Re: [tlug] Free Linux for Desktop Newbies ?

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@example.com>]

>>>>> "Lyle" == Lyle Saxon <Lyle> writes:

    Lyle> I didn't realize that KDE was so heavy.  Is Gnome
    Lyle> fundamentally lighter than KDE?

GNOME is actually heavier than KDE.  As B0Ti pointed out, it's
possible to slim GNOME down, but it's not easy.  GNOME is like those
poor unfortunates who can gain a kilo a week on a 1000 Kcal diet; its
metabolism is just geared to socking away the fat.

Both desktops suffer from the "kitchen sink" philosophy that Emacs is
justly criticized for.  In Emacs's defense, LISP is much more robust
about missing dependencies than C is; you can get an awful lot of work
done with just a standard Emacs binary.  I have an XEmacs from
ca. 2000 that's just 1.8MB, the same build process would probably give
2.5MB today due to changes in object representation and additional
standard C features.  It's far more than "just an editor"---for
example, all of the operations you need to implement a shell are in
the standard binaries.  (Of course, it's not a full-fledged IDE.)  By
comparison, on my Mac bash is 675KB, and vi (nvi, not vim) is 350KB.
How the pair fares against X?Emacs for function is a matter of
personal preference, of course.

In GNOME and KDE, of course, a missing library means the app doesn't
start at all.

-- 
School of Systems and Information Engineering http://turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp
University of Tsukuba                    Tennodai 1-1-1 Tsukuba 305-8573 JAPAN
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