Xfce Digest, Vol 91, Issue 19

[Daniele Guerrieri]

Hi,
I've just built and installed Rodent beta-2 on my Fedora
15-hyperthreaded atom N450 acer netbook. It's very nice, but it takes
~26s to open /usr/bin while thunar takes only ~5s. (2217 items). Maybe
something related to the atom CPU?

Howewer, i really like Rodent :)

Daniele

On Thu, Jun 23, 2011 at 9:20 AM, Nick Schermer <nickschermer at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Jun 23, 2011 at 12:04 AM, Edscott Wilson Garcia
> <edscott at xfce.org> wrote:
>> El 22/06/11 11:32, Nick Schermer escribió:
>>
>> On Wed, Jun 22, 2011 at 5:09 PM, Edscott Wilson Garcia <edscott at xfce.org>
>> wrote:
>
> [skip the unrelated bicycle crap]
>
>> Rodent is meant to be fast for the user, not for the stop watch under
>> laboratory conditions.
>>
>> I'll take the time to do some explanations, although I am slow to write.
>> Bear in mind that all references to Nautilus are to Nautilus, not to Thunar.
>
> I appreciate that.
>
>> How long does it take a user to identify a paper in pdf format, when the
>> title is unknown? With Nautilus you have to click and click and click, and
>> then back to the click and click and click.
>
> And how does rodent identify this file you need?
>
>> How long does it take a user to run a command in background? With Nautilus
>> you have to click and click and click and then realize you have to install
>> something extra, restart and then click and click and click before you can
>> type (if you can still remember what you wanted to do by then).
>
> What exactly do you want to run in the background? You mean file
> operations (those run async in another thread in gio) or spawn
> commands (cp/ls/etc)?
>
>> How long does it take a user to customize an application to use when opening
>> a certain type of file? With Nautilus you have to click and click and click,
>> and maybe you'll figure it out.
>>
>> Rodent's idea of being fast is allowing the user to do stuff faster, not
>> microseconds to display a label. Nautilus plays in a totally different ball
>> park. Nautilus wants to appeal the greatest number of potential users, most
>> of which do not know what "command line" means.
>
> Come on, it's not that bad. The difference is that nautilus will store
> the account-wide setting (so all apps using gtk/gio benefit), for
> Rodent you probably have to do it a second time if another application
> wants to open the same mime-type.
>
>> I could go on and on and on. You might say that not all users want skim
>> through dozens of scientific pdf articles, or run simulation programs in the
>> background or use an application other than the officially gnome santioned
>> ones. And you are right. Rodent is not for everybody.
>>
>> More numbers? On initial installation Rodent will not appear as fast as it
>> actually is. On virgin installs, disk and memory caches are empty. Once you
>> are using Rodent in a realistic way (not stress testing under ideal
>> conditions), these caches bring the numbers down significantly.
>
> That's the same for every application.
>
>> CPU usage? Rodent is built around a multithreaded design. CPU speed has
>> reached a plateau and the only way go faster is to do more work in parallel.
>> If you do not have a multicore processor, Rodent's design will make is
>> slower than any other program doing the exact same thing. But multicore
>> processors are here to stay.
>
> Threaded as in spawning processes or in multiple threads in the same instance?
>
>> At my office I have "common Joe" box, and it has 4 cores in the chip. Last
>> time I looked (at least a year ago) AMD was attaching 12 cores to the chip.
>> Does 5% of one, hurt? Not for me. After all, that's one of the reasons why I
>> have a computer, to put it to work.
>
> It just a sign of incorrect coding. It's not about the cpu working.
> but about power consumption: battery life and a greener world.
> Companies like intel try hard to reduce power, if your app does not
> sleep, it nearly impossible to do that.
>
>> The important number here is RES. Considering I have 8GB on this
>> "run-of-the-mill" box, what's 35 MB on the  rodent instance? Answer: tiny.
>> Even firefox does not have me worried. At this time I cannot compare with
>> Nautilus because, well, I don't even have it installed. Why not?
>> Dependencies.
>
> 8GB is not normal. Netbooks have 1gb and _a lot_ of people have less then that.
>
>> What about dependencies? If I do an "emerge -p Nautilus" on this Gentoo box,
>> I would need to install no less than 38 packages before it even considers
>> installing Nautilus. Everything from libsoup to gnome-desktop.  Gvfs brings
>> in 34 packages by itself (practically the gnome desktop). That's too much
>> for me, especially when I compare it to the emerge for Rodent.
>
> I agree on that one, but maybe it's better to choose a more
> competitive file manager to compare with.
>
>> The bottom line is that Rodent is small, fast and powerful. If your
>> definition of small, fast or powerful is different, that's fine too.
>
> I understand what you mean and I'm glad there are file manager around
> like Rodent, good to poke tradition once in a while. But if you say
> it's better you shouldn't only use the negative points of the *other*,
> but also show your workflow, so people can decide for their own if it
> is better for them.
>
> The question how Rodent is better remains a bit vague for me, but
> that's not entirely fair since I know a lot better how Thunar/Nautilus
> work.
>
> Nick
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