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If you're happy with OpenBSD, probably any computer is good enough

muezza.ca

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Re: If you're happy with OpenBSD, probably any computer is good enough

#211

Post by seszett »

userbinator wrote: post #201
winter_blue wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's bloat caused by stuff like Electron, and people choosing to write desktop apps in HTML + JavaScript/TypeScript + some framework. If people even used a framework like Qt (a really mature and well-maintained desktop framework the favored framework of KDE Plasma, etc.), their memory usage would be so much lower. (I'm not counting the memory used by Qt's shared .so / dynamic library files.)

and people choosing to write desktop apps in HTML + JavaScript/TypeScript + some framework. While the "web everything" trend is definitely responsible for a lot of the bloat, it is upon closer inspection not the whole story. For example, I remember various "AJAX chat" clients were quite popular around the turn of the century, worked in a browser like IE5 on a system with probably 64-128MB of RAM and a single core Pen…

They still exist. A small corner of the French free software community uses "tribunes" to communicate, and that was developed a bit before 2000. It consists of a web interface (originally not Ajax) and a standardised protocol supported by a handful of clients (most of which can federate multiple tribunes). It was briefly popular outside this community when I wrote a Drupal module that provided a tribune for any Drupal site, but then the modern web and smartphones happened and today it's really confidential.

I still use it though, and the graphical client running on my system (which is also an RSS reader) uses 23 MB of RAM at the moment, displaying 1375 messages.

Re: If you're happy with OpenBSD, probably any computer is good enough

#213

Post by NovaPenguin »

steponlego wrote: post #104
squarefoot wrote: post #20

I totally understand the nostalgia value, but energy doesn't grow on trees. A small mini-PC would consume a fraction of the current needed to run those old machines, offering much more computing power in return. Not to talk about the much better scaling achieved by modern processors; some iMac models would idle at almost 100 Watts.

A Mac LC absolutely sips power, you should see how long you'd have to run your $300 mini PC to save enough power to make it worthwhile.

It is kind of neat just how little power some of these older systems used. A big part was it was cheaper to make processors that used non-ceramic caps on them - but it limited the amount of power they could use due to thermal dissipation limits.

A good example in a similar fashion is the Super Nintendo. The power supply is rated to 7.85 Watts but it only uses roughly half of that when running. I believe the Neo Geo used 5 Watts peak. And these aren't physically tiny machines like a Raspberry Pi.

Re: If you're happy with OpenBSD, probably any computer is good enough

#214

Post by emodendroket »

winter_blue wrote: post #179
userbinator wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or apps that have no business being webapps, but somehow are. When a chat and video/audio call client take 4GB all by itself...

It's bloat caused by stuff like Electron, and people choosing to write desktop apps in HTML + JavaScript/TypeScript + some framework. If people even used a framework like Qt (a really mature and well-maintained desktop framework the favored framework of KDE Plasma, etc.), their memory usage would be so much lower. (I'm not counting the memory used by Qt's shared .so / dynamic library files.)

I suppose so but they'd bring in lots of different problems to solve a problem that most people don't care about that much.

Re: If you're happy with OpenBSD, probably any computer is good enough

#215

Post by emodendroket »

LeFantome wrote: post #205
Gigachad wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is virtually every single company and developer wrong? Or is Qt actually not that good, forcing people to use Electron despite it's resource usage? I find it far easier to believe that Qt and GTK have fallen behind rather than the whole world is under a grand delusion and didn't know Qt exists.

It is web designers and JavaScript devs not wanting to acknowledge that desktop dev and C++ exist. I use an old 2008 iMac running Linux frequently and it runs remarkably well. Firefox and MS Edge are certainly the apps that bring it down from a memory perspective ( it only has 6 Gigs ). Electron apps like MS Teams are right up there though and make it chug even more than the browsers do. To be fair, I have dozens of…

Not wanting to acknowledge they exist, or not wanting to do them because they find them less proeuctive? Different issues.

Re: If you're happy with OpenBSD, probably any computer is good enough

#216

Post by emodendroket »

ZephyrBlu wrote: post #202
Gigachad wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a hard time believing that companies like Discord are using Electron simply because they do not know what they are doing.

I completely agree with you. It would be extremely odd for a company like Discord, who has done things like using nightly Rust in production, to naively choose Electron because they "don't know what they're doing" with native apps. Many people on HN either don't understand or don't care for trading off runtime performance and other technical qualities for other things like e.g. development speed, DX, easier hiring, e…

Or to put it another way, HN users tend to strongly value things that aren't important to most people, and not much value other things that most people do care about.

Re: If you're happy with OpenBSD, probably any computer is good enough

#217

Post by emodendroket »

drpixie wrote: post #110
abricot wrote: post #4

If you are happy not surfing most of the Web, any computer is good enough. It's usually browsers and web pages that brings these older PCs down.

Presumably the result of Google making Chromium more and more like a whole OS (and everyone else following along). Is it ridiculous to give a browser such fine-grained access to your computer? If we were actually designing web standards for usability (instead of for maximising attention) our browsers would look al= lot more like Web 1.0 and nothing like Web 3.0!

Why? Is there something wrong with the concept of Web apps?

Re: If you're happy with OpenBSD, probably any computer is good enough

#218

Post by NovaPenguin »

"How much computing power do I really need on a day to day basis?"

I guess this is a kind of Computational Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs.

Basic needs can be covered by the vast majority of computer hardware. But once you get to large scale web browsing and gaming - more complex hardware is required.

The difference between a hermit living content in a cave and a billionaire in a 42 bed room mansion. Both could be happy but it really depends on their perspective.

Re: If you're happy with OpenBSD, probably any computer is good enough

#219

Post by NovaPenguin »

amatecha wrote: post #208
NovaPenguin wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My White Whale... the Dual 2Ghz PowerMac G5 I bought for $50. Sure it took months until I finally figured out how to get the OS to install properly. Having to delve into the patch work of information on Open Firmware and even then I am not entirely sure how I did it. And in the end I was left with a machine that ran well over 300 watts to do what a Raspberry Pi4 can easy do in well under 5 watts. I should have known,…

Dang, yeah it's unfortunate how high the power usage is. I didn't realize this when I bought a couple for ~$75 each. They are really cool-looking systems, but definitely not too efficient :\

Oh yeah, I consider them some of the peak of case design. As much as it is cool to run these as a G5, keeping the case is a neat homage to what they were.

Re: If you're happy with OpenBSD, probably any computer is good enough

#220

Post by Ygg2 »

Gigachad wrote: post #195
bandrami wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Electron lets you write a graphical application without knowing what you're doing. Whether this is "right" or "wrong" is a difficult question to answer.

I have a hard time believing that companies like Discord are using Electron simply because they do not know what they are doing.

Question is, if you want to do cross platform UI what choice do you have?
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