On Mon, Jun 27, 2005 at 11:18:43AM +0200, Holly Bostick wrote > Perhaps so, but is building a minimal system the default behaviour that > the profiles are targeted to? Apparently not. This "default system" is > expected to likely meet the following criteria:
[...snip big list...] Some people want this, some (overlapping but not superset group) want that, etc, etc. Trying to cover all the bases results in Windows-like bloat, and a system, with the average user not using a significant chunk of it (and for each user it's a *DIFFERENT* significant chunk). I've got this 1999 Dell Dimension, 450 mhz PIII, 128 megs of RAM, that refuses to die (they don't make them like that any more). The successor system, a P4 with exactly 4 times the ram and 4 times the speed, is currently my "hot backup". KDE literally takes a whole minute to come up on the PIII. I can see the icons being drawn in slow motion. Gnome is just as bad. But running Blackbox, and using fbpanel, Firefox is quite snappy, as are AbiWord, and Gnumeric. xmms is my gui audio player. I read email (mutt) and usenet (slrn) in true console text mode. dosbox renders old DOS games slower than I remember them. I've actually had mplayer complain that my machine is too slow for internet TV, but it's almost fast enough. Of course, I'm running the PIII with... CFLAGS="-O2 -march=pentium3 -fomit-frame-pointer -mmmx -msse -mfpmath=sse" A binary RPM distro with i586 (or i386!!!) binaries would be even worse. I think that linux will a significant opportunity when Longhorn comes out, and MS stops selling older Windows. There'll be a lot of desktops, and laptops, that simply won't run Longhorn. If nothing else, we'll be able to pick nice linux machines for really low prices. An even better scenario is a mass defection of (former) Windows users whose machines won't run Longhorn. If I was cynical, I'd wager that MS is deliberately delaying Longhorn, whilst PCs get faster and faster. In another year or two, there may be a significant population of PCs that will be able to run Longhorn. -- Walter Dnes <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> My musings on technology and security at http://tech_sec.blog.ca -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
