Pinderkent

The actual benefits of 3D computer desktops is a topic I have written about in the past. And today I'd like to revisit it, specifically after seeing an article linking to a YouTube video of Beryl in action. In short, the title of the article challenges Bill Gates and Microsoft to exceed what is shown in the video. Except I don't think that there video really shows anything remarkable.

Shimmering windows and traditional 2D desktops placed around the faces of a cube may look pretty and be eye-catching, but I don't think they really offer any real benefits. There's a definite productivity decrease while waiting for the windows to stop jiggling after minimizing or maximizing them, for instance. Placing your 2D desktops around a cube limits you to only six virtual workspaces, while it's often convenient to have many more than that. It may look impressive to rotate a window into the screen at an angle, but beyond that, there's really no benefit to being able to do something like that.

While open source developers are free to work on whatever they wish, I would have to hope that more effort is instead put towards improving the existing X11 desktop environments. I am without doubt that the memory consumption of KDE and GNOME could be reduced a great deal, for instance. There are likely some performance enhancements that could be made. Doing such work, while not always exciting or fun, would surely lead to more enjoyable and productive desktop environments.

Today I read an article comparing KDE and GNOME. It covers a number of criteria, including customization, configurability, ease-of-use, and dependability. But some major criteria I really didn't see much about were those of performance and memory usage.

Let me start off by saying that I have not performed any formal benchmarking of either GNOME nor KDE. I have never really bothered to peruse the source code of either system to any great extent. What I say comes directly from my experience as a user of various versions of both desktop environments.

I have found that KDE feels more responsive than GNOME, when used on the same system. KDE applications like the Konqueror web browser, the KMail mail client, and the Kate text editor feel snappy. On the other hand, GNOME applications like the Epiphany web browser, Balsa email client, and gedit text editor do not feel as quick, and in some cases feel slow or bloated.

One thing I found with GNOME was that the menus of most applications seemed slow to redraw. I'm not completely familiar with how GNOME deals with application menus. I don't know if most applications just use the menuing facilities provided by GTK+, or if GNOME offers some extensions to what GTK+ offers. In any case, with KDE applications, say Konqueror for instance, I can open the "Location" menu, and then move between the other menus rapidly, with the other menus being drawn immediately. Trying this on the same machine with GNOME's Epiphany results in noticeable redrawing times when moving between menus, even when revisiting a menu for the seventh or eighth time.

I really don't know why certain aspects of GNOME's performance and responsiveness are so much poorer than KDE's. I don't have the time or inclination to locate and fix the problems with GNOME or GTK+. Beyond raw performance, I think we need to consider the memory usage of each environment.

A Google search turned up some actual desktop environment memory usage benchmark data for a fairly recent study. This informal study compares KDE, GNOME, XFCE and WindowMaker in a variety of situations and configurations. For what appears to be the most real-world of all the scenarios, listed under the heading of "8. Desktop's applications" in the study, KDE was found to have the lowest memory consumption. In this particular test, KDE and some typical KDE applications were found to consume 143.2 MB of RAM. GNOME and comparable GNOME applications consumed 174.8 MB. XFCE and some third-party applications comparable to the ones used for GNOME and KDE consumed 206.8 MB of RAM.

My own personal experience would mirror those results. I do tend to think that KDE and its accompanying applications are lighter than the equivalents for GNOME. This may be due to the differing levels of integration between the two projects. As shown by its download page, KDE tends to be far more integrated than GNOME. Compare the list of KDE downloads to that of the latest version of GNOME's platform and sources downloads. Keep in mind that the GNOME downloads are listed twice for each application or library, due to both gzip and bzip2 being used to compress the archives. One notable thing is that most of libraries used by many KDE applications are bundled together in the kdelibs package, while many of the GNOME libraries are spread among multiple, separate packages.

From my own development experience, applications and libraries that tend to be more tightly developed together often include less code duplication. This may play a role in the memory usage differences between KDE and GNOME. Many of the individual GNOME libraries may include functionality offered by other, separate GNOME libraries. KDE, with its more integrated applications and support libraries, may better eliminate such duplication. It would be interesting if somebody with more time on their hands looked into this hypothesis.

While the performance and memory consumption of KDE and GNOME are not the only factors to consider when comparing the two desktop environments, I think they are pretty important and must be considered. From my own experience, even minor performance deficiencies or memory usage excesses can have a profound impact on usability. Even on systems with 512 MB or 1 GB of RAM, excessive memory usage can lead to swapping, which on many systems results in hugely degraded performance. And from my personal experience, I think KDE is perhaps better than GNOME in this respect. There is even some experimental data to back up these experience-based findings.

With consumer-grade 3D graphics hardware becoming better on a daily basis, it's no wonder that people have considered the idea of a three dimensional desktop. I read an article today comparing two such desktops, Project Looking Glass and Beryl. While my experience using such systems is fairly limited, I have to express some skepticism about whether or not they bring any productivity gains.

I can see why their flashy effects and capabilities would appeal to some desktop users. Some people may consider it neat to be able to twist a window on an angle. Others may like the idea of multiple desktops being arranged around the sides of a cube. Some of the visual effects are probably entertaining. I just don't see where the productivity gains are, however.

From my experience, I'd have to say that effects like animated or wobbly windows are nothing but distracting. When there's real world to be done, jiggling windows probably won't help in any fashion.

I also don't see how arranging desktops around the sides of a cube really has any positive impact. For many years now a wide variety of X window managers and desktop environments have supported multiple desktops. On my current KDE installation, I have it set to use 16 virtual desktops. That's far more than I could get with a six-sided cube. Another thing is that switching between desktops is virtually instantaneous. There's no having to spin a cube around, or anything of those sorts, when using KDE, for instance.

Aside from putting modern video hardware to use, I really don't see much in the way of benefits from using a 3D desktop environment. The features often don't help one get work or play done more effectively, and in some cases can actually prove to be very distracting and hindering. Thankfully, 2D desktops are a subset of these 3D desktop systems. Even if there is a trend towards using such environments, those of us who much prefer 2D desktops should still be able to use them.

I have worked with various UNIX systems many times over the years. One of the most prevalent systems in industry has been Sun's Solaris. While I tend to use FreeBSD and KDE these days, I saw a post at Slashdot that talked of Solaris and CDE that I wanted to comment on.

I know many people who consider CDE to be too "ancient" to use, and I think it's a shame that they feel that way. No, CDE does not offer all of the modern features of desktops like GNOME, KDE and even XFCE. But I think that may be one of its strengths today. What we end up with is a desktop environment that is very lean, and not nearly as cluttered as many of today's environments.

To me, it's a great thing that Sun still ships CDE, even with Solaris 10. For some of us, it's a reminder of days long past. But when it comes to just plain getting work done, CDE is often a great environment. The distractions are minimal, and it'll even run well on older systems that are considered far too insufficient to run KDE or GNOME.

So in closing, I have to say that I hope Sun continues to ship CDE for a long time to come. Even today, when I do use Solaris, I tend to choose CDE when logging in. Part of the reason is that I don't care much for their GNOME-based Java Desktop System, but the other part, I must admit, is that I just happen to like using CDE.

There has been a lot of hype lately about what are called "WebOSes". Essentially, such systems tend to be web browser-based environments that attempt to provide some of the higher-level services of an operating system. I read an article today about such a system called GravityZoo. After reading that article, my first question was "Why would I want to use it?"

Some will say that such systems are useful because they can be used on any Internet-connected computer with a web browser. I agree, that is true. But if I'm presented with such an environment, I think I will just use OpenSSH instead. Using SSH, I can securely connect to my home desktop systems running FreeBSD and Solaris. Sure, it took some effort on my end to ensure my router's firewall, port forwarding and dynamic DNS support were correctly configured. But such configuration is quite straightforward, and I haven't had to touch it in well over a year.

To ensure that one can use SSH on most systems they encounter, I'd recommend getting a USB drive. Even the larger ones are quite affordable these days. On that USB drive, one can place OpenSSH binaries for the platforms they may encounter. Furthermore, one can include programs like an X server (Xming on Windows) or TightVNC to allow for the use of graphical applications over the network.

What I like most about this setup is that I know exactly where and how my data are being stored: on my own systems. I know with complete certainty that backups are being made regularly, and being made correctly, as I do it myself. So I get the benefits of a so-called "WebOS", without the privacy and data safety concerns. Better yet, I get to use the full-featured applications I'd typically be using.

I commend the developers of these "WebOS" systems for their initiative. However, I think what they're doing is of limited value to me. The solutions to the problems they're tryin to solve have been around for decades, in the form of SSH, X11 and VNC.