winscape 2338
The taskbar shows what you usually need to know faster and in less screen realestate than top.
Top is a waste unless you really need to know all that it displays.
Of course, there is the Gnome version of top... "hefty" would be an inadequate description.
I wrote some scripts to track gnome memory usage as I run it, just to see why it eats up so much memory.
Every 15 minutes I record a snapshot of ever program's resource usage.
Just a little "applet" that shows temperature starts out at 20MB (much of it shared), and proceeds to leak memory at about 100K per hour.
Lot's of Gnome stuff leaks, or just uses memory poorly.
They also link in libraries that really aren't needed, and have some nasty vertical dependencies. This greatly increases code size and the amount of redundant library code and data in each Gnome program, even little "applets". Some of this can be fixed with some linking tricks, but better design would be a bigger win.
For example, a lot of font handling code is at the application layer, so you have the library code and the font data in *EVERY* program instead of a single copy being in a foundation layer. Given that font data alone can be 200K or more for a single font, this adds up quickly.
The other issue related to this is that sometimes when upgrading, everything goes haywire.
Um .... With all due respect, then, what you use "top" for and what I *think* most people use a taskbar for seem to be somewhat different...
The Gnome people suggest deleting all of your dot files.
That's stupid for two reasons: 1) it can be hard to find all of them and 2) they might represent months or years of work configuring and setting programs how you like them.
It's bullcrap to tell a user to reset all their configuration and start over to fix what is clearly a programming problem.
Printing... what a mess that is. First we had many years of wild variations in command sets for impact printers, which mostly was without reason. I mean, it's just a printer... 99% of all their command needs are the same.
Then raster printers exploded with variations on command languages.
All along, PostScript did the job and worked across all implementations so you didn't even need "printer drivers".
Oh well...
I run all my important stuff on a Sun Solaris system wvolume manager to set up the raid 5- everything goes onto it; email archives...
-- shannon "AT" widomaker.com -- "Consulting wouldn't be what it is today without Microsoft Windows" -- Chris Pinkham
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