[geeks] And The Linux Weenies Wonder Why They Aren't Mainstream...`

[Charles Shannon Hendrix]

Tue, 28 Feb 2006 @ 17:27 -0600, Jonathan C. Patschke said:

> Except that it's slower and eats up more memory when doing similar
> tasks.  Even StarOffice 5 (which was the first version I used) was all
> but unusable execpt on the highest-end Sun workstations that were
> available when it came out.

I find that if you have enough memory, OO is just as fast as Word.

Unfortunately, the UNIX world thinks that constant resource waste and
infighting among application frameworks is better than putting all our effort
into just one.

It's no wonder so many commercial companies stay away from the UNIX
application space. For one thing, most of the frameworks are buggy and
unstable, so deploying something you have to support for a period of years is
very difficult.

> My experience has been that OpenOffice and the recent releases of the
> RPM-based Linux distributions miss that point entirely.
> 
> 69473 jp    5  20    0    99M 71484K kserel   0:04  0.00% soffice.bin
> 
> That's OpenOffice with one empty document open.
> 
> 2674 Microsoft  1.8%  0:02.79  2 80   441  17.3M  57.2M  34.4M 444M
>
> That's Word 2004 for Macintosh with a long, complicated legal document
> open.  It's nearly half the size!

Doesn't OpenOffice use Java here and there, or something like that internally?

I think the big problem here is OpenOffice (and other applications) have their
own libraries, plus they also use Gnome and KDE libraries so they'll integrate
with that.

Also, the make use of font libraries and other things like that.

I'm not saying this is good, but the base application itself really isn't all
that big.

> Here's Firefox with nothing open:
> 
> 69921 jp   5  20    0 48600K 36656K kserel 0   0:02  0.00% firefox-bin
> 
> Here's Safari with nothing open:
> 
> 2685 Safari 0.0%  0:01.52   5   113   182  4.62M  21.5M  12.7M 357M

Firefox is truly horrible.

I am doing WWW programming on contract right now, so I frequently hit my
application pages hundreds of times in a relatively short period of
time.

I frequently have to kill Firefox when it starts hitting around 400MB of
memory resident.

What the hell is going on inside Firefox?

For that matter, even "lightweigh" Epiphany does much the same thing, though
not quite as bad.

> At that rate, I have to buy twice as much computer to use the "free"
> software than I do to run the "non-free" software!  I'm willing to use
> FireFox over IE when I'm on a Windows box just because IE is such a
> flaming ball of garbage, but it always leaves me with a sinking feeling
> of "-This- is the best we could do, over a decade after the web went
> mainstream?"

You hit the nail right on the head.

It's 2006, and all of the WWW browsers suck and are resource hogs.

It's unfortunate that Firefox is one of the worst too, because it has a
lot of features that I really like.

I really don't see any reason you could not have most of those features
in about 1/5 the memory footprint.

Something to keep in mind, much of Firefox is actually written in XUL on top
of the C core.  Eats memory and CPU like crazy.

I know that modern systems have a lot of power, but we have gone too far with
the idea that cycles are free.

I have a 2.0GHz CPU and 1GB of RAM, and it is blindly stupid that surfing the
web and running a couple of office applications can kill my machine.

> But vim won't put Linux on Grandma's PC.

It might if Grandma hacks Perl... :)


-- 
shannon "AT" widomaker.com -- [Well, I have entered the "metallic years." 
Silver in my hair, gold in my teeth, lead in my ass... -- Sheldon Hall in
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