Linux and Main: Ximian GNOME on a Low-Resources Machine

“If there is an overarching scandal in the Linux sphere, it is
how we’ve let performance go straight to hell.

“Hear me out. It’s true that we have all kinds of nifty desktops
and applications. This is great. It is also, sadly, true that as
the capacity of hardware has increased — bigger drives, more
memory, faster processors, an actual reduction in price — coding
has fallen slack. We do just about the same stuff at just about the
same speed, even though our machines should, if the coding standard
of even two or three years ago were in place, literally scream with
speed.

“KDE3, soon to be released, does marginally more than KDE-1.x
did. Yes, there are improvements. But KDE-1.x would run compile
from source in about two hours on a Pentium-133 with 64 megs of
memory, and when it was done compiling it would run snappily on the
same hardware. Today’s KDE3 release candidate takes eight hours on
an Athlon running at 1.2 gHz with 768 megs of RAM. And when it is
compiled, it runs just about as quickly as KDE-1.x did on that
P-133…”

Complete
Story