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! :-)

[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.

[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...

[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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