Pinderkent

Kubuntu 7.10 RC was announced as available several days ago. I installed it immediately, and I have to say, I'm very impressed! Although it's still just a release candidate, it has all of the necessary ingredients: stability, responsiveness, innovation and coherency.

While other articles will no doubt focus on the many benefits that Kubuntu 7.10 will bring, I'd like to look forward into the future. Namely, this is because of the upcoming release of KDE 4, which is currently planned for December 11, 2007.

Kubuntu 7.10 RC includes KDE 3.5.7. This is the latest in a long line of KDE 3 releases. The initial KDE 3.0 release was over half a decade ago, on April 3, 2002. Even the KDE 3.5 branch initially dates from November 29, 2005. But during this timeframe we've seen much work done on KDE 4.

It's without doubt that KDE 4 will be a major revolution within the open source desktop environment world. The benefits we will see will be enormous:

• Qt 4: An already-responsive desktop environment gets even faster!
• HIG: Greater UI consistency.
• Oxygen: SVG-based icons and visuals.
• Plasma: Combining the desktop, panel and more.
• Phonon: A modern multimedia framework.
• Solid: Better network and portable devices support.
• Decibel: Communication protocols galore.
• Kross: Easier scripting integration.
• Dolphin: A new file manager.
• Sonnet: Spellchecking with automatic language detection.

What's more, we haven't seen comparable innovation from the GNOME developers. When the final release of KDE 4.0 comes around, I don't think that GNOME will really be able to compete any more. It will likely take years for them to catch up, at which time KDE will likely have gotten even further ahead, in terms of quality, capability and usability.

So we may be at a turning point. If the next release of Kubuntu is based around KDE 4, a shift may start away from GNOME-centric Ubuntu, towards KDE-centric Kubuntu. Were Ubuntu to move away from GNOME towards the more capable KDE 4, that would put the Kubuntu project in an awkward position. In essence, they would make themselves irrelevant due to the very act of basing their offering on the best product available.

However, it would also signify a major accomplishment within the open source community, with regards to maturity. KDE 4 will really become a platform that can compete with the likes of Windows Vista and Mac OS X. While desktop environments like GNOME and XFCE would always have their niche, KDE 4 has the potential to become the first open source desktop environment to see a far more widespread usage. This is a very important milestone for the entire community, and also the industry as a whole.

Regardless of what actually happens, the next six months will be very exciting times within the open source desktop environment arena. The impact of KDE 4 will no doubt also be felt by many of the other Linux distributions, as well as the broader BSD and Solaris communities. These sort of widely-felt changes are rare, usually limited to the likes of X.org and GCC. Interesting times lay ahead, my friends!

I'm very happy to see that Ubuntu has been a major force in bringing Linux to the masses. Those users get a better desktop experience that they would likely have gotten using a different operating system, while also benefitting from the low cost and the better security Linux offers. Unfortunately, I see a bothersome trend forming: Ubuntu users who seem to be under the impression that GNOME is the only desktop for Linux.

It is in the second last paragraph of that blog entry that I see this problem manifesting itself. The first example is in the sentence that begins: I don't like the way Ubuntu handles network drives (even Puppy Linux does a better job, in my view) ..... The second example is later on: .... and Ubuntu still looks very average - aesthetically - compared to XP, let alone OSX.

As a commenter to that blog article pointed out, those are not problems with Ubuntu or Linux, specifically. Those complains involve GNOME. Now, Ubuntu does ship with GNOME as its default desktop, so most first-time Linux users may come to think that it is the only software there is. Of course, there are many alternatives, including KDE and XFCE, among a wide variety of plain window managers. Luckily, Ubuntu allows for such software to be installed easily and painlessly.

It becomes a situation of advising new Ubuntu users that they do have a lot of choice available to them. If they don't like certain aspects of the default GNOME desktop, it is very easy for them to replace it with KDE. Another option is, of course, to recommend the use of a distro like Kubuntu, which combines the benefits of Ubuntu with those of KDE.

So if you're a Linux user who is setting up an Ubuntu system for a friend or relative, be sure to install at least KDE in addition to the GNOME environment that is already present. You may just make their experience a lot more flexible, and hence enjoyable.

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.

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.

I know a number of people who advocate the use of Xubuntu on resource-constrained desktop systems. But there has recently been talk about how the resource usage of Xubuntu is growing at a rapid pace. Along these lines, today I read an article that considers the use of Ubuntu Lite as an alternative to Xubuntu for those with low spec computers. I haven't used Ubuntu Lite myself, but I would like to make a recommendation of an open source UNIX-like system for low-end desktop computers: NetBSD.

A quote from the NetBSD project's home page really makes clear what it is, and what its goals are: NetBSD is a free, secure, and highly portable Unix-like Open Source operating system available for many platforms, from 64-bit Opteron machines and desktop systems to handheld and embedded devices. Its clean design and advanced features make it excellent in both production and research environments, and it is user-supported with complete source. Many applications are easily available through pkgsrc, the NetBSD Packages Collection.

The goals of the NetBSD project result in NetBSD being a very high-quality system. The support for low-end platforms means that care must be taken to ensure that the kernel and userland tools and libraries use a minimal amount of system resources. Furthermore, the focus on supporting modern platforms means that NetBSD offers the capabilities one would expect from a modern UNIX-like system. That's why I think it can be used as an alternative to systems like Xubunt and Ubuntu Lite.

And when we consider its long history, dating back to when PCs were a mere fraction of the power of PCs from even a decade ago, we can see why it'd make a good choice. Compared to a 386 system, even a 300 MHz AMD K6-2 system is a powerhorse. A system like NetBSD, that even today runs suitably on a 386 or 486, is very usable on a more powerful computer. And with people considering a 1 GHz system to be "low-end" today, NetBSD makes an excellent workstation OS for such a computer.

A major feature of Debian and Ubuntu-derived Linux distributions is the extensive and friendly package management. NetBSD is quite comparable in this field. Its packages collection, pkgsrc, is very capable, complete, and up-to-date. It offers virtually all of the open source software one would expect or ever want. Support is included for all of the major open source desktops, including GNOME, KDE and XFCE.

Furthermore, i386 NetBSD offers excellent binary emulation support. This means that if you have a Linux application that is only available in binary form, you likely will be able to run it on NetBSD. In addition, NetBSD also can run binaries from a number of other systems, including x86 FreeBSD and x86 Solaris.

NetBSD is a truly remarkable and versatile system. And for many people, I think it would make a great alternative to lightweight Linux distributions like Xubuntu and Ubuntu Lite. The very philosophy of the project, that being widespread portability, will no doubt go a long way towards ensuring it remains a modern system that consumes minimal resources. If you're currently a user of a minimalistic Linux distribution that you think is beginning to get bloated, maybe you should give NetBSD a try. It may just be exactly what you're looking for.