desktopspeed

"First impression last" A lot of newbees coming from the windows platform complain about lack of speed on the desktop. Some main application such as firefox-nautilus-evolution-openoffice etc should start/load much faster. To make it more speedy maybe preload is the solution to the problem.

  • Maybe change the priority (as in niceness) of some features, notably the mouse pointer and widgets. Amiga computers were praised for their responsiveness even on processor speeds of 7MHz, since the mouse pointer and widgets had a higher priority than any other task, and although the system might be crawling due to heavy load the interface was always responsive. I am often annoyed on Ubuntu when doing many simultaneous tasks that my pointer doesn't respond (and when it finally does it jumps over to the edge of the screen and switches my desktop Sad :( ) and I have often seen people clicking multiple times on a button (probably since Windows applications have a tendency to not accept any input when the system is under load) and then ending up with, for example, five identical Nautilus windows opening. If the widgets had a higher priority then at least they would acknowledge button presses, etc. even if the action performed doesn't happen any sooner (but with that said, loading five Nautilus windows will be slower than loading one). This perception of speed, or responsiveness, is important to users' enjoyment of computing (since the components of Amiga computers were so slow they could not be marketed as "fast", even though users who merely compared the interfaces found them much "faster" than PCs and Macs of the time). Just something to think about.

  • I did some tests, and if I compare it to Windows equivalents I see a big differences in start-up times. The slowest parts of Gnome desktop are Open Office suite, Evolution, Firefox and Nautilus (when displaying big directory).

    • OO Writer

      15s

      MS Word ~ 3s

      evolution

      10s

      Outlook ~ 3s

      firefox 1.5

      10s

      IE ~ 1s

      firefox 2

      9s

      alacarte

      8s

      amule

      5s

      gimp

      5s

      gedit

      4s

      Notepad <1s

      gthumb

      4s

      synaptic

      3.5s

      eog

      3.2s

      sound-juicer

      3s

      totem

      3s

      evince

      2.6s

      bluefish

      2.5s

      file-roller

      2.5s

      gnome-terminal

      2.4s

      gnome-calculator

      1s

      xterm

      < 1s

desktopspeed (last edited 2008-08-06 16:19:47 by localhost)