Re: GNOME == bloatware?
-- Steve Juranich <sjuranic@ssli-mail.ee.washington.edu> wrote
(on Wednesday, 22 January 2003, 10:05 AM -0800):
> I'm sure I'm not the only one to notice this, as I'm running a stock
> sid box. But I've got a machine with 256Mb ram, but GNOME is bringing
> this system to a crawl. I open up the system monitor, and I see that
> the main offenders are X (65 Mb, totally expected), Galeon (40 MB, it
> didn't used to be this bad), and gnome-terminal (15 MB for a single
> instance! 11MB after I turn off all of the fancy stuff).
My main machine is a Celeron 366MHz, 256MB machine. GNOME 1.4 ran fine,
but, like you, I felt it was slow and hogged a lot of memory.
Desktop environments are nice -- they give a common area for
configuration, provide a common look and feel, and overall streamline
GUI usage. But they also tend to do it at the cost of memory and disk
space.
> So I'm wondering if I've got some binaries that aren't optimized for my
> system somehow, or this is just the state of GNOME. If so, I'm going
> to take a serious second look at ditching the whole 'desktop
> environment' altogether and go with something like IceWM.
If you don't like what you're using, the great thing about *nices is
that you have choice.
I'm currently using (and have been for over a year, a personal record!)
blackbox as my window manager (2MB) with Rox-Filer 1.3.x providing a few
icons and a file manager (8.5 MB); I've switched to Phoenix for my
browser (23.5 MB), and aterm for my terminal (1.5 MB). In this setup, X
only runs at 20 MB.
So, if memory and speed are an issue, take a look at some of the other
choices out there and optimize. You can make an older machine seem very
fast -- and a newer one seem to run at light speed or faster. (I used
the same setup on a 1.7GHz machine with 256MB, and everything seemed
practically instantaneous, with the exception of OO.org.)
> I'm not trolling, I've got a serious issue here. 256 mb should be more
> than enough to run all of the junk I want to run without swapping.
You'd think... but even with lots of memory and a fast processor,
sometimes one just wants *more* speed. So you optimize.
--
Matthew Weier O'Phinney
matthew@weierophinney.net
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