111–120 of 415 posts
There really should be a penalty for gratuitous waste of resources. Energy consumption is neither free nor without adverse impacts. The era of planed obsolescence, bloatware expanding to gobble up and justify ever more hardware is over. A fresh take on the desktop given the monstrous devices that are now available in terms of cpu, memory etc may completely redefine the footprint of personal computing
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> HDR, fluid animations, monstrous resolutions That's the job of the GPU driver, mostly. > 3D everything That's the desktop compositor. Windows 7 already had one and ran on 1 GB of RAM. > accessibility Not everyone needs it, so it should be an optional installable component for those who do. > fancy APIs for easier development allowing for more features That still use win32 under the hood. Again, .net has existed for…
I want touchscreen support on Windows. But guess what? Multitouch worked in Windows 7. If Windows still supported theming basic controls then Microsoft could enable touch screen support in most applications by setting a theme, similar to how they enhance contrast if you enable that feature. I understand that bigger stuff and better graphics involve more RAM and the switch to 64 bit doubled the pointer sizes (which is…
At most places I've worked it's a struggle to get time allocated towards necessary refactoring that'll ensure new features can be delivered in a timely fashion.
I'd love to spend time making the product more efficient but unless I can demonstrate immediate and tangible business value in doing so, it's never going to be approved over working on new features.
I'm on Windows 10. After running O&O ShutUp10, this OS has been as good as Windows 7. I can do all my software dev, gaming, video editing/graphic design, etc. on this operating system without issue. I don't think it's ever crashed on me. It genuinely makes me curious what kind of issues people are running into. After all these years being a power user of Windows, so far it's been a smooth ride. The last time I had trouble was with Windows XP and Windows ME before that. I skipped Vista and Windows 8 (except for working on netbooks at Intel back in the day).
I tried Windows 11 in October 2021 and it was an awful mess. Tried too hard to appeal to MacOS and Linux users when that ship has long sailed. Not sure what state it's in now, but I've got no plans to upgrade until I either buy a new device or until Windows 10 gets some serious security vulnerability that's not on Windows 11.
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My favorite is Geos for the Commodore 64: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/GEOS_(8-bit_operating_system... Obviously there were huge limitations but it shows what can be done. This fit on one 170K floppy and ran on a 1.44mhz 8 bit machine with 64K of RAM. In the 1990s I ran both Linux and Windows on less than 64M of RAM with IDEs, web browsers, games, and more. If I had to guess what were possible today I’d fall back…
For me also the Commodore came to mind. It had 64K RAM and a 64K address range, because other things had to fit in there not all RAM was usable at the same time. Clock frequency of the PAL model was 985kHz (yes KILO), so not even a full MHz. Yet, I could do * word processing * desktop publishing * working with scanned documents * spreadsheets * graphics * digital painting * music production * gaming (even chess) * pr…
But if you had to use that software now, you'd say (justly) that it's extremely basic and limited, and that interoperability with other systems is not great.
What can be done ≠ what's comfortable to use.
Let’s pause for a bit and dwell on the absurd amount of RAM it takes to run it even after this exercise. Anyone here remember when QNX shipped a demo in 2000 with a kernel, GUI, web browser and an email client on a single 3.5” floppy? The memory footprint was also a few megabytes. I’m not saying we should be staying within some miserly arbitrary constraints, but my goodness something that draws UI and manages process…
I think the two top questions lots of Windows users would like answered now are: 0- Did they also remove telemetry and similar malware? 1- Is it usable for gaming? I mean, didn't they also remove anything important among the cruft? I have memories of shrunk XP "distros" back in the day that were hacked to the point they refused to run a lot of software.
There really should be a penalty for gratuitous waste of resources. Energy consumption is neither free nor without adverse impacts. The era of planed obsolescence, bloatware expanding to gobble up and justify ever more hardware is over. A fresh take on the desktop given the monstrous devices that are now available in terms of cpu, memory etc may completely redefine the footprint of personal computing
It used to be the price of the hardware. Partly it still is: people won't use your software if they can't afford machines that are able to run it. But hardware gets cheaper.
It's now more about power consumption: both as price of electricity and as battery life.
But usually the "waste of resources" is "less time spent developing", that is, the users get to use some capability faster
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> HDR, fluid animations, monstrous resolutions That's the job of the GPU driver, mostly. > 3D everything That's the desktop compositor. Windows 7 already had one and ran on 1 GB of RAM. > accessibility Not everyone needs it, so it should be an optional installable component for those who do. > fancy APIs for easier development allowing for more features That still use win32 under the hood. Again, .net has existed for…
>That's the desktop compositor. Windows 7 already had one and ran on 1 GB of RAM. Compiz ran fine with a 128MB GPU and 512MB of RAM.
I use Windows and Linux, for privacy concerns. If you want privacy, go for Mac (not that I'd do it). On mobile, still working out what are the best options.