3 ms·

Review: Linux Mint 11 "Katya" LXDE

16 points by darkduck 15y ago

wyclif 15y ago
Any thoughts on the "unholy mess" (e.g. Linus) front regarding XFCE/GNOME 2 vs. GNOME 3?
rjbond3rd 15y ago
This review is seriously flawed. The author only reviews the Live USB version, and is disappointed that the distro is using 320Mb of RAM (!). And claims it doesn't feel faster than Gnome. The distro will tend to use whatever RAM is available (as it should). LXDE is -absolutely- much snappier than Gnome on an older system, but the reviewer is presumably on a system that is "too fast" to show that. The reviewer should have (a) installed it, (b) used a slow machine with a couple different levels of RAM for fair comparisons (e.g., 512Mb and 1Gb -- while 256Mb will work, it will start swapping once Firefox is in use, and 256Mb of RAM is very rare even on very old machines like the one I'm using now, which is 5 years old and has 512Mb of RAM soldered to the motherboard).
rkalla 15y ago
I have such a problem getting excited about rewrapped Linux distribution releases since these are all just recombinations of the same base software with no new core features. A different theme? Sure... but is my 3D card supported any better? No. What about printer? No. What about better 3D compositing? No. What about rendering performance? No. What about runtime performance (excluding < 5% gains via GCC args)? No. Better Office file support? No. Better/Different office apps or computing utilities like CD/DVD burners? No. Blu-ray support? No. I might be interested in a new Fedora release because RedHat writes a lot of its own software. Ubuntu, same thing. Maybe seeing a new release of Gnome or KDE in action in any of these distros is nice... but once you get past that I just don't care what new remixing of all the same ingredients is going to give me. At some point they all just taste the same. The only differentiator I see anymore is package management systems and that is... probably one of the most uncompelling selling points for a desktop OS I can think of. Arch vs Apt vs RPM vs Portage vs... and which one makes my linux desktop more functional, compatible and featureful? Or right, none of them. I dream sometimes about where the Linux Desktop scene would be if people were capable of working together and not rewriting/replacing underlying frameworks with "so much better" ones every 2 years. Linux on the server is brilliant, I attribute the benevolent dictator Linus with that; he forces backwards compatibility, consistency and good design into the kernel. Linux on the desktop is passable, has always been just passable and will likely always be passable when compared to other singularly visioned efforts (Windows, Mac, Android eventually). For those that have been around in Linux long enough, you remember the RedHat 5/Mandrake days when Linux on the desktop, relatively speaking, was exactly where it is now. Always ALMOST "good", never great, and "the year of linux on the desktop" was ALWAYS right around the corner. The next year, the year after that, OH WAIT, right after we get this framework and X rewrite done. Woops, well once dbus is in, MAN, it will definitely be ready then. The idea that Linux on the tablet/portable computer will ever compete with what iOS, Android or Windows eventually become is... infinitely optimistic. Even Ubuntu with magnitudes times more resources, focus and vision than the fractured Linux landscape was unable to create a cohesive desktop vision without changing gears mid-stream to something totally new, disliked and likely deprecated in 2 years (Unity). Linux on the desktop is too big of a problem with too many moving parts. It is more than a GUI, more than drivers, more than the X rendering framework (or whatever replaces it eventually), more than package management and more than 3D acceleration. It is all of it, plus polish plus apps plus stable APIs, plus support, plus backward compatibility. And that is never going to come out of the community on its own.

16 points by darkduck 15y ago

Any thoughts on the "unholy mess" (e.g. Linus) front regarding XFCE/GNOME 2 vs. GNOME 3?

This review is seriously flawed. The author only reviews the Live USB version, and is disappointed that the distro is using 320Mb of RAM (!). And claims it doesn't feel faster than Gnome. The distro will tend to use whatever RAM is available (as it should). LXDE is -absolutely- much snappier than Gnome on an older system, but the reviewer is presumably on a system that is "too fast" to show that. The reviewer should have (a) installed it, (b) used a slow machine with a couple different levels of RAM for fair comparisons (e.g., 512Mb and 1Gb -- while 256Mb will work, it will start swapping once Firefox is in use, and 256Mb of RAM is very rare even on very old machines like the one I'm using now, which is 5 years old and has 512Mb of RAM soldered to the motherboard).

rkalla 15y ago

I have such a problem getting excited about rewrapped Linux distribution releases since these are all just recombinations of the same base software with no new core features. A different theme? Sure... but is my 3D card supported any better? No. What about printer? No. What about better 3D compositing? No. What about rendering performance? No. What about runtime performance (excluding < 5% gains via GCC args)? No. Better Office file support? No. Better/Different office apps or computing utilities like CD/DVD burners? No. Blu-ray support? No. I might be interested in a new Fedora release because RedHat writes a lot of its own software. Ubuntu, same thing. Maybe seeing a new release of Gnome or KDE in action in any of these distros is nice... but once you get past that I just don't care what new remixing of all the same ingredients is going to give me. At some point they all just taste the same. The only differentiator I see anymore is package management systems and that is... probably one of the most uncompelling selling points for a desktop OS I can think of. Arch vs Apt vs RPM vs Portage vs... and which one makes my linux desktop more functional, compatible and featureful? Or right, none of them. I dream sometimes about where the Linux Desktop scene would be if people were capable of working together and not rewriting/replacing underlying frameworks with "so much better" ones every 2 years. Linux on the server is brilliant, I attribute the benevolent dictator Linus with that; he forces backwards compatibility, consistency and good design into the kernel. Linux on the desktop is passable, has always been just passable and will likely always be passable when compared to other singularly visioned efforts (Windows, Mac, Android eventually). For those that have been around in Linux long enough, you remember the RedHat 5/Mandrake days when Linux on the desktop, relatively speaking, was exactly where it is now. Always ALMOST "good", never great, and "the year of linux on the desktop" was ALWAYS right around the corner. The next year, the year after that, OH WAIT, right after we get this framework and X rewrite done. Woops, well once dbus is in, MAN, it will definitely be ready then. The idea that Linux on the tablet/portable computer will ever compete with what iOS, Android or Windows eventually become is... infinitely optimistic. Even Ubuntu with magnitudes times more resources, focus and vision than the fractured Linux landscape was unable to create a cohesive desktop vision without changing gears mid-stream to something totally new, disliked and likely deprecated in 2 years (Unity). Linux on the desktop is too big of a problem with too many moving parts. It is more than a GUI, more than drivers, more than the X rendering framework (or whatever replaces it eventually), more than package management and more than 3D acceleration. It is all of it, plus polish plus apps plus stable APIs, plus support, plus backward compatibility. And that is never going to come out of the community on its own.