[Gllug] What is the Gnome & KDE difference??

[Nix]

On Wed, 29 Mar 2006, Emon wrote:
> When people say "slow" what are they actually comparing
> them(KDE/GNOME) against?? certainly not against CLI... that would be
> quite unfair!!... right?

Why would it be unfair?

Generally I'd compare it against a normal X app on a system not running
a GNOME- or KDE-based desktop. It's true that these desktops come with
extra overhead (that is, they need more CPU time and memory to do the
same operations), but then antialiased fonts, flashy translucency,
support for internationalization (including bidirectional fonts), and
support for the background infrastructure that these desktops include
(CORBA, DCOP, et al) isn't going to be completely free.

Plus, both GNOME and KDE use widget sets that are graphically much more
demanding than anything that has run on X before with the possible
exception of Motif, which was *also* seen as slow and bloated by X
purists (it looked disgusting as well).

> And when people say "fat" are they referring to the bundled
> applications that these Desktop provide or something else?? and is it
> such a bad thing providing extra applications??

Nah, it's just that these environments avoid having their apps reinvent
the wheel by providing a huge heap of common code for them all to use,
from colour-picker wheels through to inter-application communication and
registry-like state saving. The sort of people who complain about bloat
tend to be people (like me ;) ) who use X as a platform to run a heap of
xterms and and a text editor or six: these people aren't *using* any of
the apps that would need the features that that extra code provides, so
from their POV it's pure bloat.

(From the POV of an ordinary user it's not, because although they may
not know it, the apps they're using are using that extra code all the
time...)

> Also by "bloated" are people referring to the frequent bugs that are
> uncovered?? if so.. I thought bugs were a reality of life in software
> development!!

No, bloat refers to size, more specifically to memory consumption and
code-size counts.

KDE in particular strains the of the C++ compiler and the dynamic linker
quite significantly, and was in the past distinctly slow to start as
a result (15 secs to start a konsole, for instance).

(This is mostly in the past now, and has been for several years.)

-- 
`Come now, you should know that whenever you plan the duration of your
 unplanned downtime, you should add in padding for random management
 freakouts.'
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