On Mon, 2003-09-01 at 18:20, Nicos Gollan wrote: > On Tuesday 02 September 2003 00:02, Neal Lippman wrote: > > I'm just wondering if anyone has any info on why X seems to need so much > > CPU power? > > It's not X eating resources like mad, it's the way desktop environments > forcing it to do things that it was never meant to do.It was never meant to > display eye candy like KDE and Gnome feature. You'll find that it's doing > just fine with a "lighter" window manager that doesn't use transparencies and > tons of bitmaps for window decorations (FVWM2, OLWM, WindowMaker, etc.). > WindowMaker should run OK on a Pentium 266 measured on its performance on my > 150MHz laptop w/32MB RAM. After some time you won't miss too many things. > > IMO the whole X(free) system needs a healthy kick in the butt. It's one of the > main factors in keeping Linux away from the desktop, not just lacking in > performance and features, but also a royal PITA to configure with new > problems cropping up every five minutes. > > I'm going to bed now. But perhaps this one will keep people away from the > "Quoting" and C popularity threads which are scrolling off to the right; > reading them is like coding python with a tabwidth of 8. (xinerama is another > thing in X that's FUBAR while we're at it, I literally *lost my mouse > pointer* while trying to set it up.) > Well, most replies to my posting have pinned the "blame" on KDE and Gnome rather than X per se. I'll have to reinstall on the laptop and see how it looks with a more minimal WM.
This does still beg the question of how Win95/98/Me/NT, etc, managed to provide a reasonable "desktop" when KDE/Gnome could not, however. It really doesn't seem to me that either KDE or Gnome provide a more complex desktop environment than Windows, at least not from the end-user perspective, even if the underlying OS (eg Linux vs Windows) is more robust and possible more feature-full. From what little I know of X, I'd tend to agree that X is being overtaxed supporting a desktop environment that it was never designed to do. Aside from the present market penetration of X (which could also be used to argue to stick with Windows instead of ever having adopted Linux), what would be the obstacle (other than, of course, the time/effort for development) for a new graphics paradigm to sit atop Linux? [Yes, I know there'd be a lot of apps to redo and so forth as well, although if there were a Gtk+ compatibility layer...) -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]