Comment by azakai | Hacker News Reader

Comment by azakai | Hacker News Reader

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> I think this is the path that Ubuntu should follow, replace current pieces of software with lighter and smaller solutions.

I fully agree, but am not sure this is an example of that. The article says LightDM uses WebKit. Loading an entire html rendering engine for a login manager seems like overkill.

I guess this explains why LightDM is smaller than GDM in code size - but is it smaller in total size when including all necessary libraries?

Now, some of this might be offset if you have WebKit loaded anyhow as a shared library. This seems unlikely, though,

1. This is the login manager - it's before you load your desktop and web browser. (It might save loading it later though.) 2. The default browser in Ubuntu, Firefox, is not WebKit based. Neither is Opera for that matter (but it is not as popular). 3. The most popular WebKit based browser, Chrome, bundles its own version of WebKit - so there would be no sharing anyhow.

Empathy (the default IM client) uses webkit to render it's themes. It is quite likely to be a shared library. On natty, webkit is fairly hefty at 24MB but it doesn't take Empathy long to load at all. And by the time your login manager has started /usr is already mounted, assuming you are not using their default partitioning which is one huge partition.

It would be interesting to know how many users use Empathy. I don't myself, and maybe I'm not representative, but I don't think it is that many - Pidgin seems more popular among people I know.

I don't follow the /usr bit - what does mounting /usr have to do with loading or not loading WebKit?

WebKit is around 24MB, which is as you say quite hefty, but it's even worse as it depends on some other libraries - sqlite, libpng, etc.

Firefox and Chrome are going to be on more equal footing in Ubuntu now, so webkit is more likely to be needed. Also, how large is webkit compared to Gnome? Maybe they want to get the login on-screen faster?

> Firefox and Chrome are going to be on more equal footing in Ubuntu now, so webkit is more likely to be needed.

Chrome bundles a completely separate copy of WebKit. There would be no savings here, it would be exactly as if Chrome wasn't there for this matter.

My bad! Thanks for the correction :)

afair, WebKit is just one of backends that LightDM can use so it shouldn't really be a problem.

Interesting, thanks, if WebKit isn't used then I see no problem here.

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