In addition, you need pay attention to the import wizard’s window to see if all images were downloaded correctly. If an error occurs, the only indication is a small red cross on the image itself. There’s no warning dialog or status message telling you that something went wrong. You have to check each image. I opened a bug report about this too.

This is actually the first problem I had with digikam, and have always had a great experience with it. I really recommend the application to organize your photos (well, just avoid version 0.9.3 ). Along with amarok, I think it’s one of KDE’s killer apps.

First of all, I’m not trying to do rigorous analysis here but just do some estimates to make a decision for personal use. Still, if you find something in my method which invalidates the results I obtained, I’d be glad to know about it.

To know the memory consumption of each desktop system, I simply started a fresh session in that desktop, opened a terminal and obtained a process listing with ps -e. No other program was opened at the time. Because I did this using a new user account, the test was made with the default configuration and default loaded programs of each desktop system.

Since the important figure in the ps output is the RSS (resident set size) column, I also turned off the swap partition in my computer. The ps manpage says that the RSS field doesn’t count swapped memory from the process. Good thing I noticed this before it was too late!

Here is the result for KDE:

And here is the result for XFCE:

So, XFCE uses 152MB of RAM, versus the 191MB KDE uses. Not bad, almost 40MB (20%) less!

That’s not the whole story, though. I also wrote down the output of the free command as a sanity check.

Using KDE:

Using XFCE:

Look at the “used” column, in the “-/+ buffers/cache” line. That is the actual memory amount being used by the running programs in the computer.

This is a very interesting and surprising result: at the end of the day, XFCE actually uses more memory than KDE! Why, if adding up the resident sizes of the processes from each desktop system you get a different conclusion?

One explanation would be that KDE actually shares more memory between processes than XFCE. Its programs most probably have a greater number of shared libraries in common, which enables the kernel to use the same memory pages for the text section of those libraries accross process images. Unfortunately I didn’t collect data to test that possibility, and it’s late at night now. But it makes sense.

The bottom line, surprisingly enough, is that you should stick with KDE to preserve memory. Or switch to a bare-bones window manager instead of a complete desktop system, like IceWM, Window Maker, Blackbox or something else. But I’m too spoiled by the amenities of a good desktop to do that.

By the way, the tests were made with KDE 3.5.8 and XFCE 4.4.2 under Debian GNU/Linux unstable (updated on 2008/01/06) on a 32-bit x86 machine.

I just found out about this feature in KDE which I suspect will become very handy for me from now on: have the taskbar’s clock show the time in different timezones:

To enable it, just right-click on the clock, select “Configure Clock…” and then the “Timezones” tab.

GNOME, of course, has the same feature. That’s how I had the idea to search for this in the first place…

Acabo de descobrir uma funcionalidade do KDE q vai se tornar muito útil daqui pra frente: o relógio da barra de tarefas consegue mostrar as horas em diversos fusos horários:

Para configurar isso, basta clicar com o botão direito no relógio, clicar em “Configure Clock…” e selecionar a aba “Timezones”.

O GNOME, claro, tem a mesma coisa. Aliás, foi assim q tive a idéia de procurar isso no KDE.