[conspire] could Linux desktop go reasonably any faster?

[Ivan Sergio Borgonovo]

On 01/30/2017 06:16 AM, Rick Moen wrote:
> 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,

If you're not on mobile (and probably even if you are, unless the 
software is really really badly written) I doubt you'll perceive the 
difference even on not so modern hardware.

I'd say main problem is stability.
But that's because we are in a new moment of transition (touch, hybrid 
mobile UI, wayland...).
The fact that hardware drivers are involved doesn't make things better.

> 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.

While I'd surely take advantage of more integrated desktop stuff, even 
if it should be integrable on standards, even if I value a GUI, DE 
gimmicks don't make my work substantially faster/easier as new libraries 
or compilers...
So I moved to xfce4 from KDE. It makes easier to use sid.

Still no matter what you say about the *nix philosophy, it is always a 
matter of compromises... or we would be running a microkernel written in 
C++ or whatever...

> 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.

I'm speculating... let me guess how it went... we've to manage data, 
calendar, address book seems to be fit for a DB... hey but we have 
semantic desktop, we need full text search and well now we have a bunch 
of applications that may have to access this DB concurrently then sqlite 
is not suited. Let's go for an instance of MySQL for every user.
And all this because you want to search an email address with the same 
interface you'd like to use to search for a libreoffice file I suppose.
It seems they gave up somehow and nepomuk is dead, replaced by baloo (a 
file search sort of). But I still can't understand why akonadi is still 
around.
Once upon a time the PMI suite in KDE was a nice set of applications and 
if Linux had to aspire to world domination it looked something that 
could really take the place of Outlook/Exchange and it was made in a way 
you didn't have to pick the whole package even if picking up the whole 
package gave advantages.
No more.
Unfortunately Outlook/Exchange are still around.

I don't think that's a fault of "integration" rather of too much grandeur.

>> 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 you can't relate KDE failures to the failure of following the *nix 
philosophy. The development process and the community behind KDE is 
pretty different from the one behind GNOME or xfce4.
There should be a cathedral in each bazaar.

>> 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.

Not bad, you take a lot of enthusiast people, let them play and be sure 
you'll see something interesting.
It's such a pain that interesting stuff get submerged by chaos.

>> 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.

Not in my use case.

I was just thinking what's going to get in my RAM... I know that I 
rarely go above 2.5Gb. I know that everything that get loaded from disk 
goes into RAM cache, so I did some df/du around, excluding archives I'm 
using around 40Gb, but 20Gb are VM images that I rarely use.
I didn't want to dig deeper but I came to the conclusion that most of 
the things on my SSD are there to take dust.

These are the reasons my computer is slower than I'd like:
- compiling stuff (CPU constrained I think)
- running JS on web sites (stupidity constrained)
- freezed browsers (bug constrained)
- play video (bad hardware drivers)

>> Typical desktop users run Windows.
>
> If you put it that way, they use smartphones.  ;->

I rarely see people using their phone on a desk.

Probably mobile users are constrained by bandwidth, JS, batteries, ipv6 
lack of adoption and... bad software.

>>> 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.

Apparently 4Gb are way more than what I have to cache in a day.

Waiting Ryzen. I hope at least for some more competition.

-- 
Ivan Sergio Borgonovo
http://www.webthatworks.it http://www.borgonovo.net