Pain and Glory from the Trenches of the IT World

I felt the need to clarify some things with this article that discusses so-called “Ubuntu Web Browsers”. The fact of the matter is that those browsers are in no way tied to Ubuntu. Likewise, Ubuntu supports browsers other than those.

Browsers like Firefox and Opera run on many different operating systems, from Windows, to Linux, to Mac OS X, to Solaris, to FreeBSD. Check out the Opera FTP site for proof of this. Look at the wide range of platforms they support. And don’t forget that some of those directories, like the “unix” directory, themselves contain several platforms.

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.

Today I read an article introducing a service called booBox. booBox apparently allows web site owners to try to sell the items they are writing about. Like the article suggests, it’s probably best to try out their demo for yourself. For their demo, if you click on the image of an iPod, for example, it will bring up an overlay showing images of similar or related items that can then be purchased from Amazon.

I have really started to look forward to the release of KDE 4. For a number of years now I have used KDE as my primary desktop. My main reasons for using it are that it is very well integrated, and it otherwise is of a very high quality. I haven’t performed any formal benchmarking, but I do think it is more responsive than GNOME. One study have indicated that KDE actually uses less memory than GNOME in many cases. Perhaps this extends to its need for CPU resources, as well.