> Sender: squeak-dev-admin at lists.squeakfoundation.org
> From: Nevin Pratt <nevin at smalltalkpro.com>

Material elided.

> >
>
> I think KDE is dog-slow, as is GNOME.  Too much of the "kitchen-sink"
> syndrom, IMO.
>
> I use WindowMaker myself.
>

FWIW: Gnome is much faster than it used to be.  Nautilus, (the Gnome
file browser), for example has gone from dog-slow to quite snappy over
the last year.

The other thing to watch when useing either Gnome or KDE is what theme
you have selected: some can be quite compute intensive. Eye candy comes
at a cost, and if you are naive, you can be asking for something that
isn't obviously slow, but is (e.g. SVG themes; the SVG support needs
serious speed work yet).  There has been discussion of marking themes
as to performance impact. KDE is also very memory intensive: C++ strikes again.

That doesn't mean I'm encouraging people to switch environments they
are comfortable with: just that the recent open source desktops
are evolving quickly and continuing to improve, and worth checking out
from time to time.
                                  - Jim


--
Jim Gettys
Cambridge Research Laboratory
HP Labs, Hewlett-Packard Company
Jim.Gettys at hp.com