Desktop memory usage

[Luciano Montanaro]

On Monday 11 September 2006 16:24, Martijn Klingens wrote:
> On Sunday 10 September 2006 15:43, Lubos Lunak wrote:
> >  I finally found some time to put together something that I had
> > measured already quite a while ago. And I think the results are
> > interesting. But before I post this somewhere publically I'd appreciate
> > if somebody could at least quickly check it. I'd hate to see this
> > trashed by people just because of some silly stupid mistake that I've
> > managed to overlook. It still needs some final polishing but otherwise
> > I right now consider it complete, so in case you see something wrong,
> > missing or not clear with it, please tell me.
>
> Very interesting read!
>
> Some notes:
>
> * The two sentences "All basic tests that follow are measured against
> this number unless explicitly stated otherwise" are easily overlooked,
> especially the second one where you switch reference platform. Perhaps
> use CAPS and/or put them between *** asterisks *** ?
>
> * For the WindowMaker editor, like Alex said, xemacs, or gvim compiled
> against xlib (the 'g' in gvim is not 'gtk', but 'gui', and it doesn't
> require Gtk). For the file manager, indeed Midnight Commander like Alex
> mentioned.

I'm not sure about xemacs, but I can't see the point in using gvim over vim 
in an xterm. Should not change much, anyway. However, you are likely to be 
wrong about gvim not using gtk -- gvim is very likely to use gtk+, in most 
distributions -- I'm not even sure other toolkits are maintained.  

>
> * The alignment of the numbers in several tables seems broken, even with
> a fixed font. You may want to look at this.
>
> * Isn't a more realistic setup to use the KMix application rather than
> the applet? The applet might need less memory, but eats way too much
> screen space and is way too complex for people who only need a simple
> volume control, so I guess it's out for most people. AFAIK the default is
> the systray app, so replacing it with the applet is a bit of tweaking for
> the happy few who know about it. (Read: this sounds like cheating.)
>
> * Be careful with the sentence "Interestingly enough using Epiphany in
> KDE needs more memory than Firefox" -- so does using Konqueror in GNOME.
> In general it's expensive to use apps from the 'other' desktop,
> regardless of which desktop is the host and which is the guest
>
> * While KOffice is certainly a lot less resource hungry it is also not
> capable enough yet for most people. Judging by KOffice's pace of
> development it's a good look at the future, but not something you should
> stress right now in your conclusion. KDE + OOo is still 30 Mb lighter
> than GNOME and only 20 Mb heavier than Xfce and much more realistic.
>

Well, looking at the case of a simple document (say a letter), kword is ok, 
and much lighter. I wouldn't use either for "complex" documents anyway.

> Apart from this, thanks for the hard work!

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