[ILUG] Linux, Arranmore Island, Co. Donegal

[Dermot McGahon]

On Tue, 18 May 2004 21:06:18 +0100 (IST), Lee Hosty <hostyle at csn.ul.ie>  
wrote:

> <call me a troll if you like but ... >
> I can encode DVDs via xvid, play mp3s via winamp5, have 5 tabs open in
> firefox, run thunderbird, paint shop pro, MS-SQL, anti-virus service, and
> macromedia products simultaneously without any noticable effects on *W2k*
> with 256 Mb RAM. Either you're doing something wrong or fedora is even
> worse bloatware than windows.
> </possible troll>

I wasn't doing anything wrong, and much as it pains me to say it, yes
fedora is worse bloatware than windows. This has happened over the last
two years or so. Improved desktop experience at a high price in ram
requirements.

Linux, in recent desktop distribution format at least, is no longer that
which you can install on your old hardware. Pity, and we can only hope
that the new functionality makes up for that.

There are lots of little annoying aspects. Starting up oowriter on this
p3-700 with 384mb ram causes a splash screen to invade the foreground
for about 15 seconds. Irritating and unnecessary.

Bloat:

  * KDE
  * Gnome
  * Standard Mozilla
  * Opera
  * OpenOffice

I think we'll see improvements. Recently, the mozilla variants have been
getting their act together with respect to bloat. They have also managed
very good stability, even if it did take about five years to appear.

OpenOffice I'm hoping will follow suit. Opera _does_ a lot, but lacks in
stability. I'm willing to put up with some of its bloat in order to get
the functionality. KDE and Gnome were trying ambitious things and that
couldn't be done without an aspect of cost. I'd like to see them trim down
somewhat though, if they can.

A lot of people have just accepted now that you need large amounts of RAM
to run linux.

I didn't realise that W2K was outperforming linux in this respect, but I
can't say I'm all that surprised.


Dermot.
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