  But the first thing I thought of when I read his post was the scene from a few years ago, when Linux was promised as a revival.  Linux ran well on old hardware, whereas Windows XP required all this extra RAM and HD space.  Some Linuxes still do run on old hardware, and can help revive an old machine by turning it into a dedicated ftp or dhcp server or something, but only in non-graphical modes.  Anything involving X is now massive.

No, I haven't missed Calum's point, I actually agree with him: I hate bloatware. I was just pointing out how cheap it is to upgrade to 512MB RAM.

I think the thing we're forgetting is that XP came out in 2001 when 256MB was a lot of memory and 128MB was more the norm. Presumably he's using the latest Ubuntu and he says it has similar performance to XP.

There are graphical distributions that will run on crappy computers but most of them are probably pretty poor - Damn Small and Puppy Linux spring to mind.

Here's a list on Wikipedia, most are graphical.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mini_Linux

I noticed that most come with ABIWord and Gnumeric. I've tried both and although their light I wasn't impressed. I consider OpenOffice 1.1.5 to be better any day which I'd recommend, unless you have less than 64MB RAM.

I don't see the point in using the latest hardware, it's a waste of money unless you're into games. I just upgrade when I want to, not when some software company says I should.

[reactosguy]

I've been a gnome lover for a long time ('lover' is a bit deep, I've just stuck to it because it lets me do my work and it comes with ubuntu, and in years I've had no problems), but I've always had a huge appreciation for both the gnome and kde desktop environments and I think anyone who says their copresence in the GNU/Linux world is degenerative just doesn't get it.

Anyhow. KDE 4.4 was released recently - I still havent used it (it is a lot of effort to try; I pretty much consider switching DE almost equivalent to switching OS (and I would install kubuntu even if I dont need to), but it looks like it's time to do this)

http://kde.org/announcements/4.4/ They're polishing up (KDE 4 needed it the last time I was using it) while innovating away. Seems like a serious desktop to me. They also now have a netbook edition which seems particularly impressive. (since I use an eee pc I will probably use this)
http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=kde+netbook&page=&utm_source=opensearch

OS X has been the DE to beat* and maybe KDE has upped the ante? Startin to look like it.


* hugely subjective; but in any case OS X has an advanced (from a technical point of view but Im not sure about this from a power user pointof view) and polished interface, gnome has a simple interface that does its job good, and kde has a powerful and sexy interface that is coming together

The GUI of KDE 4.4 has improved significantly. Which now invalidates my WIN7-IS-RIPPEDOFF-OF-KDE claim.

Cheaper Dell Adamos please. Pass the Kool Aid and include Intel C2D SU9300, 64 GB SSD, Kubuntu 10.04 and 2 GB RAM please.