[LAU] Resource gains - lightweight Desktop vs KDE, Gnome

david gnome at hawaii.rr.com
Tue Oct 14 06:34:53 UTC 2014


On 10/13/2014 01:56 PM, Joe Hartley wrote:
> On Mon, 13 Oct 2014 14:50:05 -0700
> Russell Hanaghan <hanaghan.osaudio at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Older laptops in this case... 1.6ghz - 2.2ghz dual core 64bit processors and their rough equivalents, running say, current KDE4 Ubuntu like environment, vs flux/blackbox <add ur choice here>, etc.  anyone got any real results?
>
> That should be more than enough horsepower for the task...
>
>> Does the lightweight WM or DT really give me anymore power to do something useful??
>
> My experiences have definitely been consistent with this, though I haven't
> used anything besides Fluxbox in ages.
>
> If at all possible, swap out the hard drive with a SSD.  Most laptop
> drives are not chosen for performance, so 5200RPM drives are real common
> and the less performant the drive, the harder the system works to keep
> up with everything while recording.

I'd think that the more memory your system has available for audio data, 
the less it will depend on your fixed storage (spinning or SSD).

Heavyweight desktop environments like KDE4 and Gnome 3 use a lot more 
memory for themselves, leaving less available for anything else.

And, sorry, had to laugh. When you mentioned "older laptops", my mind 
went back to my older laptop (the one just before this present i7 
system). A 32-bit 2.8GHz Celeron processor and 2 GB of RAM, without any 
of these modern accelerated GPUs driving the video. KDE4 crawled on it. 
And that was with a 7200RPM hard drive in it.

-- 
David W. Jones
gnome at hawaii.rr.com
authenticity, honesty, community
http://dancingtreefrog.com


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