KDE: What a monster!

Polytropon freebsd at edvax.de
Sat Jan 24 17:27:05 PST 2009


On Fri, 23 Jan 2009 19:15:47 -0500, Eduardo Cerejo <ejcerejo at optonline.net> wrote:
> I just finished installing kde4, and it can barely run on my old p4 machine!
> Where has kde gone?  Is the developing team trying to beat VISTA?
> Pitiful at best!

Without wanting to start an endless discussion, I may say that I've
recognized the tendency to slow down programs in UNIX world such as
it is always described in "Windows" land: As soon as you get a new
OS or new programs, everything runs slower than before. In order to
keep the "overall usage speed", you need to have more hardware power.

I'm running a P4 2GHz for more than 4 years now happily (I think),
but when I needed to build a new software installation due to a
data fallout in July 2008, I found everything running slower.

THIS TO ALL FreeBSD DEVELOPERS: NOT YOUR FAULT! Every release of
FreeBSD brought a higher bootup speed to my system, faster system
services and better performance.

But what about these advantages? They've got eaten up by all the
applications installed, their libraries and especially their GUI
toolkits. Nearly every Gtk application has been switched from
Gtk 1 to Gtk 2, including more disk consuming libs and depencencies,
slower program startup and slower reaction.

My "favourite" examples are:

	* Opera, hardly reacting on input while loading a web
	  page (and no, I don't try to use "Flash" stuff)

	* Gimp, loads very slowly, needs seconds (!) to show
	  the right click menu, needs several seconds to launch
	  printing dialog

On the other hand, there are "old" programs that seem to profit
from the system's speed gain. That's why I love to use them instead
of their "oversized brothers".

Such an "oversized brother" is KDE 4. Don't get me wrong, please.
On an up-to-date hardware basis, it's surely a joy to use, fast
and responsive. But if your system isn't from today, you don't
gonna have fun with it. Around me, other users seem to favour
Gnome instead of KDE because they are not willing to update their
perfectly running hardware with every release of the desktop
environment. (Addition: Gnome has better german internationalisation
than KDE.) But I'm not sure if Gnome or even XFCE will follow
the "tradition" to decrease speed, I'm using neither of them.

Decrease speed? In my opinion, the following formula is true:

	  hardware resources
	----------------------- = usage speed
	 software requirements

And if you add ++ to numerator and denominator of this quotient,
you'll see that the result will stay the same. This is my very
individual observation: People are doing the same things with
their computers over the years, and they keep doing it *at the
same speed* as years ago.

I always was happy when I could update my FreeBSD system, because
things were faster afterwards. Today, things are slower afterwards.
This makes me sad...

This has lead me to the conclusion not to use KDE, allthough it
has really interesting applications. It's not that I need a
desktop GUI system, I'm perfectly happy with a functional and
fast window manager (i. e. WindowMaker).




Sorry for bothering the list with my thoughts, but maybe I'm not
alone with this "unmodern" point of view. :-)



-- 
Polytropon
>From Magdeburg, Germany
Happy FreeBSD user since 4.0
Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, ...


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