Roo’s Ramblings

I think many people who know me know I’m make quite a lot of my GUI apps in Java. Whilst I found the API a struggle at first, I soon realised that it was extremely powerful and flexible. I do believe that Java’s Swing toolkit is excellent - it’s largely spoiled by it’s poor looking cross-platform look and feel.

Still, some people may know about Jacman - a Swing app which I think it looks pretty darn good. And there’s Romain Guy et al’s Aerith which is a superb looking app. Java is powerful; Swing is powerful - where are all the desktop apps?
I therefore wanted to start something which acts as a focal point for are issues relating to Swing and the Desktop Java effort.  A showcase for good quality apps; discussion about Desktop Java issues; and a place for showing off little tips and tricks. So, SwingBling is the place to go. (Do get in touch if you are using some handy Java apps that you think others would like to know about.)
The first post was Java 6 on the desktop - part 1 which  is an overview on some of the improvements users of Swing desktop apps will benefit from in with the soon-to-be-released Java 6. (This was also linked to on OSNews).

Actually, I won’t bother with another tongue-in-cheek post (even if some people detected 0% sarcasm). But following on, especially regarding the KDE is a big fat beast and GNOME is nice and lightweight debate, people should read a new comparison between the two.

Lubos Lunak has done some benchmarks regarding memory consumption. WARNING! SPOILER COMING! Well, the findings are certainly in favour of KDE, which surprised even myself. I’m not terribly worried about memory. I made sure my ‘puter was well stocked in this area when I bought it, but it’s promising to know that KDE is in fact a contender for lower-specced PCs too. Clearly the “bloat” isn’t making the difference that people expect.
One thing that got me thinking though was how much the choice of distro affects the performance of the DEs. So I intend to replicate the experiment at some point to see what’s happening on my Arch box.

Some computer users, even technically savvy ones, some times get confused about how hard disk performance is affected by the data it holds. Let me clarify: the more data you store on the hard drive, the slower it gets. It’s obvious when you think about it - each of those bytes of data adds extra weight on the disk platters which means it takes longer to spin-up and spin-down.

So, you may have thought that all those techies who keep going on about “bloat” were a crazy, but now you can see it makes total sense. Disk I/O is the biggest bottle-neck in most workstations and so reducing that is paramount. Don’t be fooled, software package size is the key factor in application performance, it’s nothing to do with poorly written algorithms, for example.

As we know, KDE is a poor performer because it comes bundled with lots of additional applications. Even though these applications are not loaded until requested, the sheer presence of them, as discussed earlier, will weigh down the hard drive. Functionality and ergonomics are not “real” metrics! Saving those micro-seconds is what keeps the world spinning around.

Continuing this, remember not to use a “bloated” OS, like Ubuntu or Arch Linux, as these OSes can occupy hundreds and hundreds of megabytes of disk space. Use muLinux or if you don’t mind the performance hit, Damn Small Linux. Don’t worry if you don’t have access to software that you want or are used to, at least the alternatives you get in these small Linux distros are also lightwight, and that’s all that matters.