Excellent information! According to the second page, TDE is actually competitive with (and in some cases surpassing) the traditional "lightweight" desktop environments. This is a very pleasant surprise for me; I had no idea that TDE was even in the same range as I do not run XFCE/LXDE on my systems.

Regarding Razor-qt, yes, AFAIK a large amount of the measured "bloat" is directly related to the use of Qt4. Other culprits might include heavy use of relatively clunky system messaging interfaces, though I would expect more of a performance drain from this than a waste of memory.

Thanks for the links!

Tim

Hi everyone! Once again, Trinity is awesome!

I remember the first time when I tried XFCE, probably in 2007, I decided to not use it because it took the same time as KDE3 to start, but with less features and I would miss my much-loved KDE/TDE apps like Amarok, KPDF, Dolphin and K3b.

Tim, I will give 50$ to the TDE project when R14 will be released with PCLinuxOS packages. You can even note that somewhere! I will also release my PCLOS non-official TDE remaster soon after, this time with a Zenity script to switch between the classic vanilla TDE theme and the more modern theme I use, so it could please more users.

Have a nice day! -Alexandre

On Sat, 13 Apr 2013 01:54:25 +0200 Slávek Banko slavek.banko@axis.cz wrote:

...

Hello everyone,

you might also be interested in:

http://l3net.wordpress.com/2013/03/17/a-memory-comparison-of-light-linux-des... http://l3net.wordpress.com/2013/04/09/a-memory-comparison-of-light-linux-des...

It surprised me Razor-qt. I have to say that this environment is not nearly as complete and comprehensive as Trinity, but memory consumption is staggering. That would be a consequence of using Qt4? The choice to remain in Trinity with Qt3 => TQt3 seems to be a very good decision.

Slavek

I have obtained pretty much the same test results while struggling to find a TDE alternative(s) using a "features / resource consumption" scale. I saw no competition between the TDE and Razor-Qt, because of the reasons you have mentioned. As the time passes new actively developed projects like Razor-Qt tend to grow larger, not smaller, so I assume the gap will only widen in the future.

It's still too early to guess, but I (wish|expect) to see E17 as a major rival of TDE in 3-4 years from now.

Regards, Sergey.

This discussion brings up a long-standing idea I have had.

I would like to add a "Why TDE?" page to the website; this should contain a brief set of paragraphs explaining why users like yourselves have chosen to use TDE versus another desktop. Entries should not engage in bashing other desktops, but should instead highlight unique features of TDE that, singly or in unison, have swayed you to choose TDE for use in a particular setting.

Thoughts on this?

Thanks!

Tim

On Friday 19 April 2013 16:33:42 Pascal Viandier wrote:

This is an excellent idea indeed.

Like Pascal I looked at and tested other DEs when KDE3 was abandoned and I did not like KDE4. There was no contest. I was just delighted that TDE existed. I'm all for telling the world how wonderful it is!

So, as a TDE fan, I vote for your idea. It can only attract more TDE users, what is we all want.

+1 Can only do good.

Lisi

On Thu, 18 Apr 2013 19:15:06 -0500 "Timothy Pearson" kb9vqf@pearsoncomputing.net wrote:

...

On Sat, 13 Apr 2013 01:54:25 +0200 Slávek Banko slavek.banko@axis.cz wrote:

...

Hello everyone,

you might also be interested in:

http://l3net.wordpress.com/2013/03/17/a-memory-comparison-of-light-linux-des... http://l3net.wordpress.com/2013/04/09/a-memory-comparison-of-light-linux-des...

It surprised me Razor-qt. I have to say that this environment is not nearly as complete and comprehensive as Trinity, but memory consumption is staggering. That would be a consequence of using Qt4? The choice to remain in Trinity with Qt3 => TQt3 seems to be a very good decision.

Slavek

I have obtained pretty much the same test results while struggling to find a TDE alternative(s) using a "features / resource consumption" scale. I saw no competition between the TDE and Razor-Qt, because of the reasons you have mentioned. As the time passes new actively developed projects like Razor-Qt tend to grow larger, not smaller, so I assume the gap will only widen in the future.

It's still too early to guess, but I (wish|expect) to see E17 as a major rival of TDE in 3-4 years from now.

Regards, Sergey.

This discussion brings up a long-standing idea I have had.

I would like to add a "Why TDE?" page to the website; this should contain a brief set of paragraphs explaining why users like yourselves have chosen to use TDE versus another desktop. Entries should not engage in bashing other desktops, but should instead highlight unique features of TDE that, singly or in unison, have swayed you to choose TDE for use in a particular setting.

Thoughts on this?

Thanks!

Tim

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I will try to show things like they look like from my perspective and may be you will find something useful.

Some background: Although I have modern hardware in my possession, my favourite all-around machine is still an ASUS Eee PC 901, with an Intel Atom single core CPU running at 1.6Ghz, 2GB RAM, two 4GB + 8GB slow SSD drives. To give you a general idea: roughly it can be described as a top-tier PIII system on steroids (amount of RAM, seek time of the block devices).

By the time KDE3.5 reached its EOL and was about to be dropped from Debian I already knew that KDE4 was not an option for me (way to heavy and buggy at the time), so it was obvious that sooner or later I have to abandon the ship, and in order to do so one needs to find out DE-agnostic alternatives to every single KDE suite application. And to achieve across-DE mobility I did.

Some things, however, either had no alternatives outside KDE ecosystem, or these alternatives did not qualify in my own workflow. Here is some of them: kwin kpowersave krandrtray (it's 2013 and I have enough fingers on my palm to count all xrandr interfaces that actually do more good than the simple 'xrandr --auto' command; if I ever start to program for desktop, it's a good project to begin with) KDE notification framework (as a mean to hook a script to almost any conceivable event) kicker (believe me or not, it's hard to find a panel configurable enough to act, look and feel a bit outside of "fits everyone" point of view, so far only tint2 has qualified) mount manager

This was probably the major points, but beyond that KDE/TDE have a long list of applications one could live without or find a substitute, but simply reluctant to do so.

Back to my case, I just want a bloat-free, robust classic desktop from Debian stable main repository. There is nothing wrong with TDE except the fact that it is not there. Regular attempts to find a substitute just proved how good KDE3 series was and it was my own folly of taking all those features for granted. Now I almost feel like I'm giving "The grass was greener back then" speech, heh :).

I'd like to share some of my thoughts on the "Qt4-bloat" topic. It is true, that by one reason or another transition to Qt4 resulted in noticeable increase in RAM usage. What I'd like to debate is the "speed" or CPU usage of Qt4 toolkit. Recently while evaluating TDE alternatives due to upcoming Debian Wheezy release I accidentally made a discovery which makes Qt4 look not as bad as it used to be in this particular aspect.

I installed Razor-Qt, but accidentally forgot kwin4, and simply launched openbox instead. Overall snappiness just blew me away, still not as good as Qt3, but very impressive. For a moment I thought guys at Razor-Qt hit a jackpot: I installed KDE4 and observed how the very same set of KDE4 apps redraw itself noticeably slower. But then I started back Razor-Qt, it launched newly installed kwin4 and the miracle was gone. I tried kwin4 with minimal compositing and without, the results were the same: as soon as you launch 'openbox --replace' things were drawn a lot faster. That day I almost stayed with KDE4, but I guess I have a bit too many custom kwin rules to walk away like that. For someone not so kwin-bound this may be a solution. It's worth mentioning that I had set QT_GRAPHICSSYSTEM='raster' at the time and kwin4 memory usage hits ridiculous 65-70MB.

TL;DR: In my opinion TDE is good because of minimal set of core applications which make it's a DE is both feature rich and resource-wise by today's standards. The only problem with it, that you can't find it in the main repository of today's major distributions. Much of the talk dedicated to slow redraw of Qt4-based desktops may be attributed to a kwin4 performance regression.

Regards, Sergey.