Re: [ANN] Frescobaldi 0.7 released, a new LilyPond music editor

[Valentin Villenave]

2008/12/29 Ralph Palmer <address@hidden>:
> I'm just about to take the plunge into Linux. I have an older Dell Latitude
> that I want to use. I was planning to use Ubuntu, with the default Gnome
> desktop. Frescobaldi looks interesting, especially after my lack of
> happiness with some other packages (esp. LilyPondTool). Does anyone have a
> recommendation or advice or reason(s) for going with 1) Ubuntu with Gnome;
> 2) Ubuntu and installing KDE; or 3) Kubuntu with KDE?

I'd recommend XFCE for older hardware, but I tend to find Xubuntu
deceiving, so I'd probably install the plain Ubuntu and just install
XFCE using the package manager (XFCE and GNOME share many libraries,
so switching is easy enough).

As for LPT, I don't know whether it's the Java virtual machine or the
way jEdit is designed, but its main flaw is that it keeps eating a
huge amount of RAM.
I have 4 GB on a 64-bits machine, and no matter what value I specify
for the JAVA_MAX_SIZE, I still have to constantly close it and
relaunch it when working with large .ly files (1000 to 5000 lines of
code ). Even when I allow jEdit to take up to 3 GB, it does take them
very quickly, but after 20 minutes or so it becomes extremely slow
(whenever I type one note, I have to wait a dozen seconds to see it
displayed on the screen).
I have disabled the SideKick "parse on keystroke" option, and it does
help a bit, but it's still very heavy. Garbage collector, anyone? :-)

Cheers,
Valentin