[Rule] Is Gnome/KDE the greatest bloat?

[Randy Kramer]

Because I lurk on this list, and you asked for feedback, I'll give you a 
little. ;-)  (Just to let you know that there are at least some of us out 
here who agree with you.)

On Monday 27 August 2007 01:33 pm, M. Fioretti wrote:
> What I mean is that we should realize that for end users who badly
> need to recycle a 4/5 year old computer for SOHO work or study, a
> system made of console-only apps on a bare X will be either
> objectively useless or practically way beyond their skills.

Hear, hear!

> In that context, KOffice is maybe the lightest solution available on
> Linux. And if one _has_ to install it, one also ends up with a lot of
> code which can be reused for PIM, the other crucial area of any
> SOHO/educational desktop. Yeah, sure, you can have address books with
> MySql, Ldap, and all those other cool things that only we geek
> understand, but, as absurd as it may seem, maybe a _complete_,
> GUI-based office environment from a... mini-kde:
> 
> - could take less disk space than the whole collection of console apps
>   and servers needed to do the same thing the hardcore Unix way
> - it may not require so much more memory, if properly tweaked
> - would surely be much more usable by non-geeks
> 
> Remember that we are thinking of machines which will be used by
> one/three users top, almost always one at a time, almost all of them
> will have an address book of what? 2/300 records? Are we sure that
> these people must be saddled with the whole (bunch of clients)-(bunch
> of servers) architecture that sysadmins love and need? Or maybe a more
> monolythic system could be more efficient in their case? Both on disk
> and on Ram?

Hear, hear (again)

Randy Kramer