Gnome and KDE on Modest Hardware

[mowestusa]

First I'm not starting this as a frame war, but just curious to hear the thoughts of other users who poke around in both Gnome and KDE.

A week ago I got a new computer put together from parts that others were throwing away, which is how I get most of my computers. Anyway, for my main system I had been running the following:
Ubuntu Dapper 6.06 LTS on Pentium 500 with 320megs of RAM, and an old ATI graphics board.

The new system that I have up and running from spare parts is:
Athlon 1.1 (1.8, but board only supports 100 bus so that clocks it down to 1.1) with 320megs of RAM, and a 64meg Nvidia card.

I decided that now I had a faster machine with a little better specs, I would load up a distro and use Gnome or KDE as my default desktop environment to make my life easy on this computer, since some of my Unix boxes are CLI only, I wanted one box where I could use the easy desktop environment tools to simplify my life a little. I also decided that I have never given Fedora a try and with the new Live CD and install I figure this was my chance. So I loaded up the Gnome Live CD.

Now I have been running ion3 on my old Ubuntu Pentium 500 to get a little extra juice out of it. When I loaded up Gnome 2.18 I guess I was surprised that with a faster system (same amount of ram though) that I was not seeing a huge increase in speed. Of course I now have Firefox 2.0 instead of 1.5, and OpenOffice 2.2. I even noticed that it took a couple of seconds for icons to appear in the Gnome menus. I had heard so much about Fedora 7 being supper fast, but I just wasn't seeing it. I do admit that boot up was pretty quick, and over all the system was nicer than Windows XP and Vista, but I guess I was hoping for better performance. Sometimes OpenOffice and Firefox would lock up when closing too.

I will admit that 320megs of ram is not the best, but is exceeds the minimum of 256megs. I will admit that my memory was close to maxed out with about 308-311 in use most of the time. However, I went back to my Ubuntu Pentium 500 system with Gnome 2.14, I noticed none of those issues. The icons have a little hesitation, but nothing like on the faster system, and Firefox and OpenOffice have been rock solid on that machine. I had heard that Gnome 2.18 was even faster and that the speed improvements were noticeable on older hardware. I don't know I'm just not impressed. It is definitely usable and not very frustrating, but not as snappy as I had hopped with a little better processor.

I'm not a diehard Gnome guy, so when Troels said to install KDE under Fedora 7 I figured I would. I loved KDE back when I was running SimplyMepis and Kanotix.

So the install finished, I logged out and logged back into KDE. Had a little issue with screen going wacky which corrected itself after reboot. All I can say is that KDE gave me the little performance boost that I was looking for. Firefox is rock solid and shuts down cleanly. OpenOffice and other programs seem to start up a little quicker. Also the KDE programs like the terminal is a lot faster to start up than the Gnome terminal under Gnome. There is no lag in the menu icons.

Now here is the questions:
Anyone else notice Gnome 2.18 just not as snappy as other Gnome releases?

Anyone else notice KDE running a little snappier on the same hardware, especially older hardware?

Anyone else understand how KDE can seem to hog as much of the resources as Gnome (memory is also at 308-311 most of the time, I do have a swap as well, and CPU seem to be about the same too) yet it seems to be more stable and more responsive?

Also I just have to say, it was so easy to get KDE to let me make custom shortcuts to start applications. It is under the control panel under keyboard shortcuts, where I still have not figured out how to do this under Gnome because the default keyboard shortcuts that you can define down include applications, but window and desktop behaviors. I found how to do it in KDE in seconds, where I have looked and looked, but keep missing how to do this under Gnome.

I am not a fan boy of either Gnome or KDE, in fact, I might even go back to ion because there is just lots to love about that little window manager, but having a pretty background for right now is fun. I was just wondering if my experiences are similar to anyone else. I will say there is a lot I like about Gnome. I like how Fedora sets up the Gnome menus, I like the clean look, I love the Fedora Gnome, because it all seems to fit nicely (icons, backgrounds, startup, and theme) Finally, I will say that for my first jump into rpm land, Fedora has been nice.

Finally, Pat, I know apt-get is great, but you know yum with just the standard repositories like Fedora, Update, and Livna is not bad at all. My yum slows up for the primary.sqlite.bz2 respository update (which I have no idea what it is) other wise I think yum is pretty nice. Yum speed is acceptable on my end of the world.

Now, please don't start a flame war of "Gnome is better than" or "KDE is better than" because that is not my intent, but I would like to hear other people's experiences. With mine, I would give Fedora 7 two thumbs up whether you use Gnome or KDE, but I would go with KDE on older hardware.

[Vogateer]

On modest hardware I generally turn to either XFCE or fluxbox, but I'll have to try Gnome and KDE on those. I remember on Gentoo it was pretty easy to pare KDE down a bit, and just have the essentials so nothing got out of hand.

It may not be a fair comparison, but I think of the difference between Konqueror and Firefox/Epiphany/any-other-gecko-browser, and Konqueror just flies. I've received the (completely unfounded by myself) impression that KDE just tends to have cleaner code and make good use of the libraries. I've never seen multiple print or file-opening dialog boxes from KDE, since apparently you don't have to rewrite the app to take advantage of any upgrades made to those KDE dialogs.

I really like the layout of Gnome (I still think the "Application/Places/System menus are the most logical I've ever seen), and have been using it because it's the default of Ubuntu, but I'm pretty sure that with KDE4 I'll be moving to it as my primary desktop, even if it means I need to find another distro that does it well.

[mowestusa]

I really like the layout of Gnome (I still think the "Application/Places/System menus are the most logical I've ever seen), and have been using it because it's the default of Ubuntu, but I'm pretty sure that with KDE4 I'll be moving to it as my primary desktop, even if it means I need to find another distro that does it well.

Yes, I also like that layout, and am too lazy to change it under KDE from the defaults. Actually, I like this layout even more under Fedora, because they add a few sub folders to those major headings which make things a little cleaner too. If you want to move to KDE 4, then perhaps Fedora 8 is for you. This is one of the stated goals of Fedora 8 to add KDE 4 as the default KDE install.

Fedora does a nice job with KDE, I have been really happy after coming back to KDE having been absent from it for at least 1 1/2 years.

[allix]

My yum slows up for the primary.sqlite.bz2 respository update (which I have no idea what it is) other wise I think yum is pretty nice. Yum speed is acceptable on my end of the world.

That is my only complaint with fedora 7 too, after its pulled down primary.sqlite.bz2 its fine.

sun java out-the-box would also be nice, its sad that since sun put java on the gpl , most of the core components are not owned by them which means their is no java.

I know following http://liquidat.wordpress.com/2007/05/3 ... -fedora-7/
will work but still its an inconvenience.

Troels even uses Java and he is one of the strongest free software uses around

[Tsuroerusu]

I'm not a diehard Gnome guy, so when Troels said to install KDE under Fedora 7 I figured I would. I loved KDE back when I was running SimplyMepis and Kanotix.

I am honored, sir.

So the install finished, I logged out and logged back into KDE. Had a little issue with screen going wacky which corrected itself after reboot. All I can say is that KDE gave me the little performance boost that I was looking for. Firefox is rock solid and shuts down cleanly. OpenOffice and other programs seem to start up a little quicker. Also the KDE programs like the terminal is a lot faster to start up than the Gnome terminal under Gnome.

That's something I have always liked about KDE, and I've been using it every day for three years now, compared to GTK apps, it has just always felt snappy to me. If I were to do a review of Firefox, all I'd have for you is a one word review: Bloatfox!
Why the heck does it take close to five seconds to start, and three even when it's already in RAM!

There is no lag in the menu icons.

"Told ya", T says with a very Chin'n'Dale style voice

Anyone else notice KDE running a little snappier on the same hardware, especially older hardware?

Yep, KDE must be making really good use of the resources it has or something. Or maybe it's just Qt being a great toolkit!

Anyone else understand how KDE can seem to hog as much of the resources as Gnome (memory is also at 308-311 most of the time, I do have a swap as well, and CPU seem to be about the same too) yet it seems to be more stable and more responsive?

I think you make the picture more black or white than it needs to be. A program can eaisily use just as much RAM as another program, however how it uses that amount of RAM will determine the user's experience.

Also I just have to say, it was so easy to get KDE to let me make custom shortcuts to start applications. It is under the control panel under keyboard shortcuts, where I still have not figured out how to do this under Gnome because the default keyboard shortcuts that you can define down include applications, but window and desktop behaviors. I found how to do it in KDE in seconds, where I have looked and looked, but keep missing how to do this under Gnome.

My friend, I couldn't have said it better myself!

Finally, I will say that for my first jump into rpm land, Fedora has been nice.

Why wouldn't it be? All that FUD about RPM breaking on the user is pretty much all made up these days. I have used RPM based distros since I began using GNU/Linux in 2004, and I have never had a problem that I, myself, didn't cause.

Finally, Pat, I know apt-get is great, but you know yum with just the standard repositories like Fedora, Update, and Livna is not bad at all. My yum slows up for the primary.sqlite.bz2 respository update (which I have no idea what it is) other wise I think yum is pretty nice.

That file contains info about repository updates. YUM is a bit of a oddball, it does what equates to "apt-get update" whenever you run it. I'd hope the YUM developers change this, as it sucks if you're not on the net 24/7, however you can do yum -C search wozzagozza, if you don't want to do that updaty thingy if you just want to do a search.

Yum speed is acceptable on my end of the world.

Same goes for me.

Now, please don't start a flame war of "Gnome is better than" or "KDE is better than" because that is not my intent, but I would like to hear other people's experiences.

KDE is better!! ... Just kidding!

With mine, I would give Fedora 7 two thumbs up whether you use Gnome or KDE, but I would go with KDE on older hardware.

Have you tried KOffice?

On modest hardware I generally turn to either XFCE or fluxbox, but I'll have to try Gnome and KDE on those.

I have run KDE on a machine with 192 MB of RAM, it wasn't a speed demon, but it wasn't unusable either. I have found that 192 is OK, 256 is quite decent and 512 is the sweet spot. 128 is stretching it.

I remember on Gentoo it was pretty easy to pare KDE down a bit, and just have the essentials so nothing got out of hand.

This is generally very dependant on the distro itself, and not KDE. For example, Debian puts every single KDE package into it's own package, and the KDE components packages like kdebase, kdenetwork etc. are just metapackages depending on the apps they normally include. This is nice because that way you can get rid of a lot of the stuff you don't use. Fedora don't do this splitting so I can't get rid of Noatun, because I need something from the kdemultimedia component. I hope this gets fixed with KDE 4.

It may not be a fair comparison, but I think of the difference between Konqueror and Firefox/Epiphany/any-other-gecko-browser, and Konqueror just flies.

I have started to seriously dislike Firefox because of stability and speed issues, even with just a few tabs open it feels sluggish, Konqueror with a lot of tabs still is nice and snappy.

I've received the (completely unfounded by myself) impression that KDE just tends to have cleaner code and make good use of the libraries.

Well, here's something interesting. If you look at a typical GNOME desktop, you'll find several applications that either used to be proprietary, or initially was developed in-house, like Firefox and Evolution. I can't think of a KDE app where this is really the case. SUSE has contributed a lot to Kontact, and also with a few hang-overs in terms of 64-bit cleanliness, but that was always done out in the open.
Gecko is an extremely huge codebase, and to be fair, Gecko does do a shitload of stuff, but it's also significantly heavier than KHTML. KHTML started out as a small, light and stanards-compliant HTML-engine, initially a pet project of a few KDE developers. Think about this, when Apple chose KHTML as the engine for Safari (They spent two years on in-house development of their KHTML fork known as WebKit), Gecko was far more mature and had more features, and was under the Mozilla Public License (Which allows for a lot more interaction with proprietary addons than the GPL, and even the LGPL (Which governs KHTML)). I can't think of a single reason besides code quality and code size that Apple would choose KHTML over Gecko.
Also, just in general, applications that has always been developed in the open, tend to have a cleaner codebase because it makes the developers' lives far easier. For a long time (Back in the 1.x days) GNOME, understandably being part of the GNU project, primarily just duplicated the features of KDE because of the licensing policies around Qt, but AFAIK they did sort of hurry the development along. And also, a lot of GNOME development has come from large companies like Red Hat and Sun, and also smaller players like Ximian (Which today is Novell). You can't tell me that these vendors all wanted the cleanest code as possible. Sun primarily supported GNOME so that they had a modern desktop on Solaris, which their partners could write proprietary software for without having to pay a Norwegian company a bunch of money (You can't use the "Open Source Edition" of Qt for developing proprietary software, and Trolltech's "commercial license" enforces this by saying that all your code MUST be developed using Qt under their "commercial license" unless you're at least gonna dual license your code).

I've never seen multiple print or file-opening dialog boxes from KDE, since apparently you don't have to rewrite the app to take advantage of any upgrades made to those KDE dialogs.

Well, to be fair, KDE's development sort of reminds me of FreeBSD, at some point you have a big release (Eg. FreeBSD 6.0), and then for several years, you have a bunch of incrementally improving releases (Eg. FreeBSD 6.1, 6.2 and the upcoming 6.3). So even if they did change something, an application developer would be quick to adapt to that change. Having said that! One thing the KDE developers are sheer genious at is writing frameworks. The KIO slame framework has become like an addictive drug for me!! And they have a lot of other stuff that abstracts things so that you don't have to think about it, and they're taking this to the next level with KDE 4.

I really like the layout of Gnome (I still think the "Application/Places/System menus are the most logical I've ever seen), and have been using it because it's the default of Ubuntu

And people say the Windows users just "use what they're told to use"!!
(Partly joking)

but I'm pretty sure that with KDE4 I'll be moving to it as my primary desktop, even if it means I need to find another distro that does it well.

I hear a lot people saying this, and the thing that just amuses me is that KDE developers at the highest level are all saying that KDE 4."0" is gonna look a lot like KDE 3, because the big changes aren't gonna be seen before they are implemented in the various applications that people use.
If you're thinking that KDE 4 is gonna be magically more different than the KDE 3.5.x releases, you may be in for a disappointment. KDE 4 is bringing some MAJOR changes, however it's not gonna be like a totally new experience. If you "are gonna move back to KDE when 4.0", you might as well switch today, and get used to the KDE applications, because it just ain't gonna be that much different, in terms of the applications, because the new frameworks have to be used broadly before you, the user, notices the changes. If you go from KDE 3.5.x to KDE 4.2 you will notice a bunch of large and sudden changes, because the developer will have had times to implement the feature of new frameworks such as Phonon, Solid, Decibel etc., in the applications, and also bringing KDE's huge amounts of interfaces into compliance with their new Human Interface Guidelines (HIGs).

If you want to move to KDE 4, then perhaps Fedora 8 is for you. This is one of the stated goals of Fedora 8 to add KDE 4 as the default KDE install.

If you're an early adopter, I say go for it, if you're a security and stability crackhead like me, wait 6 - 8 months, or at least play with it on a test box before using it.

Fedora does a nice job with KDE, I have been really happy after coming back to KDE having been absent from it for at least 1 1/2 years.

Fedora 7 is really great in terms of the KDE support, having said that, previous releases were S A D and painful to witness.

That is my only complaint with fedora 7 too, after its pulled down primary.sqlite.bz2 its fine.

As I mentioned earlier, this "problem" is caused by the fact that YUM checks to see if the repositories have been updated every time it gets run (Like apt-get update), and if they are it pulls down the updated repo data in the form of the primary.sqlite.bz2 file.

sun java out-the-box would also be nice, its sad that since sun put java on the gpl , most of the core components are not owned by them which means their is no java.

That's stretching it quite a bit. It's some quite large components that Sun can't release, however pretty much all the core of Java has out there.

I know following http://liquidat.wordpress.com/2007/05/3 ... -fedora-7/
will work but still its an inconvenience.

Blame Sun and their previous, notoriously awful licensing policies for Java. Also, for Fedora 8, they're gonna include something they call IcedTea, which is Sun's OpenJDK (Which is the GPLed Java sources), with the propritary "binary plugs" (As Sun calls them) replaced with stuff from Classpath and GCJ. It'll be extremely interesting to see how this develops.

Troels even uses Java and he is one of the strongest free software uses around

You got me there. However, my reason for insisting on free software is slightly different than that of Richard Stallman. My reason is for the maximum level of privacy. In this day in age where governments are all out to spy on us, I don't want to use something which I can't fully control. Despite being under a restrictive license, ever since Java came out in like 1995, you have been able to get the source code for it, so you could audit it for backdoors if you wanted to, that's enough for me to say "OK, I'll use it for the few things I need, but no way in hell will I advocate other users or developers using it". Having said that, I do deeply admire, and aspire to, the ideals of free software.