[ale] Linux desktop inefficiencies...

[John Wells]

<rant>
Is it just me, or are Gnome and KDE apps complete memory hogs?  I'm 
trying to scrounge by on 256mb of memory under RH 9/Gnome, and man, is it 
difficult.  Now, part of the problem is that I use java quite a bit, but 
typically don't have more than one jvm going at a time.

Apps you'd think would have relatively small footprint are huge, in my 
opinion.  For example, running Gnome System Monitor consumes 9.2MB on my 
system...why?  Why in the world would that consume so much memory?  It 
makes no sense to me that the monitoring of network/cpu/memory should be 
so consuming...

Nautilus has always been a hog (8.2 currently...which seems to be an 
improvement over past versions), gnome-panel at 12.2 MB, gnome-terminal at 
13.3MB, gweather-applet-2 at 4.4MB...

When I first installed RH 5.2 back in 99, I was able to run WindowMaker or 
Afterstep with quite a few apps going in 16 megs of RAM.  I couldn't fit 
RH9's big toe in that box.

I don't run KDE, but I've heard from friends that it's essentially just as 
bad...

So what's the culprit?  Is it Gnome's reliance on Corba?  Is it poor 
design of the toolkits themselves?  Is it the underlying X protocol? 
I shudder to say this, but applications on Windows that do the equivalent 
of many of the above have much smaller footprints and are more responsive 
under heavy load.  
</rant>

Don't get me wrong...I love linux, and I'm particularly home in 
Gnome....but sometimes things just don't seem right.

Anyone have any insight?

Thanks,
John


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