xfce

[Christopher Browne]

On 8/21/07, JoeHill <joehill-R6A+fiHC8nRWk0Htik3J/w at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> It is incredible how many useful tools there are in a desktop that is
> considered light, no? And all the plugins for the panel and Thunar...sweet :-)

I'm confused as to why anyone considers it "light," when it's nothing
of the kind.

- Installing xfce4 draws in 51MB of packages

- Do you know how many libraries xfdesktop4 depends on???  52.

- Yes, Thunar is *slightly* less bloated than Nautilus; it consumes
only 60MB of RAM, rather than Nautilus' 78MB.  Compare with, for
instance, GNUstep's "mere" 48MB of RAM consumption for its
"GWorkspace" file manager.

- xfce-panel has about half the RSS (16MB) of gnome-panel (28MB),
until it spawns its "plugin" process, adding another 14MB, and
bringing it out "heavier" than gnome-panel.

In what way is this supposed to be "light" other than possibly in the
(worthless) sense of "sometimes, but by no means always, very slightly
less bloated than similar GNOME or KDE applications" ?

"Light" should mean "considerably less weighty than alternatives."
And if GNOME and KDE are to be considered "bloated" (which seems
pretty reasonable to me), they are NOT meaningful comparison points,
unless you can demonstrate at least order-of-magnitude differences in
weight (with a base of at least 2, but preferably evaluating based on
decimal orders of magnitude).

Based on any of the evaluations I have seen, XFCE is a bloated,
heavyweight "desktop" system that people falsely claim to be "lighter"
than GNOME and KDE.
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