Well in response to the slowness of X, yes it does seem a little slower in
terms of not being snappy when you open a pull down menu compared to win 95 or
NT on the same machine. HOWEVER, I'm pleased by the multitasking aspect of
Linux and how when I open a program, say Netscape, I can go to anther part of
the screen and continue working as if nothing has happened. Try to use this to
your best advantage and I hope you'll agree that Linux can be much faster with
a little tuning of YOUR practices. This is one of the main reasons why I
switched to Linux. (yes there will still be times when the system temporarily
"hangs" trying to do some very large tasks, ie large PDF files, then again
I'm using a P133)
As stated below, and I'll say again, KDE/Gnome are both hogs and with a
little tuning of one of the smaller Window Managers it'll do all that you want
AND more with little expense of memory and processor time.
See below, for example the resident size of fvwm2 is 780K, compared to
gnuplot 628K and X itself 5.5MB, each term is 300K (rxvt), not bad I could
easily get by w/ less than 16mb of memory. Translating to 48mb this means that
I can run A LOT of programs at once and still barely ever swap! Ohh I added
netscape, 11.7mb, 15X larger than fvwm2 and 2X larger than X, which one
(netscape or X) has to do more things, hummm I guess netscape is poorly done...
[ps. I just quoted the resident sizes since shared resources are still a
little shady to me and I can't put my finger on just what number really makes
the most sense since I haven't bothered to track down just how many libs are
being shared by what etc..., but resident sounds like a reasonable measure. :) ]
john 490 0.0 1.6 2312 780 tty1 S Mar13 0:29 fvwm2
xfs 420 0.0 0.1 2352 60 ? S Mar13 0:01 xfs -droppriv
john 496 0.0 0.6 2372 296 tty1 S Mar13 0:38 rxvt -bg black
john 492 0.0 0.7 2572 328 tty1 S Mar13 0:24 xclock -digital
john 12187 0.0 1.9 2640 932 pts/3 R 14:44 0:00 ps -auxO v
john 3152 0.0 1.2 2800 596 pts/5 S Mar17 0:04 gnuplot_x11
john 3151 0.0 1.3 2968 628 pts/5 S Mar17 0:36 gnuplot
john 493 0.0 1.6 3084 752 tty1 S Mar13 0:50 xscreensaver
john 12149 0.2 3.7 3364 1752 tty1 S 14:30 0:02 xterm -bg black
root 3135 1.1 0.0 5640 0 pts/4 RW Mar17 17442:32 xdos
root 486 2.1 11.7 9644 5504 ? S Mar13 3480:40 /etc/X11/X :0
john 12190 20.1 24.9 20256 11672 tty1 S 14:50 0:05 netscape
Ultimately the decision is YOURS and yours alone, good luck.
-John
> writes:
>> Actually, I exaggerated a bit, I know this is a big thing in the future.
>> Don't you guys notice
>> the slowness of running netscape on linux?
>No, but I do notice that Netscape is a a memory and resource hog, but
>thats is mainly because it has a huge set of libraries statically linked
>in.
>> Is there a way of improving this?
>More memory will help. I consider 64Meg a minimum if you are running
>Netscape and/or Gnome.
>> If you don't
>> use gnome, what is better for the speed?
>Just about anything. I run a stripped down fvwm95. Windowmaker, IceWM
>and blackbox are also all worth considering.
>Erik
>--
>+-------------------------------------------------+
>+-------------------------------------------------+
>"There are two ways of constructing a software design. One way is
> to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies
> and the other is to make it so complicated that there are no
> obvious deficiencies." -- C A R Hoare
by