Possibility to add gwenview, krita, kdict, and enable Java in browsers?

[Knut Yrvin]

[Gavin McCullagh]
> > You also tend to have slower start-up times and greater RAM footprints
> > when you mix the two environments.

This is true. The biggest sinners when it comes to slow start-up time and 
memory footprint are FireFox and OpenOffice.org. Interestingly Xfce window 
manager + 3rd party apps uses most memory compared to Gnome and KDE when 
looking at real life usage this report shows: 

http://ktown.kde.org/~seli/memory/desktop_benchmark.html

It's important to differentiate between initialisation time (start-up) and 
runtime (continues usage). You don't need to turn off a thin client server, a 
laptop or a mobile phone. Servers are on all the time. Embedded devices and 
laptops uses suspend. This "standard" state is on, and continues usage are 
most important. 

Feedback from a company which does huge Linux deployments in banks says they 
prefer KDE when doing thin clients. You can run 50-60 thin clients on a 4GB 
RAM server with KDE, they say. We were not able to support more than 35 
clients with Gnome in the same environmen, with the same browser and office 
suite, on same hardware. When deploying several thousand thin clients, the 
number of servers affects costs, this company told. Reducing the number of 
servers with 25-30% reduces both hardware and maintenance cost.

When it comes to LowFat workstations or ordinary workstations, the RAM usage 
don't apply in same way if you got 256 MB RAM given that swap available and 
turned on. One Laptop Per Child said that 128 MB RAM should be sufficient to 
run every school application. Then introducing FireFox and Python based 
software they hit a wall. OLPC was slow. Increased memory from 128 MB RAM to 
256 MB helped allot. They increased the speed on certain applications 2-3 
times:  

http://www.olpcnews.com/hardware/production/olpc_x0_hardware_upgrade.html

[José L. Redrejo Rodríguez]
> That's totally right, and I'm afraid there is no solution for it.

Well. KDE developers has rewritten lots of libraries, reducing the numbers 
from 18 to 7. They now rely new infrastructure components based on d-bus. 
This reduces the need for different libraries between Gnome and KDE when 
interchanging data as e.g copy & past. 

With Qt4 the memory footprint and start-up time are waistly improved because 
requirement from embedded and phone manufacturers. D-bus support is also a 
part of Qt. Since KDE4 is built on Qt, memory footprint will decrease and 
speed will increase. 

There are a lot of work going into optimising memory usage on embedded and 
phone devices.  Linux on mobiles are huge in other part of the world, 
especially in China. Tomas Frydrych had an interesting talk at FOSDEM 2007 
presenting how you can messure memory footprint on embedded and desktop 
systems, and get the number right: 

About Tomas Frydrychs talk: 
http://www.fosdem.org/2007/schedule/events/embedded_analysing_memory_use

Slides: 
http://www.fosdem.org/2007/slides/devrooms/embedded/exmap/slide-00.html

My point is that there are a huge marked for less memory hungry and fast 
applications. On the desktop people from Intel says it straight out. They are 
not interested in selling cpu-s for thin clients because they don't earn 
money on low performance chips (that is really high performance stuff 
compared to 7-10 years ago). When it comes to embedded the situations is 
differently. There are more competitors, and more systems to choose between. 

Best regards
-- 
Skolelinux project manager Norway