| |||||||||||||
Amarok 2.5 releasedAmarok 2.5 releasedPosted Dec 22, 2011 11:40 UTC (Thu) by nye (guest, #51576)In reply to: Amarok 2.5 released by Del- Parent article: Amarok 2.5 released
>Amarok is feature rich, and takes advantage of the resources available on newer hardware. Calling it bloated is in my opinion misleading, leading people to think the added functionality is useless. I enjoy many of the fearures in amarok, and see it as one of the master pieces of free software.
... >What I find sad, is how some in the minimalistic camp seem to enjoy bashing KDE
Your point is valid, but Amarok is a bad example to pick - because it *really is* bloated and slow.
Try using it on a machine with a weak processor; it's almost impossible to drag files from the collection browser into the playlist for example because it turns into a slideshow. All the plasma widgets which attempt to replicate the functionality of the builtin features in 1.4 (lyrics, for example) use enormously more processing power (I'd say a factor of probably a hundred to a thousand) to provide exactly the same feature.
In fact, a couple of years back my investigation into why the collection browser is so slow revealed that the data model was misdesigned so that common operations were O(n^2) in the size of your collection, and would have required *substantial* rewriting to fix. Maybe they've actually done that since - I haven't checked - but this was what they came up with when they decided to rewrite from scratch? No thank you.
Take a look at the Amarok 2 code some time - unless things have improved considerably since I last checked, it's, shall we say, less than excellent.
(Log in to post comments)
Amarok 2.5 released Posted Dec 22, 2011 18:08 UTC (Thu) by Del- (guest, #72641) [Link]
>Try using it on a machine with a weak processor;
The weakest CPU I currently have access to is my oldest laptop with a 2.0GHz Core2 T7200. Dragging files from the collection browser to the playlist is smooth as silk on it. Exactly how weak do you want it to be?
>All the plasma widgets which attempt to replicate the functionality of the >builtin features in 1.4 (lyrics, for example) use enormously more >processing power (I'd say a factor of probably a hundred to a thousand) to >provide exactly the same feature.
The lyrics applet does more than in 1.4, it scrolls through the song. But you have a point of course. Just as a Python widget typically drains more resources than one implemented in C++. This does not only affect KDE4, even startup of all GNU/Linux distros were script based until the recent addition of systemd. Optimization comes with time, and KDE in general goes a long way to enable that. Plasma in particular have received numerous performance improvements. I believe the current focus on plumbing in KDE is well balanced. Being too religious about it will slow down development.
Make no mistake, Amarok is a real memory hog. Amarok consumes 400MB here, so I wouldn't mind seeing that number go down. However, with 4-8GB available on my main desktops and 32GB on my workstation, it is no show stopper. With 2GB systems it is a serious concern, with 1GB systems it is a show stopper, but frankly, 1GB is not enough for Gnome these days either.
Amarok 2.5 released Posted Dec 22, 2011 20:34 UTC (Thu) by freggy (guest, #37477) [Link] with 1GB systems it is a show stopper, but frankly, 1GB is not enough for Gnome these days either.I beg to differ. I run GNOME 2.32 on a 1GB netbook (with some zram swap) and this works perfectly fine. OK, if I start LibreOffice, Firefox with 10 open tabs and Evolution at the same time, it will start swapping heavily, but if you don't exaggerate in multitasking, it's definitely not slow.
Amarok 2.5 released Posted Dec 22, 2011 21:17 UTC (Thu) by Del- (guest, #72641) [Link]
Let me see if I get this right. You religiously stick to GTK apps and the old Gnome release stripped down. Even then with office-app, web-browser and mail-client running your are out of memory. I rest my case.
Amarok 2.5 released Posted Dec 22, 2011 21:47 UTC (Thu) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]
Neither Firefox nor Openoffice.org are really GTK apps. That kinda invalidates your argument quite a bit.
Amarok 2.5 released Posted Dec 22, 2011 22:05 UTC (Thu) by Del- (guest, #72641) [Link]
Care to elaborate on gui tool-kits used for LibreOffice and Firefox?
Amarok 2.5 released Posted Dec 22, 2011 22:48 UTC (Thu) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]
Sure. Libreoffice uses VCL, or Visual Components Library with native desktop integration and has both GTK and Qt frontends. Firefox uses XUL with GTK integration. Neither are pure GTK apps and have occasional regressions on look and feel that doesn't match the rest of the GTK apps as a result.
Amarok 2.5 released Posted Jan 3, 2012 15:00 UTC (Tue) by nye (guest, #51576) [Link]
>>Try using it on a machine with a weak processor;
> The weakest CPU I currently have access to is my oldest laptop with a 2.0GHz Core2 T7200. Dragging files from the collection browser to the playlist is smooth as silk on it. Exactly how weak do you want it to be?
An Atom running at 1.66GHz, because that's the processor in my main desktop machine.
It's happily capable of my other non-demanding activities like web browsing and playing 1080p H264 video, which one might expect to be a more difficult task than smooth drag-and-drop.
(NB: I don't really care though, since I switched to Clementine as soon as I heard about it, and I'm extremely happy with it; just wanted to point out that not all slowness can be attributed to additional features.)
|
|||||||||||||