How Slow is KDE?

[Bill Campbell]

On Mon, Jan 23, 2006, Dallam Wych wrote:
>On Sun, Jan 22, 2006 at 11:06:41AM -0700, Collins Richey wrote:
>> All joking aside, yes KDE is bloated, and so is Gnome and so is XFCE4,
>> but it floats the boat of a lot of users, and it's quite useful for a
>> lot of folks who couldn't hack my less bloated icewm setup.
>
>> IMO, Gnome is a piece of animal droppings moving uphill not horizontally.
>
>While I will readily admit Gnome could benefit by someone giving it
>a clue, Kde looks like it was written by a group of fifth graders
>using crayons :)

I've never seriously used any Linux distribution that used Gnome as the
default desktop system, so my main points of reference on Linux are kde and
xfce.  Now I generally run the distribution's default desktop, figuring
that it will provide the best integration with the system.

For the average desktop user, the most import things about KDE or Gnome is
how they integrate access to system resouces (e.g. hardware) so that the
user doesn't have to deal with proper permissions to read and write to
devices.

I used xfce < 4 for quite a while, but it was always somewhat of a hassle
to configure when moving to new machines or updating systems, and I have
better things to do than spend a lot of time dealing with desktop
configuration.  It takes me a couple of minutes on a new KDE system in the
control panel to get the system to my liking, turn off autologin and the
show users icons in the login screen, set focus follows mouse, and turn off
click-raise.

Recently, my primary desktop has been on a Mac Mini running OS X Tiger
where I have about 34 xterms open in X11 under the (gasp) quartz-wm.  It
isn't ideal, but it works, and, unlike xfce, it's reasonably easy to cut
and paste with the mouse between x11 and native Apple applications.

It doesn't look all that different from my first X11 desktop on OS X pre-
jaguar shown in the page below that I used to make a presentation to a OS X
user group meeting on integration with Linux about four years ago.

	http://support.celestial.com/doc/osx

Bill
--
INTERNET:   bill at Celestial.COM  Bill Campbell; Celestial Software LLC
URL: http://www.celestial.com/  PO Box 820; 6641 E. Mercer Way
FAX:            (206) 232-9186  Mercer Island, WA 98040-0820; (206) 236-1676

``One of the common failings among honorable people is a failure to
appreciate how thoroughly dishonorable some other people can be, and how
dangerous it is to trust them.''
    - Thomas Sowell