The Three Faces of Fedora – Prologue
Although the title above takes a page from film history, Joanne Woodward won’t be appearing in this blog.
[Okay kids, Joanne Woodward was an actress in the mid-20th Century who was married to Paul Newman, another actor around the same time who retired from acting to race cars and make great salad dressing and cookies. One of her most famous roles was playing the schizophrenic woman in "The Three Faces of Eve," hence the source of the title of this blog series.]
[No, I'm not saying I think Fedora is schizophrenic. I'm just playing off the film title. Sheesh.]
With a few of boxes to spare at the offices of Redwood Digital Research in beautiful downtown Felton, Calif. — no, you can’t have them — I thought I’d run a small experiment: Take Fedora 11 and run it on separate machines with three different desktop environments. You know the lineup — GNOME, KDE and Xfce, which comes as a Fedora spin.
Then, of course, write about the results and observations here.
Starting Monday: The Three Faces of Fedora: GNOME on F11. Watch this space.
![[FSF Associate Member]](http://www.opensourcereporter.net/button88x31.gif){kind=small}
(Larry Cafiero runs Redwood Digital Research in Felton, California, and is an associate member of the Free Software Foundation.)
Now, for ideal test conditions you’d have to have identical hardware for each box, right down to the same mice, to ensure it wasn’t just a funky mouse that was making KDE so danged slow.
True, Jercos. However these machines are relatively close to one another in specs (which I should have probably mentioned in each of the blogs)
I have two nearly identical Toshiba laptops (both fished out from the to-be-recycled pile), and that has made my testing much easier.
Thanks for the kind words in the Xfce item, Steven, and great minds think alike re Xfce
. You know, in retrospect I should have tested each on identical machines (and, theoretically, I could have if I had just reinstalled each on one machine), and next time I probably will do it that way. However, I think the machines were close enough in specs that I don’t think it affected the general performance.
The fly in my identical-laptop ointment is that one has 768 MB of RAM, the other 512 MB … so I’m running Debian in 512, Ubuntu in 768.
I’m going to burn my first DVD ISO — Debian Lenny — in preparation for a big Debian GNOME/Xfce install.