If I ever converted someone like my grandma to Linux I'd have to live on her house lol and I am a linux noob myself

Don't worry about lack of whistles: at Brian's age he's probably lost most of his high-frequency hearing anyway.

1 members found this post helpful.

Click on the Applications Menu, click on Settings, click on Window Manager Tweaks, click on Accessibility and deselect Automatically Tile Windows when moving toward the screen edge.

Bye-bye "feature."

Nice post; my favorite terminal was a Wyse 99-GT (the one that had built-in plotting). Amber characters on a black background, used it for about five years until the vertical oscillator gave up the ghost. Started out whacking on a ASR-33 Teletype. Was a bass player (the stand up kind) so I already had strong fingers thankfully. That would have been in '74 or so connected to a Honeywell mainframe (with a 300 baud modem) running GECOS. After learning on a keypunch (in '61 and for quite while afterwards, that damned Teletype was a dream).

Hope this helps some.

[edit]
Oh, I forgot, I can't take credit for this, it was somebody else on this forum that clued me in (and I can't remember who it was and can't find the post in My Posts, either).

Sorry to whoever.
[/edit]

2 members found this post helpful.

@tronayne,

Thank you very much!

I cannot thank you enough! That has been making me nutso for a very long time!!!!

I once bought a Packard Bell PC/XT. Had an Nec v20 drop in replacement for the 8086 that ran at 3.2 MHz, and 1MB ram. Fastest computer I ever had up until then, and what on earth do you do with 1MB ram? That is more memory then I knew what to do with....

I'm glad you like Xfce. I do, too. On this thread it was I that took offense at the assertion that KDE IS bloated, not that it wasn't when v4 was first released. It is important to note that KDE stated clearly that v4 was "not for production machines" but in the rush to "be first on your block!" distros negligently jumped on like fleas. The "evil few" were indeed hogs back then but it was only supposed to be in development stage, not default on many distros. It is worthy of note that Patrick held out for longer than most, but I suppose had to weigh caution versus a label of overly cautious with so many clamoring for v4 back then.

Apparently you, and maybe some others, missed the most recent thread but several people, including me, tested resource usage at idle on both Xfce and current KDE. The difference in RAM footprint varied between 100-200MB... CPU less than 3% difference on average, iirc, with KDE using more.... more, but not a lot especially by today's standards, and there are reasons why. Incidentally my numbers were with Strigi, Nepomuk, Akonadai.... in fact everything KDE starts by default, still active. Some disable those for even lower footprint.

There is so much more about how that bold investment paid off but I don't wish to hijack this thread. I just want it clear that 1) There is no need to denigrate others choices to justify ones own, and 2) This is "doubled down" when the information is obsolete and incorrect. I'm quite certain people here would be all up in arms if someone posted that "I don't use Slackware because it is so old it uses the 2.4 kernel, gcc 3.2, and Gnome 2". It was true at one time, but it isn't now, so it's irresponsible to fault it without checking it's current state. It's still perfectly valid to switch and stay switched for whatever reason, just not ethical to sway others with falsehoods.

It's interesting and a propos that you mentioned age as a pattern, since it is commonly the younger males suffering from DTB that feel compelled to engage in the old "Chevy Rox!, Ford Sux!" battles.

I presently don't have a smartphone either but it is looking like one is in my future and largely because of KDE Connect. You really should take a few minutes to see this! KDE Connect It's just begun and already it does amazing things fusing and extending both phones and PCs.

As for Slackware love, Patrick chose wisely I think for dumping Gnome and keeping KDE as the premier DE while not excluding so many others even on the install media. Additionally, Eric (Alien Bob) has said he is building KDE Connect slackbuild for both 14.0 and 14.1.

IIRC I looked at it about a month ago and saw nothing that gave me cause to change my assessment of bloat and unnecessary eye candy. This included my own benches and observations of memory usage, which was far more than 100-200mb difference at the time. But hey, my family likes chocolate ice cream, and I personally don't care for it. Rocky Road is the way to go for me

KDE is awesome and gets the job done. I don't use it. I personally consider it to *still* be bloated and *still* have excessive eye candy. This does not make it better or worse, it just means I prefer xfce for the reasons stated above.

1 members found this post helpful.

I have no explanation for why 4 of us got similar numbers and yours are so much higher. Perhaps unfamiliarity? Suggestions?

Eye candy is not what made KDE feel bloated. Indexing was, until they got the algorithms and scheduling sorted. But since that's what it means for you, let me just mention eye candy can be turned off, downgraded to whatever you want. I'm confident I can add enough stuff to Xfce to make it excessive but that doesn't mean Xfce by definition must be bloated. This would be misuse of the term, and while commonplace, is still just incorrect, in either case.

I noted with interest that you simply stated your family "likes chocolate" but you "don't care for it" and prefer Rocky Road. You didn't say something like "I won't buy chocolate because it supports Colombian Drug Lords, and don't even get me started on Strawberry!" See the difference? No need for justifying a positive choice by creating a negative alternative. You like it. It does what you want. What KDE does is irrelevant to you. That is that!

Yeah. Some people say the first thing to go with age is hearing. Others say it's memory...Forget what else they said, they were speaking too quietly.

I justify my choices in whatever manner I choose, not how someone else thinks I should. And if how I do it offends someone, as I said before they can get offended for all I care. Political correctness has come to linuxquestions.org. How sad.

1 members found this post helpful.

OMG - that's me to a tee!!!

Huh? Did you say something Brad.... uhmmm Bart... Brian?

Political Correctness? How does that apply here? It's ethics! Why would one support their position with what boils down to lies, once an inaccurate position has been proven?

You stated "eye candy" as an example of inherent bloat.

I stated -

1) KDE has more default eye candy but it is easily downgraded or removed.

2) Xfce has less default eye candy but it can be added.

3) I, or anyone, can create a KDE config that has lower resource usage than an Xfce config I, or anyone, can create.

Am I lying? Have you tried it or even suppose it is impossible? Am I just trying to protect someones feelings? Pffff!

so to say that KDE, is inherently bloated, isn't political. It's just mistaken, short-sighted and unethical. To continue to choose something unethical says something about your character, not the quality of your original choice you wish to justify. It has nothing to do with how someone else "thinks you should". It has to do with how YOU think you should, once you know the facts. Or can you falsify the above?

Bottom Line - It has nothing to do with being offended but a lot to do with how people will assess your character (and the value of your posts here) if you show you give carte blanche license to yourself and have few or no guiding principles.

My problem with KDE (which triggered a switch to Xfce) began a few releases ago with the so-called Evil Twins; i.e., Akonadi and Nepomuk, which at first were... well, kind of nasty. Didn't really work, couldn't figure out just what the heck they were, and they were just flat getting in the way.

When I found out that, essentially, they were for indexing (which is what locate is for), well, enough of that nonsense, thank you, don't need two indexing daemons running all the time. They may have gotten better, but, frankly, who cares. Once somebody imposes a clumsy expensive (in terms of resource use -- mine and system) thing on me by default and I have to waste a lot of my and other folks' time fixing or getting rid of that, well, I'm done. That's what Microsoft does and we all just love Microsoft, eh?

When Pat got rid of GNOME (a gargantuan piece of stuff that I did not use after one try) in favor of KDE, seemed like a Good Idea until KDE started acting like GNOME and Microjunk. I've been doing software for a long, long time and the most important lesson learned during a wasted youth was to adhere to Doug McIlory's Unix Philosophy (down at the bottom of the page here): write programs that do one thing and do it well. If you go look at Unix utilities, you'll notice something: they're small, efficient and effective. If you look at GNU utilities, well, they're a bit more complicated and larger; I believe that is the result of not being able to leave well enough alone.

By the way, Dough McIlroy is the guy that invented pipe, possibly one of the greatest contributions to computing ever (after C and Unix itself anyway).

An example would be the difference between AWK and GAWK. AWK (available from Brian Kernighan's web page at Princeton (http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~bwk/) is small, tight, efficient and effective. GAWK has "extensions;" somebody's idea of more is better -- bloat. Aho, Weinberger and Kernighan (get it? AWK?) wrote an efficient programming language (and the book about it) in 1988 (New AWK which replaced Old AWK) and it hasn't changed since and there is no reason to change or add to it (on Solaris systems you get oawk and nawk to choose from). If you download the source from the link, it'll build and install on Linux and runs circles around GAWK; save the a.out as nawk and there you go.

A slightly different example would be ex, the extended editor, originating at Bell Labs. vi is ex running in visual mode (thanks to Bill Joy and crew at Berkeley). ex is small, efficient and effective. Does one thing and does it well. Nowadays, on Slackware, ex is a symbolic link to vim. Used to be a link to elvis (a gargantuan piece of code that tries to be all things to all people with bells, whistles and who knows what-all.

GNU has done a wonderful job of building look- work-alike software emulating Unix utilities (GNU is GNU's Not Unix); free and open source, well done, thank you. A little bloated here and there, over time a bunch of "extensions," some good, some not, some questionable but so what? It works.

I learned programming on "large" systems (that nowadays are your average desktop, maybe even your phone or your wristwatch); I also learned on microcomputers -- Z-80 processor, 32K RAM, flip switches, heat the house with the thing. I learned to "write programs that do one thing and do it well" simply because I had to. Upgrade to 64K RAM, oh, what a relief it is. New box, Motorola 68000 processor, one whole megabyte of RAM, 50M disk drive, wow, zowie, nirvana. Still wrote as small as I could, still do on what would have been considered a mammoth computer (4-core, 16G RAM, drive array are you kidding me?).

Software that tries to be all things to all people, at least in my experience, tends to not do all those things efficiently or too well (my opinion). For that reason, I don't like KDE -- it's not "bad," but it's not "good" either. Xfce, from the release found in Slackware 14.0 to the one found in 14.1 is "better" but it's growing. Still smaller and cleaner, but developers just can't seem to avoid adding features, tweaking things and fiddling around until something breaks; the default Automatically Tile Windows when moving toward the screen edge "feature" that drives a lot of folks up the wall may just be one of those.

The question is not how well but rather why at all (think those little dancing dog in the circus here).

But then again, Linux is all about choice -- it's up to you what you use and why and how you use it. I like X-windows, I like having multiple windows open, I like being able to quickly and easily customize what I see on the screen to be as simple and unadorned as possible. Other folks like photos of the grandkids, oceans, stars, artwork, pretty girls (or boys, gotta be equal here), cars, airplanes, space ships, you name it. Different strokes, no right or wrong there.

I will always appreciate something well-done and useful; hey, that's why Slackware, eh?

Hope this helps some.

4 members found this post helpful.

^^^
Excellent. Well said! Best post in this thread.