When comparing Sakura vs cool-retro-term, the Slant community recommends Sakura for most people. In the question“What are the best terminal emulators for UNIX-like systems?” Sakura is ranked 6th while cool-retro-term is ranked 18th. The most important reason people chose Sakura is:
Sakura has very few dependencies, it's very lightweight, and great if your computer does not have many resources.
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Lightweight
Sakura has very few dependencies, it's very lightweight, and great if your computer does not have many resources.
Pro True colour support
Supports full 24-bit color.
Pro Great unicode support
Even shows combining chars correctly.
Pro Few dependencies
Pro Starts quickly even on lower-end machines
Sakura's quick start-up time becomes noticeable with lower-end machine's such as Eeepc 1015PX (Intel Atom 1.6 Ghz and 2 GB of RAM).
Pro Tab support
Pro Easy zoom
Sakura supports zooming through keyboard keys (Ctrl+'+'
to zoom in and Ctrl+'-'
to zoom out).
Pro Ready for wayland
Pro Mimics the look and feel of the old cathode tube screens
Cool-retro-term mimics the look of old cathode screens. This is just aesthetic, but great for people who want a more retro feel.
Pro Good rendering
If you disable every special effect and the framing, the rendering is actually quite comfortable and readable making a good terminal option if you have CPU cycles to spare.
Pro Good fun
For simple tasks this is wonderful - anyone seeing it will love it, takes me back to using the Commodore Pet in college in the early 80's.
Pro Available in multiple repositories
This terminal is available for download from repositories in all the most popular distros, making it easily available.
Cons
Con libvte/gtk
It has gnome dependencies.
Con Doesn't provide many configuration options
Sakura does not have any advanced configuration capabilities.
Con Not very practical by today's standards
While it certainly has an aesthetic feel, cool-retro-term is nothing more than a cool trick if you want to play around. It's not very useful in this day and age.
Con Extremely heavy and impactful on resources
A massive amount of resources are used as graphical processing in cool-retro-term. They are ridiculously heavy for the terminal's intended use.
Con Large dependency on kde
It looks like many of the effects present here are provided by more or less stock kde effect libraries. For Gnome-based systems, installing this will pull in a large handful of kde libs.