[conspire] Ubuntu 6.10 [was Re: ... distro news]

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Daniel Gimpelevich (daniel at gimpelevich.san-francisco.ca.us):

> Yes, a year and a half ago, I chose GNOME over both xfce4 and wmaker, and
> found it to be even lighter than xfce4 in the setup that suited me.

Well, I'll certainly try GNOME again (things change), but, when last I
tried it, it gobbled enormously more RAM (even after moderate tweaking)
than did Xfce4 -- or, obviously, Window Maker -- and additionally
cluttered up the process list with a huge number of autospawned
processes I mostly had no obvious reason to want to run.  Additionally,
with either of the two non-GNOME desktops, there's a great deal less
visual clutter.  (Tastes and criteria differ widely, of course.)

In particular, GNOME performance including but not limited to memory
loading was just plain unacceptable (again, after moderate tweaking) 
on my 256 MB and 320MB (or whatever it is) G3 iBooks -- whereas both
Window Maker and (surprise!) Xfce4 performed well.

I can't remember exactly when I last check, but it was definitely on
current stable releases (primarily Ubuntu) within the last 1.5 years.