[geeks] GNOME may improve in the future...

[Charles Shannon Hendrix]

Kevin wrote:
> That's good, but it's got a damn long way to go before it
> approaches anything near useful.  A 70% speed increase might not
> be enough for me personally.  I'll keep WindowMaker for now.

I have an AMD64 3000 with 1GB of RAM, and I rarely notice Gnome 
performance problems, but it is pretty stupid that a basic desktop 
requires a hefty machine just to run well.

Also, apps still do load slower than they should, and after enough are 
running the load is notable.

The biggest problem for me is the bugs.  It seems like they never get 
fixed.  Just simple things like file browsing, one of the biggest 
reasons to use a desktop setup, crashes all the time, leaving you to 
start over with whatever you were doing.  The lost context alone ruins 
the desktop metaphor.

If you run a trace on any Gnome code that starts up, you'll see each 
program does dozens to *thousands* of directory and file operations, 
finding and loading needed data.

Surely the more reasonable approach would be to ask a server for that 
information, so it only needed to be fetched once.  Even if you had to 
use IPC to transfer redundant copies of data, it should be faster than 
going to the filesystem all the time.

Of course, ideally applications would not be doing so much themselves in 
the first place.  Even fonts are handled by the app layer, which means 
massive redundancy just by itself.  Hopefully as X changes to more of 
the Apple PDF model, we'll see more of Gnome foundations move out of the 
applications and make them a bit leaner.

Of course, you have to remember that Gnome developers don't seem to be 
interested in efficiency.  If you complain about code being slow, they 
say buy a faster machine, even if the algorithm in question is the 
problem rather than your hardware.

They are using more and more .NET stuff too (called Mono in Gnome), 
which is like running a bunch of Java apps.

Of course, Sun is doing the same kind of thing: you can't even get a Sun 
installer anymore that isn't a slow and bloated Java program.  Even 
their batch shell installers are bloated Java code now.

What moron decided that it would be OK to fire up a 300MB virtual 
machine just to do an install?