Plugin Bloat (speeding up OpenOffice?)

[dsr at tao.merseine.nu]

On Wed, Jan 17, 2007 at 09:53:17PM -0500, Rich Braun wrote:
> Upgrading memory does, of course, make sense.  This does beg the question,
> though--whatever happened to the "old" Linux?
> 
> I first ran Linux on a 386DX-25 with 4 megs of memory.  Everything was nice
> and speedy up through the 486 and early Pentium line.
> 
> Ever since then, it's all been downhill.  The fastest computer I ever used, in
> terms of how much it actually got done for me, was a CDC Cyber 173 installed
> in--get this--summer 1978.

I live in a different universe, apparently. Each computer I buy
is faster than the one before, for less money:

8086-8, 384KB, no hard disk: $1200
386SX-24, 2MB RAM, 130MB disk: $1200
486DX-33, 8MB, 240MB : $1000
P-150, 32MB, 2GB: $2000 (whoops, bought at the wrong time)
K6-III-450, 128MB, 10GB: $900
Celeron 1.7Ghz, 384MB, 30GB: $650
AMD Athlon XP 2.4GHz, 1GB, 200GB RAID-1: $600

Every one of them felt much faster than the one before, both
objectively and subjectively.

I suspect that if you pose the same sort of problems that you
did to the Cyber 173 to a modern $500 Linux box, you will see
much faster results.

What did you ask it to do?

> Just venting, I guess, I don't really see a solution.  The open-source
> movement is pretty much by definition oriented toward bloat:  contributions
> keep coming in and adding to the code pile.

Depends on the project. There are lots of projects specifically
devoted to efficient use of resources. On a desktop box, try
running:

- XFCE instead of GNOME or KDE
- AbiWord and Gnumeric instead of OpenOffice
- Galeon instead of Mozilla
- rxvt instead of xterm
- without 3D or other use of GL on the desktop
- without transparency

All of that will speed up your feel significantly.

-dsr-

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