OT [was Re: [PATCH] fsync applet]

Denys Vlasenko vda.linux at googlemail.com
Thu Jun 18 09:19:17 UTC 2009


On Thu, Jun 18, 2009 at 9:53 AM, Bernhard
Reutner-Fischer<rep.dot.nop at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> My guess is that performance bugs are only fixed when they are
>>> painful enough.
>>>
>>> Example. KMail's abysmal performance on big mail folders
>>> is not fixed yet only because it is tolerable on 2 GHz+ machines.
>>
>>Ha.
>
> easy enough to fix. apt-get remove --purge kde && apt-get install mutt && \
> echo 'set header_cache=~/.Mutt_headers' >> ~/.muttrc

When mutt was born? 1995? No wonder it does not use as much resources.
In 1995, it _had to be_ more resource-efficient. That's my point.
Software gets optimized when it sucks bad enough on typical modern machine.

As modenr machines get faster, more and more of awful code gets unnoticed
until it piles up high enough to suck visibly.

> I can't imagine to run anything KDE on a 100MHz machine anyway. Such a
> box works nicely with (or without) X, a sensible WM like blackbox or
> related descendants, rxvt or ggiterm, mutt and links/lynx/dillo etc.

KDE/Gnome-like GUI is needed for mere mortals.
Otherwise, the world will continue to use Windows.

There is not intrinsic reasons why such a GUI can't be made efficient.
It's just a question of quality of code.

> It's faster to reinstall such a box from scratch with a sane system than
> to wait for KDE to bootup to the desktop _once_ anyway. Using or
> complaining about KDE is just doctor-it-hurts-when-i.. syndrome :P

I see it as "using stuff I want to be usable for non-geeky users".
Because I want more non-geeky users on Linux. If we, collectively,
won't care about KDE/Gnome, how we make sure it is not too awful?
--
vda


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