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From: Oliver Neukum <oliver@neukum.name>
To: Helge Hafting <helgehaf@aitel.hist.no>,
       "Martin J. Bligh" <mbligh@aracnet.com>, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org
Subject: Re: The reason to call it 3.0 is the desktop (was Re: [OT] 2.6 not 3.0 - (NUMA))
Date: Mon, 7 Oct 2002 11:18:44 +0200
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On Monday 07 October 2002 10:08, Helge Hafting wrote:
> "Martin J. Bligh" wrote:
> > > Then there's the issue of application startup. There's not enough
> > > read ahead. This is especially sad, as the order of page faults is
> > > at least partially predictable.
> >
> > Is the problem really, fundamentally a lack of readahead in the
> > kernel? Or is it that your application is huge bloated pig?
>
> Often the latter.  People getting interested in linux
> seems to believe that openoffice is the msoffice replacement,
> and that _is_ a huge bloated pig.  It needs 50M to start
> the text editor - and lots of _cpu_.  It takes a long time
> to start on a 266MHz machine even when the disk io
> is avoided by the pagecahce.

OpenOffice _is_ an important application, whether we like it or not.

How does one measure and profile application startup other than with
a stopwatch ? I'd like to gather some objective data on this.

> A snappy desktop is trivial with 2.5, even with a slow machine.
> Just stay away from gnome and kde, use a ugly fast

A desktop machine needs to run a desktop enviroment. Only a window manager is 
not enough.

> window manager like icewm or twm (and possibly lots
> of others I haven't even heard about.)
> X itself is snappy enough, particularly with increased
> priority.
> Take some care when selecting apps (yes - there is choice!)
> and the desktop is just fine.  Openoffice is a nice
> package of programs, but there are replacements for most
> of them if speed is an issue.  If the machine is powerful
> enough to run ms software snappy then speed probably
> isn't such a big issue though.

KDE and friends _are_ not quite optimised for speed. That however doesn't 
mean that the kernel should not make an effort to allow them to run as fast 
as they can.

	Regards
		Oliver
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