Yet Another reason to use linux...

Fri Apr 6 23:21:17 UTC 2007

On Tuesday 03 April 2007, Lennart Sorensen wrote:
> If you use the kde tools you will get the resource requirements of
> KDE. The window manager part is actually not a big deal resource
> wise, the kde subsystem that all the tools use for communications
> is.  So pretty much any kde tool will cause a resource problem.

Save for Kopete, which seems to have its share of problems and which I 
only use occasionally for IM, none of the other KDE/Qt apps I use, 
Kate, kdesvn, Quanta, KMail, digikam, kompare, Qt Designer, Eric, 
KDevelop, Konqueror, kmymoney, konsole, etc. are objectionable in 
terms of resource utilization. The biggest culprits in runaway memory 
useage seems to be OpenOffice, GIMP, and Firefox, especially if the 
Flash plug-in is invoked. You'll note none of those are Qt or KDE 
applications. When Firefox goes crazy, it sets Xorg off on a bender. 
I'm not going to stop using GUI web browsers or the Flash plug-in 
because both are integral to what I need to do so trying to convince 
me of the Zen of lynx, links, vim, or blocking Flash and turning off 
JavaScript is pointless.

> As for apt versus rpm, well that's not really the thing that makes
> debian better.  It's a nifty tool, it managed the downloads and
> upgrades for you and resolving the dependancies, something which
> took years for rpm based systems to gain.

That is just folklore and Debian snobbery. Debian is no better at 
managing dependencies on removal of packages than say, Mandriva, 
which has the best suite of tools around RPM. Mandriva's urpmi and 
the Smart package manager that is used on various distros is at least 
as good, if not better, at managing dependencies as apt. If you 
compare bare rpm to apt, of course rpm is going to look worse. Urpmie 
compared to apt is a more valid comparison. Yum, unfortunately, 
stinks compared to either. It may be capable but it's so slow as to 
be barely useable.

> The real reason it is 
> better is that it's packages actually have accurate dependancy
> information, and are put together consistently and in a way that
> everything can work together and get along.  It doesn't matter if
> your packaging tools work well if the packages they are managing
> are crap.

More folklore and Debian snobbery. Red Hat Enterprise Linux and 
Mandriva are perfectly coherent and useable distros. If you don't 
want to spring for RHEL, you can use CentOS. If you start installing 
packages from random repositories packaged by inexperienced or 
clueless people, all distros, including the vaunted Debian, can have 
problems.

> I just upgraded my 486 which I installed Debian 2.1 on in 1999.  It
> is now upgrading to 4.0 (ok so I am doing it slightly early), and
> other than having to purge a couple of ancient packages for
> netscape 4.77 I forgot I had installed (which were getting in the
> way of upgrading to X.org it told me), the upgrade has gone just
> fine (the power failure in the middle was a bit inconvinient, but
> the upgrade system doesn't mind it would seem.)  It has gone
> through 2.1, 2.2, 3.0, 3.1 and now 4.0. Gotta love quality
> packaging of software, by people that do it just because they care,
> and hence release when it is ready and not a moment before.

That is not a typical scenario even in the Debian world. Oh sure, many 
people claim this and I'm sure some of them even manage to do it as 
easily as they claim but I'll bet if you looked closely, you would 
find that a) it wasn't quite as easy as they claimed it to be, and b) 
they limited their choice of packages to well-known, widely-used, and 
official packages, not some "weird" packages from unofficial 
repositories. In other words, they made compromises that many people 
aren't willing to make.

The ability to do rolling upgrades without reinstallation is touted as 
a virtue by Debian folks but I dispute it's value. I'd much rather 
have the means of (re)installing quickly onto bare metal (or a 
virtual machine) and be able to carry customizations forward with 
minimal fuss. If you want to convince someone of the merits of 
Debian, I think a greater win is debootstrap. I can create a new 
Debian instance on our Xen hosting infrastructure in a matter of 
minutes. To me, that is worth much more than being able to upgrade on 
an ongoing basis. The former, I can script and repeat. Systems that 
are continuously upgraded without reinstallation tend to accumulate 
barnacles no matter how careful one is and when they go down, they 
may not be as easy to replicate as one that was installed fresh a few 
months ago. Rolling upgrades are more prone to breakage and are more 
difficult to repeat whereas fresh installs are less prone to breakage 
and are more repeatable.

> > 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.
>
> I actually find the current version of gnome much better than they
> were in the past, and have actually ditched kde in favour of it. 
> Now using a different window manager is no help as long as you
> continue using anything kde related.

I develop apps using PyQt and PyKDE so I'm not likely to ditch KDE in 
favour of Gnome's sub-standard UI and Mono's promotion of Microsoft's 
agenda. To me, KDE isn't just the desktop manager. It is integral to 
my software development processes. As I outlined in my previous 
message, the resource utilization of the various desktop managers I 
tried weren't appreciably different enough to justify switching. The 
right solution to my problem of my formerly suitable but increasingly 
hard-to-tolerate laptop isn't going on a quixotic quest to find The 
Ultimate Desktop Manager/Windowing Manager that manages to supposedly 
run (more like crawl) on 486/66 machines but to upgrade to a modern 
machine.
-- 
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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