231–240 of 415 posts
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Sure, Commodore could do all that! 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.
That doesn’t account for the sheer monstrosity of modern software. You don’t need gigabytes of RAM for those things.
It really staggers me the lengths some people will go to try and preserve something that is actively against them, when there are alternatives right there. I'm not saying Linux is for everyone, but the kind of people creating and running these scripts really should have no issue daily driving Ubuntu or even Arch. Or if they desperately need photoshop or whatever, get a mac. It's like watching people constantly go bac…
> Or if they desperately need photoshop or whatever, get a mac. I'm kind of in that situation and I don't thing going with Mac and the Apple ecosystem really is better than trying to use Windows 10 as long as possible on an older Thinkpad.
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A lot more than you think: * Steam (the root process, not the subsequent Chromium child processes) is 32-bit, as are a lot of games. * Discord is 32-bit.
How come people run these Electron apps separately when they run pretty well as tabs/windows in the browser?
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Isn't it interesting that both you and I frequently use Sublime and VS Code? Why can't VS Code kill off Sublime? It's interesting to me where a text editor like Sublime can't be a preferable IDE, but an IDE also isn't a preferable text editor?
Sublime is, well, Sublime. Every time I try VS Code I just can’t commit. There’s a bit too much going on and it never feels as tight as Sublime. I did just get a new Windows machine, so maybe I should try it on that.
I’m starting to get back into emacs recently though because I like fiddling with tools more than productivity.
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Hasn't it, though? HDR, fluid animations, monstrous resolutions, 3D everything, accessibility, fancy APIs for easier development allowing for more features, support for large amounts of devices, backwards compatibility, browsers are almost unrecognizable in featureset to the point they resemble an OS unto themselves, email clients have stayed mostly the same at least except for the part that they also ship a browser…
> 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…
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>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 think I first saw it running on a Geforce with 64MB of RAM. Even then it was smooth as butter. Now that I think about it, Mac OSX was doing GPU compositing back in 2000/2001 and those machine usually only had about 16MB of VRAM. I remember it running fairly well on a 2005 MacMini G4 with 32MB of VRAM.
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It is still possible to have a snappy computer experience. Go Linux, use a very configurable distro (Arch, Gentoo, NixOS), choose a lightweight DE and app ecosystem and it will get you there for the most part. Browsers are still going to be the sticking point, but with agressive adblockers/noscript and hardware that's not terribly old (NVMe storage is priority 1), and you should be set. But of course, snappiness isn'…
I’m on debian and using xfce. The problem is the web browser. I’ve got 16 gb of ram and the browser is using most of them. I can literally see the swap space emptying when i have (as in “im forced to”) sacrifice my browsing session (xkill the browser) due to constant swap out to disk. And I’m using a pci gen 3 nvme disk, and already lowered swappiness. The problem is the web browser.
At this point, my primary use case for ad blocking isn't the ad blocking itself, it is 1. the security of blocking ads, one of the worst vectors for attacks in the while and 2. the greatly reduced system resources my browser uses. The ad blocking itself is a further bonus.
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…
When we see egregious examples like Windows, then it's arguable having constraints might be desirable. It is well-known that "limitation breeds creativity". It's certainly true outside of "tech" companies. I have witnessed it first hand. "Tech" companies are some sort of weird fantasy world where stupidity disguised as cleverness is allowed to run rampant. No more likely place for this to happen than at companies that have too much money.
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> Not everyone needs [accessibility], so it should be an additional installable component for those who do. The UI has to be designed from the ground up to support accessibility.
Accessibility support was in Windows 95 as far as I remember.