8 ms·

>KDE is my desktop environment of choice. KDE5 is rock-solid, configurable in any way possible and works great. It treats you like a responsible adult instead o

by prvc 5y ago

>KDE is my desktop environment of choice. KDE5 is rock-solid, configurable in any way possible and works great. It treats you like a responsible adult instead of a child like GNOME does these days, and after XFCE switched to GTK3, the RAM usage is on-par, more often than not a bare KDE install (Debian or Arch) uses around 300MB ram. This is with Baloo (search indexer) and Akonadi (PIM database backend) disabled. The GNOME Foundation's supposed rationale for removing basic functionality from its desktop is to help inexperienced users, and international users. However, those are precisely the same users who are more likely to have a shortage of computing resources. GTK's bloat is really indefensible.

andrekandre 5y ago
its kind of ironic if you think about it, youd think removing features and simplification should allow for more optimization not less...
- nyanpasu64 5y ago
  Except GNOME rewrote GNOME Shell in JavaScript. I don't think GTK3 requires GJS, so I'm not sure why it uses more RAM than GTK2, maybe due to CSS? I know it's still Cairo-based, not GPU-accelerated or DOM-like.
  - zxzax 5y ago
    I can't say for sure what the deal is with GTK3, but GTK4 apps are GPU accelerated and should be faster. Though it may come at a cost of using more GPU memory, depending on the app.
zdragnar 5y ago
> and international users I might be mistaken here, but it seems to me that the international users who want a simple experience are already well served by smartphones (android or otherwise). The international users who are going to install linux on a laptop are the tinkerers and fiddlers and the self motivated learners who aren't going to be motivated by a dumbed down, inaccessible interface.
- csande17 5y ago
  It's important to remember that GNOME is primarily funded/developed by Red Hat, who are owned by IBM. Red Hat's goal isn't to make something for the kind of person who would install Linux on a laptop themselves -- they're trying to make a clone of macOS they can sell in bulk to enterprise customers. The intended user population is very different.
  - _d7dt 5y ago
    I'm not sure where you heard any of that, but I have never heard any Red Hat employees say anything to that effect, ever. Fedora still exists, and to me that seems perfectly fine to install on a random laptop.
    - csande17 5y ago
      It may surprise you to learn that Red Hat's primary revenue stream is not Fedora, but a separate distribution called "Red Hat Enterprise Linux".
      - zxzax 5y ago
        Sure, but that shouldn't really matter to an ordinary Fedora user, at least not to the ones I've heard from.
        csande17 5y ago
        If Fedora (or GNOME, for that matter) fits your needs, you should feel free to use it! But if you're wondering, like the grandparent comments, why projects like GNOME seem to be moving away from fitting your needs, the answer is that they're being designed for Red Hat's enterprise customers first and any use you get out of them is a happy afterthought.
        zxzax 5y ago
        Again I'm not sure where you got that, I have not heard any Red Hat or Fedora developers say that's the focus. In fact if you follow GNOME development, there are various other directions that people are pulling in. It might be the case coincidentally for some things, but that could be yet another one of those happy afterthoughts.
nextos 5y ago
If you are reasonably experienced and constrained by resources, a great option is to use a window manager without a desktop environment. That's my setup because it has fewer moving parts and lower latency, as there are only a handful of processes running and no compositor.
- hpoe 5y ago
  That's why I now run i3 for my daily driver with emacs.
zxzax 5y ago
I find it pretty disappointing that these type of articles and the resulting comments like yours often can't seem to praise something like IceWM or AwesomeWM without also bashing GNOME or XFCE or something else because of "bloat." Who cares? Do you even care? I don't think you do, you'll just delete that desktop and move on and use whatever you want, and that's the whole point. Also, your characterization of GNOME's rationale is totally wrong. The goal was never to make a desktop with no features, it was more to make a desktop that is streamlined towards certain functionality. If that's not for you, then use a desktop that's more streamlined towards what you want. There's plenty to choose from. What is the real problem? Edit: I also want to address another common misconception that I see -- the GNOME Foundation does not direct development in a top down fashion and does not impose any rationale on the project. If some feature was removed, it was probably because an individual volunteer working on it decided that it wasn't worth spending time on that anymore, possibly because the need was better filled by a different project.
- imwillofficial 5y ago
  > “Who cares? Do you even care? I don't think you do“ > “ The goal was never to make a desktop with no features” Wow, your first paragraph you accuse people of lying at worst, or capriciously taking a position that doesn’t matter to them at best. It gets better in paragraph number two where you misquote GP and go boxing with that strawman. So to address your first paragraph, I’d say people here care a lot, and the bashing they do is not out of a place of tribalism, but out of a place of constructive criticism. Most of us here would LOVE to see improvement in $ArchEnemySoftware, and the failures strike deep because this stuff means so much to us. A mixture of disappointment with the status quo, and/or poor judgement calls with design or execution, rather than knocking a bit of tech that doesn’t appeal to us. As for the second paragraph, GP didn’t say “no features” in reference to GNOME, but decried the basic features that were removed, thereby rendering the software less useful to them. I’d take a brighter outlook on discussions like these, if the points land on the right ears, perhaps positive change might happen in GNOME. We can hope anyway.
  - zxzax 5y ago
    I'm not accusing anyone of that and I'm not misquoting, please stop with this hostility. In my experience, people are happy to switch when it suits them. By "no features" I was referring to those basic features. Sorry for the misunderstanding. I also didn't see any constructive criticism, if you have any specific suggestions for positive change you'd like to make, then please make them. I'm all ears. But for the record, if you'd like to get involved in development, places like HN and reddit are generally not a good place to do it. The people who are most likely to listen to requests don't visit here.
lobstrosity420 5y ago
The idea that the GNOME DE or GTK3/4 are resource intensive is a meme with little basis in reality.
- Zababa 5y ago
  This site asks for 1.5 Go of ram https://ubuntugnome.org/ https://ubuntugnome.org/, Ubuntu 20.04 asks for 4 Go of ram. Compared to the 30 Mo for IceWM in the article (apple to oranges, I know, but still 3 orders of magnitude), or the 300 Mo for KDE. The author also notes that since XFCE switched to GTK3 they use more resources. That seems to be plenty of basis in reality. Perhaps you mean something else by "resource intensive"?
  - csande17 5y ago
    Keep in mind that the 1.5 GB number is the total amount of RAM you need to have a good time using the operating system, not the amount consumed by the window manager alone. Even OP consumes just about a gigabyte of RAM with all the programs on their Raspberry Pi. That's not to say GNOME _isn't_ resource intensive -- it is, especially when compared to desktop environments that were either written to be lightweight or written 30 years ago -- that just isn't the best way to measure it.
    - Zababa 5y ago
      > Keep in mind that the 1.5 GB number is the total amount of RAM you need to have a good time using the operating system, not the amount consumed by the window manager alone. That's why I said apples to oranges initially, but you're right, I could have clarified that part.
  - alisonkisk 5y ago
    What's Go and Mo?
    - Narishma 5y ago
      Gigaoctet and Megaoctet. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octet_(computing) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octet_(computing)
stjohnswarts 5y ago
Yeah but if you don't like it, you can just leave it alone and it's perfectly functional. That said I use Pop_OS! which is gnome based and fine. I like the defaults just fine. I have used all sorts of DE over the years, in the end I decided I didn't really care :) . KDE is fine, Gnome is fine, xmonad is fine.
- approxim8ion 5y ago
  I've been adopting this mindset myself. I've used almost every prominent DE and WM there is, and they're all fine. Varying levels of ugly or beautiful perhaps, but I just want to get past them and onto my actual work.

by prvc 5y ago

andrekandre 5y ago

its kind of ironic if you think about it, youd think removing features and simplification should allow for more optimization not less...

nyanpasu64 5y ago
Except GNOME rewrote GNOME Shell in JavaScript. I don't think GTK3 requires GJS, so I'm not sure why it uses more RAM than GTK2, maybe due to CSS? I know it's still Cairo-based, not GPU-accelerated or DOM-like.
- zxzax 5y ago
  I can't say for sure what the deal is with GTK3, but GTK4 apps are GPU accelerated and should be faster. Though it may come at a cost of using more GPU memory, depending on the app.

zdragnar 5y ago

> and international users I might be mistaken here, but it seems to me that the international users who want a simple experience are already well served by smartphones (android or otherwise). The international users who are going to install linux on a laptop are the tinkerers and fiddlers and the self motivated learners who aren't going to be motivated by a dumbed down, inaccessible interface.

csande17 5y ago
It's important to remember that GNOME is primarily funded/developed by Red Hat, who are owned by IBM. Red Hat's goal isn't to make something for the kind of person who would install Linux on a laptop themselves -- they're trying to make a clone of macOS they can sell in bulk to enterprise customers. The intended user population is very different.
- _d7dt 5y ago
  I'm not sure where you heard any of that, but I have never heard any Red Hat employees say anything to that effect, ever. Fedora still exists, and to me that seems perfectly fine to install on a random laptop.
  - csande17 5y ago
    It may surprise you to learn that Red Hat's primary revenue stream is not Fedora, but a separate distribution called "Red Hat Enterprise Linux".
    - zxzax 5y ago
      Sure, but that shouldn't really matter to an ordinary Fedora user, at least not to the ones I've heard from.
      - csande17 5y ago
        If Fedora (or GNOME, for that matter) fits your needs, you should feel free to use it! But if you're wondering, like the grandparent comments, why projects like GNOME seem to be moving away from fitting your needs, the answer is that they're being designed for Red Hat's enterprise customers first and any use you get out of them is a happy afterthought.
        zxzax 5y ago
        Again I'm not sure where you got that, I have not heard any Red Hat or Fedora developers say that's the focus. In fact if you follow GNOME development, there are various other directions that people are pulling in. It might be the case coincidentally for some things, but that could be yet another one of those happy afterthoughts.

nextos 5y ago

If you are reasonably experienced and constrained by resources, a great option is to use a window manager without a desktop environment. That's my setup because it has fewer moving parts and lower latency, as there are only a handful of processes running and no compositor.

hpoe 5y ago
That's why I now run i3 for my daily driver with emacs.

zxzax 5y ago

I find it pretty disappointing that these type of articles and the resulting comments like yours often can't seem to praise something like IceWM or AwesomeWM without also bashing GNOME or XFCE or something else because of "bloat." Who cares? Do you even care? I don't think you do, you'll just delete that desktop and move on and use whatever you want, and that's the whole point. Also, your characterization of GNOME's rationale is totally wrong. The goal was never to make a desktop with no features, it was more to make a desktop that is streamlined towards certain functionality. If that's not for you, then use a desktop that's more streamlined towards what you want. There's plenty to choose from. What is the real problem? Edit: I also want to address another common misconception that I see -- the GNOME Foundation does not direct development in a top down fashion and does not impose any rationale on the project. If some feature was removed, it was probably because an individual volunteer working on it decided that it wasn't worth spending time on that anymore, possibly because the need was better filled by a different project.

imwillofficial 5y ago
> “Who cares? Do you even care? I don't think you do“ > “ The goal was never to make a desktop with no features” Wow, your first paragraph you accuse people of lying at worst, or capriciously taking a position that doesn’t matter to them at best. It gets better in paragraph number two where you misquote GP and go boxing with that strawman. So to address your first paragraph, I’d say people here care a lot, and the bashing they do is not out of a place of tribalism, but out of a place of constructive criticism. Most of us here would LOVE to see improvement in $ArchEnemySoftware, and the failures strike deep because this stuff means so much to us. A mixture of disappointment with the status quo, and/or poor judgement calls with design or execution, rather than knocking a bit of tech that doesn’t appeal to us. As for the second paragraph, GP didn’t say “no features” in reference to GNOME, but decried the basic features that were removed, thereby rendering the software less useful to them. I’d take a brighter outlook on discussions like these, if the points land on the right ears, perhaps positive change might happen in GNOME. We can hope anyway.
- zxzax 5y ago
  I'm not accusing anyone of that and I'm not misquoting, please stop with this hostility. In my experience, people are happy to switch when it suits them. By "no features" I was referring to those basic features. Sorry for the misunderstanding. I also didn't see any constructive criticism, if you have any specific suggestions for positive change you'd like to make, then please make them. I'm all ears. But for the record, if you'd like to get involved in development, places like HN and reddit are generally not a good place to do it. The people who are most likely to listen to requests don't visit here.

lobstrosity420 5y ago

The idea that the GNOME DE or GTK3/4 are resource intensive is a meme with little basis in reality.

Zababa 5y ago
This site asks for 1.5 Go of ram https://ubuntugnome.org/ https://ubuntugnome.org/, Ubuntu 20.04 asks for 4 Go of ram. Compared to the 30 Mo for IceWM in the article (apple to oranges, I know, but still 3 orders of magnitude), or the 300 Mo for KDE. The author also notes that since XFCE switched to GTK3 they use more resources. That seems to be plenty of basis in reality. Perhaps you mean something else by "resource intensive"?
- csande17 5y ago
  Keep in mind that the 1.5 GB number is the total amount of RAM you need to have a good time using the operating system, not the amount consumed by the window manager alone. Even OP consumes just about a gigabyte of RAM with all the programs on their Raspberry Pi. That's not to say GNOME _isn't_ resource intensive -- it is, especially when compared to desktop environments that were either written to be lightweight or written 30 years ago -- that just isn't the best way to measure it.
  - Zababa 5y ago
    > Keep in mind that the 1.5 GB number is the total amount of RAM you need to have a good time using the operating system, not the amount consumed by the window manager alone. That's why I said apples to oranges initially, but you're right, I could have clarified that part.
- alisonkisk 5y ago
  What's Go and Mo?
  - Narishma 5y ago
    Gigaoctet and Megaoctet. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octet_(computing) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octet_(computing)

stjohnswarts 5y ago

Yeah but if you don't like it, you can just leave it alone and it's perfectly functional. That said I use Pop_OS! which is gnome based and fine. I like the defaults just fine. I have used all sorts of DE over the years, in the end I decided I didn't really care :) . KDE is fine, Gnome is fine, xmonad is fine.

approxim8ion 5y ago
I've been adopting this mindset myself. I've used almost every prominent DE and WM there is, and they're all fine. Varying levels of ugly or beautiful perhaps, but I just want to get past them and onto my actual work.