I just wanted to post a little something about my adventures with tux, I hope everyone will bare with me as I ramble for a little bit.
Recently I came into a couple pretty good mid-range p4 laptops and decided “what the hell lets go distro hopping”. I tried the new versions of ubuntu, fedora, mandriva, crunchbang (still one of my favs) slitaz and puppy. i tried gnome, kde, xfce, and enlightenment to name a few. Ive always loved the KDE interface and wanted to use it but my experiances have been…less then pleasing. KDE almost always took up 90% of my cpu and about 500+ MB of my ram so it was rendered useless on my laptop. Then I stumbled upon openSUSE and installed it with the gnome desktop, weary of the almighty best known as KDE4. After playing around with it for about 5 days I got bored (as I usually do) and installed the KDE4 desktop and WOW!! my cpu is staying where it should be (about 14% during normal operation, which is average for my machine) and the ram usage is at about 300MB. All in all its extremely stable and usable unlike KDE4 on other distros i’ve tried even with compiz running.
So I just have to ask the question, what is so different about openSUSE then the other distros when it comes to KDE4? Why is suse so much better? If I dont get answers to those questions it still wont matter, I have decided to stick with suse as my main distro from here on out. I am extremely pleased with it, it does everything I need to do or want to do and it does it very well. Cheers to the dev team and everyone involved.
I am not entirely willing to call openSUSE the king of KDE4, as there are good contenders out there like PClinux and Mandriva.
Both have fairly decent KDE4 integration on par with openSUSE.
i never said it was king, but i have tried mandriva (havent tried pclinux) and out of them suse handles it better on my computer. its a personal experiance thing.
Well many consider openSUSE to be king of the hill when it comes to KDE4, but it is with good reason as its pretty smooth compared to Kubunbtu and some other distros.
But this does hang on hardware, most of the time openSUSE is quite good at its job.
Though I will say pclinux is worth a shot for those who like hopping.
Really - the key to your answering your question is in the reason WHY the CPU is being hogged in the first place. I feel it is unlikely to be kde or gnome specifically that is at the root cause. All distros use basically the same source from upstream. (Although it is always possible to have a rogue distro specific package). Hence Bug reporting for gnome or kde, whatever distro you use, should go upstream as well as to your distro’s bug database.
The kernel build for your distro is likely to have much more influence than the desktop you choose. Also X (Graphical environment) and it’s implementation into the desktop is key to stability.
You mention Compiz, but in openSUSE, with a plain KDE install, Compiz is not installed because it is Gnome specific. In fact openSUSE uses a package called kde-pure to maintain that clarity and distinction. Try installing Compiz in KDE and you will need to install a shed load of Gnome desktop and be asked to drop kde-pure. KDE uses kwin which has it’s own desktop effects. Therefore, I ask, was it Compiz you were using in the other distros and or in openSUSE?
I have sandboxed most distros - including those you mention, they all work just fine on my hardware. But my choice is openSUSE.
very true, i noticed a few time with a vanilla install of some other distro’s my computer was sluggish, but after upgrading to a recent kernel or x server it was fine, i know there are improvements all the time. The reason i mentioned compiz is just because I kindof wanted to test the limits of what my laptop can handle so i installed compiz on top of kde trying to find out the “breaking point” and was pleased to find it ran both with ease which means it will run 98% of what i want to run on it. It was used as a sort of benchmark for my laptop lol
For kde on x64 suse is the winner. I used Kubuntu and Mandriva but they were not stable. According to AMD abt 90% driver development for x64 is done by suse guys. Other than YaST I find suse useful in many ways.
Still, with older hardware, if one wishes a bit snappier performance , then there is a new desktop (that looks closer to Gnome than KDE) that some of us have been supporting for introduction into openSUSE. This is the LXDE desktop.
If definitely does NOT have the eye candy nor features of KDE (that I like) nor the features of Gnome (which I also like - except for Gnome’s pulse audio implementation).
But LXDE has one thing better than those two desktops on old PCs with 128MB to 512MB of RAM, and that is ‘speed’. … By no means is an LXDE desktop a speed deamon like, for example, Puppy Linux, but if one wants openSUSE with reasonably fast behaviour on an old PC then LXDE is a good candidate.
The plan is LXDE will come with openSUSE-11.3 DVD (to be released in mid-July) and then maybe by October (possibly sooner) the openSUSE community will produce a liveCD for LXDE in openSUSE-11.3. There is a liveCD for LXDE on openSUSE-11.2, but the 11.3 version of LXDE is SIGNIFICANTLY superior to the older version on 11.2 liveCD LXDE.
ive tried lxde also, and to be honest i dont really care about “snappiness” at this point, as long as the os is stable and usable without taking an hour to load firefox im good to go. as far as upgrading i heard a couple bad things about xorg in 11.3 not liking ati or something so i’m kind of weary about upgrading. as of right now i decided to go back to gnome mainly because its a lot more familiar to me. but i’ll call that a successful venture into kde4 the way it should be
… can you be more specific as to what “bad things” you have heard ? If this is your hardware/software:
Uber-puter - IBM Thinkpad T41 ~ Pentium M 1.6Ghz ~ 512 MB RAM ~ 32MB ATI Mobility Radeon 7500 ~ openSUSE 11.2 ~ KDE4
then I believe you should get better behaviour with the Radeon 7500 on openSUSE-11.3 with its newer radeon driver.
Why not download a liveCD now, and test? I think the liveCD will boot even with your PC having only 512MB of RAM.
i just heard something about xorg in 11.3 not using radeon or catalyst drivers well and some people lost all video, but if you are telling me that mine should actually be better with 11.3 then i’ll back up and upgrade and check it out
Still, with older hardware, if one wishes a bit snappier performance , then there is a new desktop (that looks closer to Gnome than KDE) that some of us have been supporting for introduction into openSUSE. This is the LXDE desktop.
If definitely does NOT have the eye candy nor features of KDE (that I like) nor the features of Gnome (which I also like - except for Gnome’s pulse audio implementation).
But LXDE has one thing better than those two desktops on old PCs with 128MB to 512MB of RAM, and that is ‘speed’. … By no means is an LXDE desktop a speed deamon like, for example, Puppy Linux, but if one wants openSUSE with reasonably fast behaviour on an old PC then LXDE is a good candidate.
The plan is LXDE will come with openSUSE-11.3 DVD (to be released in mid-July) and then maybe by October (possibly sooner) the openSUSE community will produce a liveCD for LXDE in openSUSE-11.3. There is a liveCD for LXDE on openSUSE-11.2, but the 11.3 version of LXDE is SIGNIFICANTLY superior to the older version on 11.2 liveCD LXDE.
I have tried Knoppix with LXDE and it wasnt pretty. It was slow and gave me an impression of running windows2000 or something. If you have pentium type hardware then you may think of running LXDE. One can kill pulseaudio and install alsa mixer (I’ve done that with ease in suse).
I have zero issues with speed using suse gnome, or kde and thats one of the things i like so much about it, even with a stripped down version of xp (my own disc + nlite) with everything i didnt need taken out it was still sluggish and worst of all kept dropping my net ( i use public wifi and dropping a signal during say an upgrade is really bad) but with suse (and linux in general) my laptop is lightyears faster and my wireless card sees double the connections and will hold on to it.
Sorry to read of your difficulties with Knoppix LXDE. I like that distribution. It could be your hardware and the driver being used thou, and NOT LXDE.
Just to say. I had some issue with LXDE. For some reason it had problems with moving files. If there are subfolders in it (linked) it will copy all folders.
Otherwise works great. I am back to Gnome since i like the philosophy of Gnome. KDE always look to me as a Windows clone. No offense and yes i know you can customize it.
If OpenSuse with KDE works best for you, thats great. I have OpenSuse running with Gnome and its fast and no problems. So it stays on my harddrive.
The file manager by default in LXDE is PCManFM. But one is not forced to use that file manager and one can use the IDENTICAL file manager that is in Gnome. So I confess I don’t see that as an LXDE limitation.
Plus I have NOT encountered the File Manager problem you discovered (ie I can NOT reproduce it).
I like the look/feel of Gnome, but I dislike Gnome’s pulse audio implementation, as it is still quirky. On my PCs, neither LXDE nor KDE have the audio problems that Gnome has. Unfortunately the audio implementation problem with Gnome (that I get on my PCs) in itself is enough to convince me to keep KDE on my newer PCs and keep LXDE for my older PCs. Unfortunately, no Gnome for my PCs.
Also, its easy to change a file manager. Changing an audio system setup is not so easy.
ok then i just have one last question, when 11.3 is released can i upgrade via iso? or just reinstall? or is there an online option i missed, in the wiki it said upgrading can be a challenge? did i read it right?
It is supposed to be possible to update to 11.3 from 11.2 (or from a milestone release). One just sets up their repositories to the new 11.3 repository location and send the appropriate zypper command.
I have not done this myself, so I can not provide the details.
BUT I do know that if one occasionally custom compiles or if one uses applications from many different repositories, then one can get all sorts of dependency errors, which can make such an update difficult for a relatively new user.
…Edit - silly me. I only just now (after posting) see caf4926 replied.
well i dont have anything currently custom compiled so im figuring i should be okay then, thanks all for your help and i’m looking forward to upgrading next week
… By no means is an LXDE desktop a speed deamon like, for example, Puppy Linux, but if one wants openSUSE with reasonably fast behaviour on an old PC then LXDE is a good candidate.