[rescue] Solaris on a PPC -or- bloat sux

[Tim H.]

On Wed, 5 Feb 2003 20:58:37 -0500
Dave McGuire <mcguire at neurotica.com> wrote:

>  This has nothing at all to do with Gnome or KDE being open source.
> 
>         -Dave


I am currently running a P4M 2GHz with 640M of RAM in my Dell laptop. 
KDE on this thing is slower than I like to admit.  I never ran Windows
on it, but I can't believe Win2K would be slower than KDE.  On the other
hand, WindowMaker is down right peppy, even with transparent Eterms and
visual time wasters turned on, and XPenguins crawling all over the
unaccelerated screen.  I like a lot of the GTK software, but
Gnome/Enlightenment has a steeper feature bloat curve than Windows, KDE
tends to crash for me, and I really don't care for window managers that
try to measure "up" to windows.  

This machine was my first working Linux box in about a year (working, as
opposed to trying stuff out on a spare box) and I must admit, Xandros
really has improved Linux for the Windows user, but with KDE as the
desktop, it crashes like Windows also.  I left the root account running
default Xandros/KDE, primarily so I could find all the nifty user
friendly gui tools they have for system admin stuff, and the stability
difference between my user account (the only time it crashes is when I
accidentaly leave VMWare running when I exit WindowMaker) and the root
account (which crashes stuff fairly often, especially if it involves
Xandros Update, the guification of apt-get they made for package
management) is very noticeable.  Of course, to be fair, a lot of the
instability showed up when I upgraded to debian-unstable, but the
performance difference was noticeable right from the start.

And when I got the box, with 128M of RAM, 2 KDE xsessions were enough to
drive it hard into swap, which really bugged me. After all, 128M of RAM
really is a lot on a machine just running the OS and GUI

Tim