Re: [LUG] [OT] The Vista Experience with Office 2007

Ben Goodger wrote:
>
> I've never used 1.x for serious purposes, but I must disagree: OOo 2.0
> loads in more time than GNOME....

Interesting to compare these.

Restarting GNOME is about 10 to 12 seconds here. OpenOffice only takes 3
seconds to restart (or about 12 from cold). It is really hard to get
objective measures of these things without cold restarts.

Personally I think both are ridiculously long times given the speed of
modern computers, and presumably the 12 seconds from cold is at least 9
seconds of disk seek, and read, and 3 seconds of CPU and other
miscellaneous stuff.

GNOME at least has the excuse that it is going out to talk to hardware
drivers for things like sound.

The problem is that it's not afaik; it's merely talking to ALSA to secure its first-come-first-served hold on the hardware.

We really should perhaps sit down at a
DCGLUG meeting and hack away at a few of these to illuminate what is
actually being done during these huge start-up times.

I give immense verbal essays on Parkison's Law of Computing - various things will always remain constant.

For instance:

Invariably I can use 60% of a hard disc, be it 500MB, 30GB or 120GB.
Windows always takes 2.5 minutes to boot, be it Windows 95, 98, Me, 2k or XP and no matter what hardware it's run on.

All software expands to fit available processing power and memory capacity - OOo provides no more features than Word 97, but requires a comparative mainframe to run properly; GNOME arguably doesn't do anything special that Windows 95 doesn't, and yet requires 256MB of RAM.

I also think that a good hacking-apart would be good for GNOME and OOo. GNOME devs have been doing this for a while by themselves, while Sun seems ill-motivated to improve OOo's efficiency ("we don't sell anything that can't run this"?)