[ Thanks to James
Maguire for this link. ]
“Running nothing except a virtual terminal, GNOME 3 consumes 883
megabytes of RAM on a one gigabyte notebook. Not only is this
requirement more than twice that of GNOME 2.32, but it compares
unfavorably with the 615 megabytes needed by KDE 4.6.
Realistically, it means that two gigabytes of RAM would be a
realistic requirement for GNOME 3 unless you have the patience to
continually use the swap partition. That probably means that,
unless your machine is less than a couple of years old, GNOME 3 is
not the desktop that you should be using.“More importantly, while not having hardware acceleration in KDE
only prevents you from running some compositing effects, GNOME 3
requires basic hardware acceleration to run at all. Most Intel
video drivers are sufficient, but with some other chip sets,
proprietary drivers may be necessary, which free software advocates
will find unacceptable. Admittedly, GNOME 3 is supposed to come
with a ‘complete fallback interface,’ according to the FAQ, but the
fallback was unavailable on the Live CDs I used for this
comparison.'”