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Why GNOME3 will never be a player on tabletsWhy GNOME3 will never be a player on tabletsPosted Aug 26, 2011 18:35 UTC (Fri) by jmorris42 (subscriber, #2203)Parent article: The year of the Linux tablet?
Why won't GNOME be a player on tablets or phones? It is a pig. Gnome Shell might be designed to look like a tablet or phone but the GNOME stack is a bloated hog. On a tablet 1GB of ram is the max currently seen in the wild and that only on the premium products that won't be running GNOME. No, they would have to break in at the bottom and look at the specs on those, CPU speeds at 1Ghz or lower and 256-512M ram No way GNOME is going to run well in that.
It gets worse, it is probably true that to survive the checkbox problem there would need to be smartphones too, their hardware and available battery is even more restricted.
Haven't really looked at KDE lately but I'd bet their footprint is just as horrible. And so will Windows 8's footprint be too heavy to succeed in a resource and power constrained environment. So it is likely to remain an iOS vs Android world for a few years off the desktop/laptop.
We had a choice a decade ago to keep our stack lean and mean and able to run on older hardware. All the bright kids with big ass developers desktops said screw that, lets bang it out in Python or layers upon layers of C++ frameworks and make it pretty, 90% complete and move on to something more interesting because it runs plenty nice on my machine and it will run OK on most people's machine in a year when the distros catch up. But had we kept the ability to run on older hardware, now when new tablets have the power of desktops from a few years ago we would have been in a position to rule the world. Alas.
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Why GNOME3 will never be a player on tablets Posted Aug 30, 2011 11:38 UTC (Tue) by niner (subscriber, #26151) [Link]
Just to add a data point: I'm running KDE 4.7 on openSUSE 11.4 with messaging, the rekonq browser and a couple of terminals and the system uses 559M of RAM total. I'm also running openLDAP, MySQL and PostgreSQL on this machine. It's not great, but I it should still run just fine on a machine with 512M of RAM and I can imagine that it would be possible to get by with 256M with some optimizing.
Why GNOME3 will never be a player on tablets Posted Sep 4, 2011 15:20 UTC (Sun) by jlokier (guest, #52227) [Link]
I'll add a data point too.
My old laptop used to run GNOME, Mozilla and a plethora of development tools very well. It has 192MB RAM, and I used it from 1999 to 2006.
I don't expect a modern GUI to fit, but I thought at least a text console with a current distro would be useful as a VPN hub, remote serial ports etc. for I have quite a large network of embedded systems which I develop on remotely.
I quite like Ubuntu Server, so I tried installing Ubuntu 11.04 on my old laptop with 192MB RAM, and it couldn't even run the text-mode installer. After an hour of swapping I gave up. Debian was not much better.
In the end I used debootstrap on another machine to make a Debian image, then copied the filesystem over. It runs fine, but the basic installer doesn't fit -- on a system that used to run GNOME and Mozilla very well.
Why GNOME3 will never be a player on tablets Posted Sep 4, 2011 16:38 UTC (Sun) by tshow (subscriber, #6411) [Link]
I find that if you don't have fully modern hardware, it's better to go with something like gentoo or slackware or the like. I think the ubuntu folks have "modern desktop machine" as their baseline, so they work pretty well if you've got a PC that's less than 5 years old, but get creaky otherwise.
I wind up repurposing old hardware as unix/linux boxes fairly often. Generally, I reach for gentoo; it takes a little more fiddling to set up, but it works pretty well even on older hardware. Assuming you don't try to install KDE or GNOME, of course... :)
Why GNOME3 will never be a player on tablets Posted Aug 30, 2011 21:59 UTC (Tue) by ebassi (subscriber, #54855) [Link] No, they would have to break in at the bottom and look at the specs on those, CPU speeds at 1Ghz or lower and 256-512M ram No way GNOME is going to run well in that. GNOME 3.0 runs fine on netbooks, which are single core Atom ~1 GHz CPUs with 1GB of RAM. new smartphones and tablets are coming out on dual core CPUs. the memory usage of the Shell is between 150 and 200 megs of RAM; anything more is a bug. the real issues arrive when you start the web browser, but that has nothing to do with GNOME. so, you're essentially wrong: GNOME works fine on netbooks and tablets.
Why GNOME3 will never be a player on tablets Posted Aug 30, 2011 23:18 UTC (Tue) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link]
I'll bite.
What exactly is GNOME going to do about web browser as core functionality the GNOME OS future? Html5 based apps are only going to grow in importance, especially in the infotainment consumption use case that the tablet form factor seems to fit very well.
Amd there's still a significant point that GNOME as a project needs to address concerning the definition of a coherent API and SDK story that can be breadcrumbed to application developers. Application developers will need to reuse as much of the code silo that underpins Shell to minimize resource consumption as application developers build task specific applications for the post-desktop form factor usage cases. Android and iOS both lay down a pretty strong preferred SDK storyline for incoming application developers.
-jef
Why GNOME3 will never be a player on tablets Posted Aug 31, 2011 3:09 UTC (Wed) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link]
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=697592 Only happens in gnome shell.
So, you're essentially wrong: GNOME needs help on some netbooks and tablets.
Why GNOME3 will never be a player on tablets Posted Aug 31, 2011 18:14 UTC (Wed) by tshow (subscriber, #6411) [Link]
> [...] the memory usage of the Shell is between 150 and 200 megs of RAM; anything more is a bug. the real issues arrive when you start the web browser, but that has nothing to do with GNOME.
So, Shell is eating a sizable fraction of RAM, but hey, it's other people's problem to try to make their applications fit in the remaining space? Because, you know, people run computers and tablets to experience the GNOME brand, not to actually *do* anything...
Having the shell eat 15%-20% of system RAM on a 1GiB tablet is not "doing fine" by any reasonable stretch of the imagination.
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