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Forget GNOME and KDE, Xfce 4.8 Runs Simpler and Faster
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Comments (18)
LXDE and Enlightenment?
Enlightenment? Really?
That surprises me given that e is really pretty darned snazzy.
That surprises me given that e is really pretty darned snazzy.
Lxde didn't thrill me, and the only experience I've had with E is with the E-Live CD, so seriously I couldn't say.
I don't have my single-core system any more to try them out for speed. Everything works pretty well for me speed wise, it's feature bloat and "look and feel" that make/break.
Lastly, in terms of "speed", isn't it really speed for what you use it for? Even KDE4, with all the bells and whistles turned off that can be turned off, is fast enough.
I don't have my single-core system any more to try them out for speed. Everything works pretty well for me speed wise, it's feature bloat and "look and feel" that make/break.
Lastly, in terms of "speed", isn't it really speed for what you use it for? Even KDE4, with all the bells and whistles turned off that can be turned off, is fast enough.
Enlightenment can boot to around 60megs of RAM if you strip things down. Around 100megs on a typical config
~Jeff
~Jeff
I'd like to support Bob_Robertson's last comment about "speed".
I was around at a Linux friend's place yesterday where both of us had a bit of "show and tell" fun about our latest DE's. He showed off Xfce and what it can do, and I showed him KDE4.4 running in the "all bells and whistles, KDE3.5 approx. mode". I could see very little difference in speeds between the two in practical terms, and my friend (who really does love tinkering for speed) quietly commented that KDE4 under my settings was quite satisfactory as regards speed. Xfce is undoubtedly faster, but to me at least, the difference isn't significant in terms of what I can do at the desktop.
I was around at a Linux friend's place yesterday where both of us had a bit of "show and tell" fun about our latest DE's. He showed off Xfce and what it can do, and I showed him KDE4.4 running in the "all bells and whistles, KDE3.5 approx. mode". I could see very little difference in speeds between the two in practical terms, and my friend (who really does love tinkering for speed) quietly commented that KDE4 under my settings was quite satisfactory as regards speed. Xfce is undoubtedly faster, but to me at least, the difference isn't significant in terms of what I can do at the desktop.
Ridcully,
While I see what you're saying, I can't help but conclude that your "show and tell" was not a fair comparison that would be helpful for anyone except you and your friend. After all, you were using your own heavily modified, "chopped" KDE4, and your friend was using his own tweaked Xfce.
Plus, you didn't mention how your friend's and your hardware compared, or whether either of you were running on older hardware.
So, while I greatly admire your skill and patience in being able to modify KDE4 to make it more like KDE3.5 -- as well as your skill in describing that entire process in articles (3 of them, so far) here at LXer -- your "show and tell" doesn't provide much helpful information to typical KDE4 users who wouldn't have your knowledge, skills or patience, and would therefore normally not do all of the tweaking that you did.
In other words -- and to use a bad analogy -- even a fully loaded garbage truck can beat a Maserati on a 1/4-mile track -- if you strap enough jet engines onto it. But that wouldn't really provide a fair comparison of the speed of a Maserati and the speed of a fully loaded garbage truck.
And no, I'm not saying that the stock KDE4 is like a fully loaded garbage truck -- I wouldn't want to be accused of plagiarism. ;)
Plus, you didn't mention how your friend's and your hardware compared, or whether either of you were running on older hardware.
So, while I greatly admire your skill and patience in being able to modify KDE4 to make it more like KDE3.5 -- as well as your skill in describing that entire process in articles (3 of them, so far) here at LXer -- your "show and tell" doesn't provide much helpful information to typical KDE4 users who wouldn't have your knowledge, skills or patience, and would therefore normally not do all of the tweaking that you did.
In other words -- and to use a bad analogy -- even a fully loaded garbage truck can beat a Maserati on a 1/4-mile track -- if you strap enough jet engines onto it. But that wouldn't really provide a fair comparison of the speed of a Maserati and the speed of a fully loaded garbage truck.
And no, I'm not saying that the stock KDE4 is like a fully loaded garbage truck -- I wouldn't want to be accused of plagiarism. ;)
Jeff has more than a little skin in the game, as it were, as the lead developer of an Enlightenment-running distro:
http://www.bodhilinux.com/index.html
Not that there's anything wrong with that ...
I've tried Bodhi, and I think it's very good.
http://www.bodhilinux.com/index.html
Not that there's anything wrong with that ...
I've tried Bodhi, and I think it's very good.
> ...quietly commented that KDE4 under my settings was quite satisfactory as regards speed.
So, your KDE 4, which you spent weeks configuring to your satisfaction, is almost as fast as his "out of the box" XFCE. In investing circles, we'd call that a poor return on investment. :)
So, your KDE 4, which you spent weeks configuring to your satisfaction, is almost as fast as his "out of the box" XFCE. In investing circles, we'd call that a poor return on investment. :)
Run KDE 4.x and then LXDE/Enlightenment on a netbook or some other low end system. You will see a huge difference.
~Jeff
~Jeff
Reminder of the Distinction Between a DE and a WM
Byfield starts off his piece by writing:
AAMOF, although Byfield does not specifically mention this in the piece, LXDE also happens to be another viable Desktop Environment.
The distinction between a Desktop Environment and a Window Manager is well-worth mentioning here as a reminder.
A good expose of this distinction is Matt Chapman's 'Window Managers for X: Introduction' found at http://xwinman.org/intro.php .
Chapman writes appropriately in his section Window Managers:
Again, a Desktop Environment can be distinguished from a Window Manager.
Several commonly-used, non-native WM's are
- Window Maker, http://www.windowmaker.info/
- IceWM, http://www.icewm.org/
- Fluxbox, http://fluxbox.org/
- FVWM, http://www.fvwm.org/
- AfterStep, http://www.afterstep.org/
(see also Chapman's 'relative popularity of the window managers' found at http://xwinman.org/vote.php )
A practical use of this DE-WM distinction is the possibility that Byfield and/or others can experiment and discover whether one or more of these non-native WM's can effectively balance "convenience and speed" as well as or even BETTER THAN the native WM of a particular DE (e.g., the Desktop Environments GNOME,KDE,Xfce,LXDE).
Quoting:A few times each month, I tire of the complexities of GNOME and KDE. Then I turn to a simpler, faster desktop for a couple of days or a week -- and that desktop, more often than not, is Xfce. No other desktop I’m aware of balances convenience and speed half so well.When Byfield mentions "No other desktop...", he presumably means a Desktop Environment.
AAMOF, although Byfield does not specifically mention this in the piece, LXDE also happens to be another viable Desktop Environment.
The distinction between a Desktop Environment and a Window Manager is well-worth mentioning here as a reminder.
A good expose of this distinction is Matt Chapman's 'Window Managers for X: Introduction' found at http://xwinman.org/intro.php .
Chapman writes appropriately in his section Window Managers:
Quoting:One of the guiding philosophies of The X Window System (and also UNIX itself) is that its functionality is achieved through the co-operation of separate components, rather than everything being entwined in one huge mass (or should that be mess?). The advantage of this is that a particular part of the system can be changed simply by replacing the relevant component. The best example of this is the concept of a window manager which is essentially the component which controls the appearance of windows and provides the means by which the user can interact with them. Virtually everything which appears on the screen in X is in a window, and a window manager quite simply manages them.
Let's face it, people are different, and those that use computers use them in different ways for different tasks. So why do some think we should all use (suffer?) the same interface? Fortunately X doesn't suffer from this degree of rigidity, and to this end, a large number of window managers have been developed, which between them provide a large range of different appearances and different behaviours. Furthermore, most of these window managers are themselves heavily customisable. This means that a newcomer to X has firstly a choice of window manager, and then a choice of the precise configuration of the chosen window manager.
And on top of that, more recent developments have created a new breed of desktop environments which aim to provide a more complete interface to the operating system, and supply their own range of integrated utilities and applications. This convenience and ease of use makes them particularly attractive to new users, which has made them very popular in the rapidly growing Linux market, with distributors like Red Hat bundling the two main freely available desktops (KDE and GNOME).
Again, a Desktop Environment can be distinguished from a Window Manager.
Several commonly-used, non-native WM's are
- Window Maker, http://www.windowmaker.info/
- IceWM, http://www.icewm.org/
- Fluxbox, http://fluxbox.org/
- FVWM, http://www.fvwm.org/
- AfterStep, http://www.afterstep.org/
(see also Chapman's 'relative popularity of the window managers' found at http://xwinman.org/vote.php )
A practical use of this DE-WM distinction is the possibility that Byfield and/or others can experiment and discover whether one or more of these non-native WM's can effectively balance "convenience and speed" as well as or even BETTER THAN the native WM of a particular DE (e.g., the Desktop Environments GNOME,KDE,Xfce,LXDE).
Quoting:A practical use of this DE-WM distinction is the possibility that Byfield and/or others can experiment and discover whether one or more of these non-native WM's can effectively balance "convenience and speed" as well as or even BETTER THAN the native WM of a particular DE (e.g., the Desktop Environments GNOME,KDE,Xfce,LXDE).
YES! I'm a very happy Gnome user for some time now.... with Awesome WM as my Window Manager.
I still don't know the difference.
The "window manager" is just that, and only that. So "Kwm" is the window manager used by the KDE "desktop environment".
It's like saying "engine" and "car". Car includes engine, even if you can swap it for other engines, but engine does not include the whole car.
It's like saying "engine" and "car". Car includes engine, even if you can swap it for other engines, but engine does not include the whole car.
So what's the rest of the desktop environment? If you bundle a file manager and a few config. utilities, you have a DE?
This reminds me of the argument that "Linux is a kernel, not an operating system!" One of those technical niceties that aren't particularly relevant anymore. Way back in the olden days of Gnome 1.4 it was fun to swap window managers just to see what difference it made, and then complain bitterly when Gnome 2.x was released in all of its incapable glory, using the feeble Metacity window manager that couldn't do anything. But then neither could Gnome. I remember trying to use Sawfish, but it was pointless and I joined the legions of defectors that went to Enlightenment, KDE, and other graphical environments.
I understand that not everyone cares about, or considers there to still be a considerable difference between, a DE and a WM.
But those of us who do, still appreciate the clarity and efficiency of communication that can be achieved when others properly use the two terms -- and cringe at the loss of it when others use them interchangeably.
But those of us who do, still appreciate the clarity and efficiency of communication that can be achieved when others properly use the two terms -- and cringe at the loss of it when others use them interchangeably.
> If you bundle a file manager and a few config. utilities, you have a DE?
File manager, sound control, printer control, keyboard settings, mouse settings, desktop settings (background, screensaver, shortcuts, etc.), logout function, application lauching, and probably a few other things I'm not thinking of. All of which could be assembled on a piece it together yourself basis, and some of which are actually provided by the windowing system itself, but are supplanted by the DE.
File manager, sound control, printer control, keyboard settings, mouse settings, desktop settings (background, screensaver, shortcuts, etc.), logout function, application lauching, and probably a few other things I'm not thinking of. All of which could be assembled on a piece it together yourself basis, and some of which are actually provided by the windowing system itself, but are supplanted by the DE.
Quoting:If you bundle a file manager and a few config. utilities, you have a DE?I run Sawfish, with Ctrl-Alt-T configured to open a terminal window. After that, I have all the utilities I need, right at my fingertips.
On my netbook (EeePC 90[0?/1?]), it's a very nice DE.
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~Jeff