GNOME - Future ideas

I've read a lot of comments complaining about how Gnome is slow on their P2 133Mhz laptop with 32K of RAM. Well no kidding it's slow! When you're running a full desktop you expect it to be a little more sluggish than *box window manager!

People also keep complaining that Gnome is getting more bloated as new features are added. Yes, this is the way thing happen. If you want snappier response times / new features, you're going to need to cache some stuff in memory.

Personally, I do not believe that Gnome should cater to those who are on 10 year old hardware. Those people should keep in mind that Gnome 1.x was built for those hardware platforms, and is still available.

Today, Gnome runs great on my 2.4 GHz laptop. I do not expect that in 10 years the latest Gnome will still run great...this is unrealistic. This is the nature of software evolution. As hardware technology becomes more advanced, software evolves to take advantage of it. To limit what an environment can do just because some people are still using their old 386 and expecting it to run smoothly is simply ridiculous. However, what I DO know is that in 10 years, my laptop may not be able to run the latest greatest Gnome 3.x (4.x?), but it WILL be able to run Gnome 2.10 pretty damn well. And because Gnome 2.10 is GPL'd, it will still be around.

Legacy environments exist for legacy platforms. New bleeding edge environments exist for new bleeding edge platforms. Let's not hamstring Gnome because a very vocal minority naively believes it should be snappy on an 8086.