[conspire] (forw) Re: Need to Install Ubuntu Linux

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Ivan Sergio Borgonovo (mail at webthatworks.it):

> I don't know about GNOME. I'm currently running xfce4 after many
> years running KDE. I switched to xfce4 mostly for stability and a
> bit disappointment about akonadi.

Xfce4 in my experience has been about the same in resource-intensiveness
as GNOME2, which in turn is/was markedly _less_ resource-intensive than 
GNOME3.  At the time I was spending time comparing GNOME2 and Xfce4, 
the latter's main distinguisher was that it didn't rely on a
ridiculously bloated process tree, i.e., you could look at ps output and
not wonder 'What the hell are all these things?'  But, by contrast, the 
needed hardware resources were about the same.

I don't spend a lot of time on DEs generally, because personally I see
them as a solution to the wrong problem and not anything I have reason
to want.  Given a good distro with functional content policy (yeah, I do
mean specifically Debian), I can and do install individual applications
on a best-of-breed basis without caring or often even knowing what their
DE allegiance are.  From this perspective, a DE is a flock of
applications that all happen to need certain characteristic libs bundled
together with a graphical file manager, window manager, session manager,
and display manager.  I look at that DE bundle (and all other such DE
bundles) and I think, 'Why would I want the bundle?'  Smarter to ignore
the bundle completely, cherry-pick the individual contents I want, and
say no-thanks to the rest.

And, seriously, pushing a graphical file manager as a key feature?  When
I need bash to be graphical, I run it in an xterm.  ;->  Adding little
pictograms is cute but is no way to manage files.


My lack of regard for DE bundles extends to 'Akonadi framework', which I
understand to be merely a bundle of KMail, KAddressBook,  KOrganizer,
KJots, and KAlarm all modified to use a central data store calld Akonadi
that in turn is back-ended into MySQL by default, plus temporary cache
file ~/.local/share/akonadi/file_db_data .  

So, great, a bunch of your personal productivity applications are now a
dependency hairball, you have no idea how to debug anything any more,
and good luck with a backup strategy.


> KDE is changing faster than xfce4 and it is made of way more parts
> and this has side effects if you're running sid.

Yeah, that's one reason I figure, when people claim KDE4 is great these
days, I say 'You first.'  ;->  And I've heard way too many horror
stories about KDE autocorruption of its files.  Which is, as a different
but similar example of such a situation, _also_ what we at Cadence
Design Systems kept running into, during attempts to use RHEL's GNOME2
as a standard corporate desktop around 2005-2008.  (In fairness,
Cadence's corporate deployment of autofs/NFS is pathologically
overcomplex, but GNOME2 couldn't deal with homedirs on that at all, and
was unusable.  Nothing else had that problem, at the time.)


> Having said that... KDE is pretty fast, contrary to xfce4 it will
> gain wayland support and it doesn't use that much ram compared to
> xfce4 while it provides many more useful services.
> 
> But you know... I'm a systemd fan, no surprise I fancy KDE.

{shrug}

Haven't seriously looked at it lately, and I would rather focus on
matters of greater interest to yr. humble servant.  Glad you like it.


> You really have to use a pretty old very low end computer to have
> any reason to complain about speed even if you've many things
> running.

Again, I really don't think you have any idea about the wacky ways
typical desktop users often abuse RAM and then are surprised by the
adverse results.  (I have no personal use for colossal amounts of RAM, 
e.g., above 4GB, outside of VM usage, yet more RAM is indisputably
better and is more often than anything else the best hardware place to
bestow discretionary money.  VM usage is a killer feature, though.
E.g., anyone doing Operations workd really needs to run Qubes OS for
security reasons, and that's all about compartmentalisation by
hypervisor.  Don't even think of using it without at _least_ 4GB, and
more is a lot better.)

> Typical desktop users run Windows.

If you put it that way, they use smartphones.  ;->


> >Anyway, I've always appreciated the way Linux can always put more RAM to
> >good use as disk cache, if nothing else.
> 
> It really depends on what you do with your box.

No, it really doesn't.  Linux _can_ lways put more RAM to good use as
disk cache, if nothing else.