Messages in this thread | | | Date | Tue, 08 Oct 2002 15:49:37 +0200 | From | Helge Hafting <> | Subject | Re: The reason to call it 3.0 is the desktop (was Re: [OT] 2.6 not 3.0 - (NUMA)) |
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Oliver Neukum wrote: > > On Monday 07 October 2002 10:08, Helge Hafting wrote: > > People getting interested in linux > > seems to believe that openoffice is the msoffice replacement, > > and that _is_ a huge bloated pig. It needs 50M to start > > the text editor - and lots of _cpu_. It takes a long time > > to start on a 266MHz machine even when the disk io > > is avoided by the pagecahce. > > OpenOffice _is_ an important application, whether we like it or not. > Sure. It is important. Fortunately it is open source, so improving on it might be a good idea. I don't think the kernel do anything wrong with it - it is simply very big and dead slow.
> How does one measure and profile application startup other than with > a stopwatch ? I'd like to gather some objective data on this. > > > A snappy desktop is trivial with 2.5, even with a slow machine. > > Just stay away from gnome and kde, use a ugly fast > > A desktop machine needs to run a desktop enviroment. Only a window manager is > not enough.
Of course. My machine (256M, 266MHz) is snappy with a netscape, 4-5 opera windows, 5-10 xterms, a few xemacs'es, a couple of lyx windows and xdvi, and sometimes a compile or latex running.
This is possibly spread out over 2-3 virtual desktops provided by icewm. Switching between them is instantaneous, although I can see "slow" things like xdvi redraw. The rest just appear. Throwing a openoffice into the mix cause no problems with desktop snappiness, but openoffice itself is too slow to use. Particularly if a cpu hog like gcc/latex is running. But then this _is_ a slow machine these days. > > > window manager like icewm or twm (and possibly lots > > of others I haven't even heard about.) > > X itself is snappy enough, particularly with increased > > priority. > > Take some care when selecting apps (yes - there is choice!) > > and the desktop is just fine. Openoffice is a nice > > package of programs, but there are replacements for most > > of them if speed is an issue. If the machine is powerful > > enough to run ms software snappy then speed probably > > isn't such a big issue though. > > KDE and friends _are_ not quite optimised for speed. That however doesn't > mean that the kernel should not make an effort to allow them to run as fast > as they can.
The kernel should do its best - and it seems to do well too. I believe KDE and friends may have performance problems of their own, and stay away from them mostly. I don't need _pretty_, merely something that works well. That might not sell, but nobody sell 266MHz machines either.
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