[CLUE-Talk] The Fast-Food Syndrome: The Linux Platform is Getting Fat, a comment by Bob Marr

[Joseph A. Nagy, Jr.]

On Thu, Jun 10, 2004 at 06:47:40PM +0000, bof wrote the following:
> Interesting comment on the increasing size and hardware requirements 
> needed by the newer versions of Linux.
> 
> It would appear that the days when Linux could use older hardware are 
> passing on; from personal experience, my K6 475 laptop with 192 MB RAM, 
> that ran RH 7.3 just fine now, can run Fedora Core 2, but opening Emacs 
> in a KDE terminal window takes 1-2 seconds, and other apps are 
> correspondingly slow.
> 
> Of course, there's still Slackware, but from some the comments on ./ 
> even that now needs 128 MB RAM to run KDE well.
> 
> http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=7324&page=1

The problem isn't Linux itself. You can build the 2.6 kernel on a 386 as
well as any modern machine (I have an IBM that I'll be installing Gentoo on
as soon as I can get it to boot up properly again). As you noted, apps
opening in KDE are slow because of KDE. Same with apps opening in GNOME
being slower because of GNOME. You still have your minimal window managers
(fluxbox, blackbox, WindowMaker, IceWM, etc. etc.) that you can run on those
slower machines. To expect the eye candy of GNOME or KDE to be able to run
on slower machines is an extremely silly notion IMO. Of course the eye candy
is going to take more powerful machines. Of course you could argue we don't
need eye candy but the people using Linux aren't just 1337 g33ks anymore.
You are getting more and more clueless n00bs (and not so clueless n00bs)
moving from Windows to Linux. They want an experience similar to Windows so
they don't feel as lost. How do I know this, well besides extensive reading
on the subject from a variety of expert print sources (eWeek, Network
Computing, CMP Weekly, etc. etc.) I have a more important and more relevant
source. One of my good friends is an MCSE (yes, yes, I know the joke, "Must
Call Someone Else") who won't switch to Linux because it is not user
friendly enough for him. User friendly means "works like Windows" as far as
installing programs and configuring the system in his mind. He's not
interested in security, reliability or scalability. There is alo the lack of
modern games (e.g. new releases) for him to consider making the switch.

So while the elite Linux-ites are quite happy with WindowMaker and running
2.6 on a 386, there are people like my friend the MCSE who want eye candy
and the ease of use that KDE and GNOME are working towards. Unfortunately
that means you must have a box that is as close to top of the line as you
can manage. I can run KDE 3.2 on my system but it's slow as hell (I have a
PII w/MMX @ 233MHz and 122MB RAM) so I run WindowMaker only. I do 90% of my
work from the CLI and only pop the gui when absolutely necessary. Even now
I'm working towards not using the WindowMaker preferences utility and
editing all those files by hand. I /want/ to become an elite Linux user
(although it might never happen, I still try), not everyone moving from
Windows wants to become an elite user, it's just that simple.

-- 
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