Useless and meaningless rant about my hate for Linux Mint...

[Brian Cluff]

On 06/21/2014 11:05 AM, kitepilot at kitepilot.com wrote:
> And/or the M$-like bloated KDE.

Since your ranting, I will too...
I really hate seeing people continue to spread that KDE is bloated.  It 
might have been true in the KDE 3.5 days, but these days it's quite 
small.  As far as ram usage it isn't the smallest, but in the class of 
the full featured desktops it's usually among the lowest.  It's 
certainly lower memory usage than both Unity and Gnome.
Even if it wasn't lower, why would you throw out all the time saving, 
integration you get with KDE for what amounts to the ram space of a 
single dollar worth of ram that you get back with the use of one of the 
"lean" desktops.
I've watched people use the "more efficient" distros over and over and 
spend a ton of time trying to get the features that are built into the 
"bloated" distos.
...and if your answer to why you have to run a slim distro is that your 
machine is too old to run anything else, I would recommend spending one 
of the hours that you'll be spending trying to get your machine to work 
right or waiting for the machine to process something and mow your 
neighbors lawn.  The money you will make from a single lawn mowing job 
would buy a computer that will run a lot better than that or at least 
buy enough ram to have your current computer run without you having to 
worry about it.
Remember that once the libraries are loaded the apps themselves don't 
really take much more ram.  I once had a machine with only 4 gigs of RAM 
serving up KDE desktops to 45 xterms, and it usually had a couple of 
gigs free...amazing.

Unless your talking about running very specific programs in an embedded 
environment, it's better to pick a desktop that makes your life easier, 
especially when any of the desktops out these are smaller that a single 
copy of firefox with a single tab open to a single web page.  If I could 
find an environment that would save me a bunch of time but used 4 times 
as much RAM as the largest Linux desktop, I would happily run it.

As for your M$-like comment, other than the initial layout which can be 
easily changed to pretty much anything you want, I don't see it.  Even 
if it was more M$-like, what's wrong with incorporating some of the 
better features that windows had (Yes, past tense).  I'm no MS lover, 
but not everything MS did was garbage.  It would be foolish to implement 
everything "different" just because that's the way it was done by 
someone/something that you don't like.

And just to clear things up, KDE is an open source port of the 
proprietary (at the time) CDE, which predates the windows look that 
Microsoft adopted for windows 95.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Desktop_Environment

If anything, Microsoft copied the layout from CDE, not KDE from M$.

Another thing to consider, is that KDE has kept a similar initial layout 
to it's interface for almost 20 years and almost all changes have been 
very incremental often times with a way to use the legacy interface, so 
there has never been a need to completely relearn everything just 
because a newer version of the distro comes out that they felt the need 
to continue to call the same name even though it's now sporting a 
completely different interface... I"m looking at you Ubuntu and Gnome.

OK, rant over.. I have to end it or I'll go on all day.

Brian Cluff