[Gllug] Transparent Terminal

[Nix]

On Mon, 06 Dec 2004, Tethys said:
> 
> Nix writes:
> 
>>KDE *bashing*? Compared to GNOME, it's glorious: wonderfully integrated
>>and with all sorts of nifty bits of configurability all over the shop.
>>
>> [...]
>>
>>If it wasn't for <http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=47320>,
>>Konqueror would be my default web browser: I actually find myself
>>using it instead of the shell at times, which is very unusual for me.
> 
> And to think I used to have a certain amount of respect for you... :-)

I don't use Konq for file management *that* much, but the Konq preview
stuff is terribly useful if you're scanning a huge pile of docs and want
to find one with an unusual look that you can spot in the preview :)

(and wow-ee is it extensible. I'm amazed at how easy it is to write KParts:
that relative ease probably explains why there are so many KParts compared
to the paucity of things using Bonobo.)


Two nifty tools, too: `fsview' and `filelight'. Two unusual and
remarkably readable ways of seeing where your disk space is disappearing
to.

> FWIW, both KDE and GNOME are hideous bloated monstrosities that will be

:)))

They're definitely not trim, but I'd say that KDE is big because it does
a lot, while GNOME is big because it has *frameworks* that do a lot that
the front-end code hardly ever uses.


Of course I don't use KDE stuff for news or mail or addressbooky stuff.
Gnus shall not be dislodged. :)

> kept far from my desktop for the foreseable future. Of the two, GNOME is
> a) faster, and b) feels more natural to me. But neither provide anything
> that I don't already have with fvwm and a bunch of xterms except a loss
> of performance and flexibility.

I've ditched the session manager (well, told it never to save sessions:
X session management just isn't worth it if you run lots of programs on
different hosts with unusual environments; the session manager just
can't capture enough state to restore accurately). I'm still using fvwm:
everything works as long as you use fvwm-2.5.x, which supports the
extended window-manager hints spec used by KDE and GNOME for things
like panel workareas and desktop drawing.

I'm oscillating over whether to ditch rxvt for konsole: rxvt is *far*
smaller (1/10th the VSZ), but my machines have lots of free RAM, and
konsole is just as fast to render and has tabs; tabs excuse a lot. :)

(Again, yes, I could use pwm or ion and get tabs for free, but my fvwm
config has accreted over a decade and rewriting it would be a sod).

> Konqueror is one of the worst parts of KDE IMHO, being simply too slow
> to use,

Um, rendering is almost instantaneous on my i586/233MHz. Are we talking
about the same program?

Notably, Konqueror (and all the rest of KDE) starts and to a certain
degree runs much faster if you make sure the system is prelinked: Konq
makes substantial use of exec()ed subprocesses to do things, and KDE
stuff really strains the poor dynamic linker (well, any very large C++
shared libraries do that; blame the virtual method tables). It took that
i586 above more than ten seconds to relocate Konq prior to starting it,
and prelinking a system on which KDE had previously been unprelinked
took well over ten minutes of continuous computation (!!!). Prelinked,
the relocation time on startup was of course pretty much zero (not
quite: there are still two relocations per VMT which can't be avoided),
and several Mb of writable pages were left unmodified on every
invocation as well.

(Note that prelink was implemented in reaction to KDE people complaining
about the dynamic linker, and the first, fugly version was implemented
by KDE people).

>         and having a poor rendering engine to boot.

It's not quite as pretty as Mozilla, I'll grant. But on my boxes it's
less than 1/3rd (!)  the RSS and VSZ of Mozilla, too.

-- 
`The sword we forged has turned upon us
 Only now, at the end of all things do we see
 The lamp-bearer dies; only the lamp burns on.'
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