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It's about time...It's about time...Posted Aug 4, 2005 4:36 UTC (Thu) by hp (subscriber, #5220)In reply to: It's about time... by jabby Parent article: Our bloat problem
It's significant that most people don't _use_ the "lightweight" apps, though, unless they really genuinely don't have the compute power.
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/news/20020407.html
Solid element of truth there.
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It's about time... Posted Aug 4, 2005 5:09 UTC (Thu) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330) [Link] Unfortunately, we lack lightweight apps that can deal with Microsoft file formats.
It's about time... Posted Aug 4, 2005 5:53 UTC (Thu) by hp (subscriber, #5220) [Link] Not sure you could have them - the MS file formats require all the MS application features. The hard part of implementing the formats is coding the features that use the stuff in the file.
anti-bloating microsoft docs Posted Aug 12, 2005 15:55 UTC (Fri) by astrophoenix (guest, #13528) [Link] my friend was writing her Ph.D. dissertation in microsoft word. now that she has to get it formatted to pass the university, I'm helping her convert it to LaTeX (we found a LaTeX class for her university to handle the formatting). the first step was to filter the .doc through antiword, producing a nice ascii file. even the tables came out nice. her 400 page .doc file was converted to ascii so fast that I wasn't sure it worked at first!
It's about time... Posted Aug 12, 2005 23:28 UTC (Fri) by obi (subscriber, #5784) [Link] Well, unlike OpenOffice Abiword and Gnumeric feel very light. Opening an Excel file in Gnumeric has _never_ failed for me (in my personal experience, 100% compatible - maybe I haven't used difficult documents enough), and on my 800mhz machine startup is nearly instant. Abiword is a bit less compatible with Word than I'd like it to be, but it's definitely usable, produces very nice output in XHTML, is kept simple - nice!
(BTW Inkscape/GIMP start up in a fraction of the time needed for their commercial counterparts - which might have a bit more features, but I seriously doubt a lot of people use them)
Just to mention that it's not all bad.
Exactly Right Posted Aug 4, 2005 16:37 UTC (Thu) by GreyWizard (subscriber, #1026) [Link] On my desk I have an old iMac from 1999 with 32MB of RAM. Last week I tried to install Fedora Core 4 to on the poor thing, only to discover that it took thirty seconds from the time I moved the mouse to the time anything happened on the screen. That was just in anaconda (the installation program)! I'll have to try again in text mode when I get the chance, but I doubt I'll be running Firefox on that machine.
Meanwhile I'm typing on a 1.7 GHz laptop with 1GB of RAM where FC4 is quite snappy providing innumerable features I've come to think of as essential. Going back to RedHat 6 is simply not an option, even supposing it could be tricked into supporting the internal wireless card. Doing more with less is a worthy goal and I would be thrilled if some genius worked magic that made my iMac useful again, but until then I vote for bloat.
It's about time... Posted Aug 4, 2005 20:47 UTC (Thu) by jrigg (guest, #30848) [Link] >It's significant that most people don't>_use_ the "lightweight" apps, though, >unless they really genuinely don't >have the compute power.
I tried KDE recently after using WindowMaker and rxvt for the last few years. It was irritatingly slow even on a dual Opteron, so I reverted to my old setup. Maybe I'm impatient, but I prefer the speed of lightweight apps running on fast hardware.
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