Re: [opensuse] Window Managers

On Sunday 10 May 2009 06:07:57 am Constant Brouerius van Nidek wrote:
Using 11.1 on my computers.
Used for a very long time KDE and last KDE4.2 on my underpowered Pentium
III and II. My motherboards do not see/use more than 768 respectively 512
M. I think it is time for me to buy a new motherboard ;( or to have a look
at less memory hungry window manager. Does somebody have a comparison
between the available managers? Are there known drawbacks for any of them?
No flame war ;)

# free
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 1472004 659964 812040 0 72104 315088
-/+ buffers/cache: 272772 1199232
Swap: 2000052 0 2000052

The middle line output is what I look for memory usage 272772 KB used, when
needed 1199232 KB can be used for other applications.


Looking the:
# ps -A -o uid | wc -l
115
tells that 115 processes are running.


# ps -A -o uid | wc -l
48
tells that 48 belong to user 1000, including 3 console, dolphin and 2 kmail
windows.

When I started OpenOfice Calc to put "ps -A" data in tables to calculate sums
the total usage was 339812 KB, with 73 MB belong to OpenOfficwe. Which is
still well within your smallest RAM.

What makes difference to you is not memory usage, but CPU usage.
Modern desktop like KDE rely on certain functions that PIII can't provide and
it will be used workaround that is slower, just as any software emulation of
hardware capabilities. How they do that I don't know, but that is what makes
big difference.

Having Athlon XP 1600+ and Athlon 64 3400+ side by side, I can see big
difference just with web browsing, not to mention rendering images in GIMP.

Taking how cheap can be used computer it seems better option to think of
hardware upgrade, but if you can't do much about it at the moment then you can
try Xfce, ICEwm, WindowMaker, and similar. That will require a bit of your
configuration, but it will not ask you CPU for things that it doesn't support.

You have to keep in mind that system processes may still ask for better CPU,
so don't expect essential speedup in all parts of the system.

In my case that would be 115-48=67 processes.


--
Regards, Rajko
http://news.opensuse.org/category/people-of-opensuse/

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