I started cutting marble in a quarry. I worked my hands, I wasn't in a hurry.

[reddragdiva]

When I got a FreeBSD machine, I started with an all-macho X desktop: Sawfish and nothing else, all applications started by middle-click. After setting up KDE for redcountess, I realised that the shiny and helpful is actually very nice to use and saves a lot of arse pain.

Lately I've been annoyed at how slow Firefox and Thunderbird seem to be getting. Literally several seconds to open a window. Odd pauses typing URLs. It's a PII-450 with 640MB memory, it should be doing a lot better.

So last night I closed KDE and put sawfish back in .xinitrc. And I had a revelatory geek experience: KDE makes your system really fucking slow. WELL DUH. Firefox now screams, Thunderbird is actually not so slow I want to kill it with an axe despite its l33t spamgobbling p0w3rz.

So much for the shiny.

(Don't follow up talking about your favourite window manager. Window managers are for pooftahs. You should size your initial xterm in your .xinitrc and each new application using -geometry.)

Comments

[stevek.livejournal.com]

I'm glad it's not just me that finds Firefox to be a tad slow - I'm hoping this is just "teething" problems with Firefox. In fact, I'm having great difficulties just accessing Fotopic sites (I'm beginning to suspect this might be slight residue following my recent AV hiccup!) but that's another story entirely! :-)

[reddragdiva]

No, no. Firefox now SCREAMS along. (On Windows and on FreeBSD.) It was KDE fucking it up. Post edit to clarify this.

[stevek.livejournal.com]

I've resolved the Firefox issues - it now seems to be working quite nicely (although I'd like to find a java plug-in, but that's a side issue).

[reddragdiva]

(replying to ancient comment)

The Sun Java plugin should work just fine with it, pretty much out-the-box. Sun are very Mozilla- and Firefox-aware ...

[stevek.livejournal.com]

Thanks - I didn't quite realise how ancient that comment was, it just suddenly appeared in my In-box! Seems like I'm one of many to get this problem.

[redcountess]

In Windows, the problem is likely to be not enough RAM, as Firefox is a RAM hog - how much do you have on board?

[stevek.livejournal.com]

I don't think that's the problem as I'm running with 1GB of RAM!

It's not *that* bad, but it is noticable compared with IE. I think the Fotopic problem is a too efficient AV program (I might play around with the PC when I get the chance).

[wintrmute.livejournal.com]

I mainly use Firefox under Linux, but even with Gnome 2, XMMS, Mplayer, and bunch of other stuff running, it still cranks along quite quickly, even on the slower machines with 256 Mb ram.

[stevek.livejournal.com]

It's not that slow, but there might be an underlying problem that I'm unaware of.

I might have a play around and see what I can find... it'll probably end up being something rather simple no doubt!

[blarglefiend.livejournal.com]

It's chewing up cycles with animations and such crap, and eating huge gobs of memory. No great surprise that other stuff would slow down.

I tried going back to my setup from the Ericsson days -- fvwm2 configured with no window decorations beyond borders, everything bound to key combinations -- but having spent so long using a reasonably *good* UI on top of a UNIX it just didn't feel right.

Firefox does pretty well on OS X these days, BTW.

[reddragdiva]

It's not, actually - I switched off almost all the eye candy. It's doing weird-arse things with functions like keyboard input that should be at the X level.

At some stage I'll be moving to the latest FreeBSD 5.x - this is 4.6.2 with KDE 3.0.0, and I'm amazed a .0.0 works this well. I expect tremendous improvements.

I must say, I could go a TiBook.

[blarglefiend.livejournal.com]

There's some wacky crap required to hook in to the keyboard stuff, as I understand it. So if you've got a big bloated thing hooking in...

As to lapdogs, even the current iBooks are pretty well-specced -- they're all G4s now. And they're rugged little bastards, too. Were I in the market and not looking at the penis-substitute AlBook an iBook is where I'd go.

If I had a TiBook I'd be worrying about scratching or dropping it. When I had an iBook, well, I don't recall worrying about much of anything.

[vatine]

Almost *all* X wm:s intercept the keyboard input. The exception would be those that have no keyboard short-cuts. That's (basically) how X works. For encore, I shall bore you to death about my latest hack on top of raw XLib.

[blarglefiend.livejournal.com]

I know. I mean that if the thing doing the hooking-in is a slow bloated pig, then it's presumably going to slow everything else down -- i.e., most other wms *aren't* slow bloated pigs, at least the bits that actually do that bit.

[vatine]

Well, yes. I'm still surprised taht even doing Motif emulation (definietly the least performance-bummed add-on) my wm-of-choice is quite nippy. Must be because it's written in 1993 and optimised to work with then-high-end systems. Not much chrome, though.

[aidan-skinner.livejournal.com]

4.6.2 seems to be a Really Popular realease. You may have GNOME 1.4, which should be pretty fucking good on that sort of machine.

[reddragdiva]

Having tried both, KDE feels nicer to me. Will probably give GNOME 2.x a go with next install too.

[oscarhocklee.livejournal.com]

Hmm. I have a very custom environment set up, which I found KDE could finally reproduce a couple of months ago, so I switched to it. It's pretty fast on here, but I may have more things turned off than you. Also, this is kde 3.2.2... I was surprised that I've not been tempted to switch back to windowmaker yet.

[edwards.livejournal.com]

Apparently my PS2 Linux thing should fly if I stop using KDE. When redcountess gets her PS2, go to linuxplay.com and order one. You're in Education, University of Abertay, or something. Anything. Just get one for the 99 Euro plus tax price, it's worth it for the Broadband adaptor, USB keyboard, 40Gb HD and Mouse...

[reddragdiva]

The problem with PS2 Linux is 32 meg of memory. That's, ah, rather too little for KDE.

[vatine]

"More swap"... That'd make things rather painfully even slower, though.

[edwards.livejournal.com]

*replies from PS2*

R e a l l y ?

*grins*

Still an amusing toy, though.

[redcountess]

Sadly, I think the PS2 is MIA :-(

[lunadaze.livejournal.com]

i heard that u were in melbs recently. i didnt see you. that sucks great big _u know whats!!! hope all is groovy in the U of K. who knows, if i actually get my djing act together i could schedule in a visit before the turn of the decade. Woo000!!
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