Guilty as charged, I generalize too much. I sling mud at Ubuntu without taking care not to splatter the other Ubuntus in the process. So I’m going to amend that over the next few days.
Some will call me a glutton for punishment for starting off with Kubuntu. Others will slap themselves soundly on the forehead and mutter, “Out of the frying pan, into the fire.”
And both will be right; straight Ubuntu might swallow a mighty chunk of memory just to get off the ground, but Kubuntu 11.04 gobbles it greedily.
But I won’t harass Kubuntu as much as Ubuntu for being a memory hog … even though my system is consuming as much as 290Mb on cold boot. 😯
(That’s on the core duo, of course. I dare not run it on anything else. 🙄 )
No, I’m not prejudiced, I just always seem to remember KDE eating up more. So I expected it. It’s not delightful, but it wasn’t a surprise either.
But I’m going to go back and really rub vanilla Ubuntu users’ noses in it, and repeat what I said years ago:
It’s already got all the effects, the gloss, the shimmer, the bling and the splash. It came prepackaged with everything you see above … and more.
So if you’re working hard to prettify Gnome — either as a developer or as an end user — why are you fighting it? What you really want is KDE.
Next stop is the purported lightweight of the family. 😈
Motho ke motho ka botho 
Using mint 10 kde. I can configure it to my heart’s content. I am a user and I want a pleasant experience. I don’t want to bang head with a desktop environment who knows what’s best for me.
What’s all this talk about light weight? I got a core2 duo with 3GB (soon updating to 4GB), I have installed a Seagate Momentus XT 500 GB. Really I’m happier than a pig in sh**t.
Gnome and Unity can continue to vociferously decry “I’m the best, I know what’s best for you. I can’t hear them.
“What’s all this talk about light weight?”
Well, this blog is about very old computers after all.
“Why do you use gnome when it’s a memory hog ? If you want beauty and customization you should be using kde.”
“Why do you even bother using xfce when it’s basically just a crippled version of gnome ?”
“Why do you use geany instead of vim ? Why don’t you just use eclipse anyway ?”
“Why do you use Arch instead of Ubuntu ? Why aren’t you using Linux from Scratch if you want something lightweight ?”
Why, why indeed. We always have to sacrifice something to satisfy our demands. For different people the amount they’re willing (and able) to sacrifice will be different, but you already know this.
I ran with Kubuntu a few months back and got tired of it quickly actually. When memory usage was better than in Ubuntu the 6 Month release schedule has a huge effect on it. Optimizations often aren’t seen until the LTS.
However I have a ton of ram and I don’t cry when I hit 50% running 50 tabs in a few Chromium windows. It sandboxes, I remember that and think well I have another 2GBs sitting on top of this.
So yes I agree KDE does seem to use less MEM than Gnome, and yes KDE is very customizable, but the focus has been on Gnome.
And because of the strange movements of Gnome with version three I may find myself wondering back to KDE or even XFCE. :O
I don’t think any of the *buntu’s are very well done, although Ubuntu is tolerable. I actually set up a very nice looking Xfce configuration today, looks way better then my Gnome does. Still, I always wind up using Pekwm/Openbox/Fluxbox/Icewm. If I want a good Xfce I use Salix. Wonderfully configured Xfce. Many distros have a great KDE such as Mepis, Pardus, OpenSUSE and PcLinuxOS. Really no reason to use *buntu.
I know there are a plethora of ‘Minimalist’ distros based on ubuntu. But this one
http://bodhilinux.com/index.html
is actually very impressive. You have probably heard of it, but I think it is worth a plug.
IIRC, KDE is supposed to use more RAM at the start, but doesn’t increase nearly as much as you load more KDE programs.
Isn’t it time Distrowatch did something to reflect the true position?
The *buntus – Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Xubuntu, Lubuntu, Edbuntu – have a release cycle of 6 months. A new, clean install is recommended over an update. Is is any wonder that people keep downloading again and again? It would be interesting to know who is downloading the latest version of the *buntu when they already have/use *buntu.
The second most “popular” download is just given as “Mint”. Does that cover both the versions based on *buntu AND the version based on Debian? There is no differentiation.
Someone who uses a distro with a much longer release cycle e.g. Debian, or a rolling release e.g. Aptosid had no need to keep downloading. They just update…
I use Ubuntu in my laptop simply because I do not have time to work on carefully configuring the hardware.
But then… I install fluxbox and make it the default window manager from GDM. In the end, I get an installation that may be a little bit heavier than others, but it works just fine even with 512M of RAM.
Even when I first installed Linux on a machine with 48M, Gnome would drag like crazy. Did I change the distro? No. At that time, I used WindowMaker and everything was fine. And it is more keyboard shortcut frendly. 🙂 (That’s the reason I use Fluxbox anyway.)
Ive played with lubuntu and mints version of lxde both kind nice and light for my usage
for my older lappy i use puppy
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I use various KDEs, most usually PCLinuxOS, Mandriva and Gentoo.
I have Kubuntu installed on my Dell mini 9 with full cube effects and all. Just used it tonight at judo: other parents LOVED the cube and other effects… people love eye candy.
I am now at my folks place using their spare laptop which also runs Kubuntu (dad read about Shuttleworth and wanted Ubuntu. He tried it and said it looked like WIndows 95 and said no thanks. Luckily, we have choice and he found Kubuntu to his taste), its an old Acer laptop-tank and its running a Celeron chip and I bumped it up to a whole 1gb of ram and the shared SIS video card isnt made for 3D effects.
Works nicely.
Atom with igb ram and 7-8yr old Acer with 1gb ram dont fly like my 64bit system with 4gb ram but they are very usable.
If it wasnt, I would change.
I try about 6-7 distros a month so its not like I cant change it.
I’m using Ubuntu a few years now, but the truth is that I don’t like the upcoming ‘cellphone edition’ (Unity) or KDE. The resource-hunger bothers me too. A bit eyecandy won’t hurt, but when your talking about 290MB? Reason enough (for me) to do a simple netinstall and put openbox, lxpanel, conky, wbar and gtk stuff on it. Eyecandy enough and it uses 40,1MB with a cold boot.