[Gllug] Window Managers

[Tethys]

Jim Bailey writes:

>I think a lot of desktops have suffered with the rise of KDE and Gnome,
>not that I have anything against them other than they don't suit me.

I used to think the same. Fine for others, useless to me. But then I
tried to install Linux on a friend's laptop. He's a reasonably computer
litterate Windows user, and was interested in learning about Linux. I
thought the best place to start was to give him the default GNOME desktop
that comes with RH7.3. So that's what I did. And it coredumped on startup.
Fine. So I switched to KDE (which in itself, wasn't something an average
newbie would have been able to do). KDE at least loaded, but it was so
slow as to be unusable. Now OK, the machine is a bit old (it's a K6-450),
and somewhat memory starved (it has 32MB). But Windows is perfectly
usable on the same machine. For both of the leading Linux desktops to
render the box useless is a *very* poor situation. Yes, I could have
set him up a nice fvwm2, icewm or whatever desktop, but that's missing
the point. I could have done that. He couldn't...

KDE in particular is guilty of more bloat than even Microsoft can manage.
Looking at the process table while it was running, I was horrified. I
suspect GNOME may be similar, but since the panel dumped core on startup,
I couldn't check...

Both GNOME and KDE need some *serious* work on their default setups to
ensure they work on older machines. I'm not saying we need to consider
a 386 here. But a K6-450 should easily be able to run a graphical
desktop. To say I'm unimpressed is a *huge* understatement.

Tet

-- 
Gllug mailing list  -  Gllug at linux.co.uk
http://list.ftech.net/mailman/listinfo/gllug