The Linus view of GNOME 3.2

[JB]

Joe Zeff <joe <at> zeff.us> writes:

> 
> On 12/05/2011 04:48 PM, Tim wrote:
> > Buying new and expensive hardware every few years, for artificially
> > necessary reasons, is the Windows mindset.
> 
> The underlying problem is much more fundamental than that.  Often, the 
> devs get big, muscular boxes to work on with lots and lots of disk 
> space, RAM and video RAM, including the Latest and Greatest Video Cards 
> they can find.  This makes development much easier.  They don't, 
> however, bother to test their work on anything other than their own 
> boxen, meaning that they quite often end up with great software that 
> only works on a maxed-out computer with the latest video cards.  And, of 
> course, their regular response to anybody who complains about the 
> unreasonable and expen$ive hardware requirements is to tell them to 
> throw money at the problem because they rarely, if ever, have the 
> slightest idea how much their development equipment cost or how hard it 
> might be for their users to get together enough cash to upgrade.
> ...

Unfortunately there is a trend recognizable affecting this and other distros.

The past week I continued taking inventory of "what is going on in Linux
distros land".

Among others, I picked the recent OpenSUSE 12.1 live cd with KDE.
I decided to test it on one of my notebooks that has 768 MB RAM, on which
I have been running Windows XP, FreeBSD, Fedora with GNOME 2, XFCE, and LXDE.

Well, it was a horror - it took it 10 min to stabilize KDE (load, swap in and
out, and what ever other hell was going on in there), and while doing that to
give me a chance to access menu items (!) or panel applets without waiting
for each of them for 0.5 min to even react to each of my mouse clicks.
After that mountain climb the desktop was ready but noticeably slow.

OK, I knew KDE was a hog, even in KDE 3 times, but this ?
I mean this was a live cd - do those devs want to scare the hell out of
prospective or current users ?
Btw, here are reliable reviews of their recent 32- and 64-bit releases:
http://www.dedoimedo.com/

Now, this is not funny any more.
Fedora (you remember its review there, don't you ?) and OpenSUSE are top
distros in the perception of many, but reality bites ...
 
Now, I vividly remember times when we ran DOS, or even Windows 95, with
Lotus 1-2-3, WordStar, and dBASE without a hickup in this amount of RAM, and
btw on a PC with CPU and other hardware that was primitive by today's
standards.

And nowdays we can not get a Linux distro DE alone run satisfactorily on
a modern machine ?
And if that happens in UNIX/Linux world then it is a double whammy !

This is not only about programming and designing skills.
Your mindset has been polluted by IT players, marketing, companies you work
for, your peers.

JB