Date: Fri, 15 Mar 2002 16:00:23 -0800 From: paul beard <paulbeard@mac.com> To: Bob Kovacs <bkovacs@mindspring.com> Cc: Salvo Bartolotta <bartequi@neomedia.it>, chat@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Free BSD Message-ID: <3C928B17.5020300@mac.com> References: <1016219646.3c9247fe203dd@webmail.neomedia.it>
next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
Salvo Bartolotta wrote: > [ redirected to -chat before I get flamed :-) ] good idea ;-) > paul beard <paulbeard@mac.com> seems to have written: > > >>I stopped using KDE since my 500 MHz laptop wasn't enough for it. >> > > > Urk. > > I have been running KDE2 (and a bunch of other resource hogs^W^Wthings) on a > PIII 450MHz without significant problems. On the other hand, my > junk^Wworkstation has 384MB RAM -- well, for the time being. :-) > > I think RAM is the operative word here. I think you're right about that, but it's hard to believe 128 Mb is insufficient for a desktop/client UI. How did Apple get away with their (admittedly simple ) UI in 1 Mb on the old all-in-one toasters? And come to that, I have 384 Mb in a 350 MHz G3 and OS X is still less than zippy, where OS 9 fairly flies by comparison. To address Bob's question more directly, it helps to see FreeBSD for what it is: it's a high-performance OS with performance and stability coming before creature comforts. If you want to add a more hospitable UI, there are many options, all along the performance/comfort curve, from black box or [ugh] twm to KDE and Gnome. I like KDE2, but it's just so slow on this machine, it's hard to use. Contrast this with the Leading Brand where the UI is always there: why would you want to fill a datacenter with systems that always waste cycles on a UI and at the same time, don't support lightweight remote admin capabilities? (NB: the Register this week revealed that parts of HotMail still run on FreeBSD: 4 years down the road and who knows how many engineering dollars to add to the $400 million purchase price, and it still can't reliably run exclusively on any MS OS.) Anyway, I count 79 window manager entries in /usr/ports/x11-wm on one of my FreeBSD boxes. Add to that the themes and skins that you can add, and there has to be something for just about everyone. KDE2 and fvwm have the Windows[tm] emulation thing down so starting with one of them might make sense. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?3C928B17.5020300>