Yet Another reason to use linux...

Tue Apr 3 21:28:55 UTC 2007

On Tuesday 03 April 2007, Sheldon Mustard wrote:
> On 4/3/07, Sy Ali <sy1234-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> > On 4/3/07, D. Hugh Redelmeier <hugh-pmF8o41NoarQT0dZR+AlfA at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> > > I wonder why there isn't a mainline distro that is reasonably
> > > functional and yet "parties like it's 1999".  If you know what
> > > you are doing, you can slim some distros down or pick slim
> > > off-beat ones, but the "know what you are doing" is the catch.
> >
> > There are lots of choices - and most of them suck.  I've spent a
> > bunch of time looking through the selection only to realise that
> > it would be easier to strip down a mainstream distro to a
> > reasomable level than deal with the crusty old "not updated since
> > 1999" distros out there.
>
> xubuntu runs pretty well on 96 or 128 MB RAM is that 1999 levels
> probably not eh.
>
> SJM

I'm a long-time KDE user and love everything about it but its resource 
utilization. KDE and the facilities and tools it provides are 
ingrained in my development process. I also love my trusty old 
ThinkPad A21p. I'm not fussed by the fact that it's a P3/850 or that 
some of the markings on the keyboard have worn off. I'm a touch 
typist and have developed muscle memory for which keys I need to 
push. The only things I find lacking on this machine are RAM and disk 
space. The latter is easy to address for a very nominal amount but 
the 512M of RAM I have is already maxed out so that limits the 
continuing usefulness of this machine as a developer's platform.

In what turned out to be a futile attempt at finding a reasonable 
alternative to KDE as a desktop manager while still continuing to use 
the KDE tools that I depend on, I tested fluxbox and XFce. I'm 
running Fedora Core 6 on this machine. It's a piggy distro and for 
the most part, I don't really like it but I don't have the time to go 
on another round of testing different distros right now. I already 
run Etch, Mandriva, CentOS, and Ubuntu (server-only) on other 
machines and I've run Kubuntu, OpenSuse, Mandriva, and Gentoo on this 
laptop so I've already evaluated a few alternatives and have found 
them wanting in one area or another. I don't find that APT has any 
clear advantage over RPM, despite the hype around it but that's a 
different discussion, which I'll leave for another day.

Empirical testing of fluxbox, XFce, and KDE on my laptop contradicts 
the folklore of XFce being a lightweight alternative to KDE or Gnome. 
Speaking of Gnome, I couldn't be bothered testing it because I knew 
I'd never use it and would have to remove all the Gnome junk after 
installing it just for testing anyway. Besides, in previous tests of 
Gnome within the last couple of years, Gnome's memory footprint was 
indeed lower than KDE's but it wasn't enough to compensate for its 
ugly UI and its poor attention to usability. If I have to put up with 
that, I'll go the whole way and just use something like fluxbox.

My testing methods were as follows. I ran four tests, the first with 
no X running (init 3), the second with fluxbox, the third with XFce, 
and the last with KDE. Between each test, I rebooted the machine to 
clear any potential after-effects of the desktop manager in question 
not cleaning up properly after itself. The same daemons were running 
in all cases. Only in the KDE case was I running any applets, such as 
knewsticker, kalarm, kgpg, klipper, and a host of others. If 
anything, the KDE memory consumption would be lower if I didn't run 
those applets so in effect, I was discriminating against KDE, my 
favourite. These tests were done in mid-February, 2007 with the 
latest versions of the respective desktop managers from the Fedora 
repositories. 

I've pasted the results of the "free -m" command for the four test 
cases below. I've modified the spacing on the first two rows in the 
hope that the formatting won't be screwed up by line wrapping.

My baseline - console only
--------------------------
        total   used    free    shared  buffers cached
Mem:      502    212     290         0       14    152
-/+ buffers/cache:         44        457
Swap:         2000          0       2000

fluxbox
-------
        total   used    free    shared  buffers cached
Mem:      502    363     138         0       29    272
-/+ buffers/cache:         61        440
Swap:         2000          0       2000

XFce
----
        total   used    free    shared  buffers cached
Mem:      502    497       5         0       36    322
-/+ buffers/cache:        138        363
Swap:         2000          0       2000

KDE
---
        total   used    free    shared  buffers cached
Mem:      502    445      57         0       33    310
-/+ buffers/cache:        101        401
Swap:         2000          0       2000

I ended up sticking with KDE because the difference in memory 
consumption was not worth the loss of productivity and inconvenience 
of switching to fluxbox and there were no gains to be had using XFce 
anyway.

I simply don't believe Xubuntu would be very pleasant to use on a 96M 
or 128M system. My son is running that very distro on a Celeron 366 
with 196M of RAM and while it is barely useable, it is slower than 
when that same machine was running Windows 98. I think we do Linux a 
disservice when we make these claims that are not only unsupported 
but actually contradicted by the evidence.
-- 
Regards,

Clifford Ilkay
Dinamis Corporation
3266 Yonge Street, Suite 1419
Toronto, ON
Canada  M4N 3P6

<http://dinamis.com>
+1 416-410-3326
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