Pain and Glory from the Trenches of the IT World

About a month ago, I considered the factors that were holding back one open source project with much potential, Parrot. Today I will do the same for another open source project: .

I’ve met a lot of end users over the years. Some I have quite disliked, most I am indifferent about, but some I will remember forever. One such user I met today at an insurance company. His job was to perform some actuarial tasks for the company. The work he does is apparently quite computationally-intensive, so he had some pretty modern, high-end Sun and IBM workstations at his disposal.

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.

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 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 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.