The Linus view of GNOME 3.2

Alan Cox alan at lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk
Tue Dec 6 10:39:25 UTC 2011


> 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.

LiveCD will really show up any point you tip into paging and it's not a
good way to get a performance picture of a distro. It's a bit better off
USB2 with some of the USB sticks.

> 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.

As was the software !

> And nowdays we can not get a Linux distro DE alone run satisfactorily on
> a modern machine ?

There are lots of people building distributions for "small" spaces using
things like Yocto. The other assumption you have is also a bit dubious.
Everyone in server space is now doing lots of virtualisation - having big
fat distributions is exactly what the big hosting providers and
corporations doing this on a large scale *hate*, because it wastes tons
and tons of resources.

Alan


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