What I found is that you can get an old computer to work great with an old OS right up until you open the Web browser and start visiting Web sites.
You can get an old computer to work great with an old OS right up until you ... open the inner OS
If you're happy with OpenBSD, probably any computer is good enough
221–230 of 357 posts
Re: If you're happy with OpenBSD, probably any computer is good enough
#222What I found is that you can get an old computer to work great with an old OS right up until you open the Web browser and start visiting Web sites.
Not only an old OS. An older web browser has the same issues.
I think we need to come back to gopher and ftp because http is a rolling target.
But we are https (s comes from encription).
Re: If you're happy with OpenBSD, probably any computer is good enough
#223You're only using 61 MB of your 512 MB RAM. Megabyte. I love it. Megabyte. I distinctly remember the happiness of attaching a 512KB RAM expansion card to my Amiga, bringing total RAM to 1MB. You have 512 of those!
I cut my initial programming teeth on an 8Mhz (Maybe?) 8086 with 512KB RAM. Had the luxury of a 20MB HDD. At the time it felt like an ocean of storage. Nowadays it can be transferred around the world in less than a second.
Re: If you're happy with OpenBSD, probably any computer is good enough
#224What I found is that you can get an old computer to work great with an old OS right up until you open the Web browser and start visiting Web sites.
Not only an old OS. An older web browser has the same issues. I think we need to come back to gopher and ftp because http is a rolling target. But we are https (s comes from encription).
I actually meant a lightweight OS but I guess the parallel construction was so tempting I wrote the wrong thing. Everything seems great until you ask the computer to render the modern Web.
Re: If you're happy with OpenBSD, probably any computer is good enough
#225What I found is that you can get an old computer to work great with an old OS right up until you open the Web browser and start visiting Web sites.
There are some hacky ways of getting a little distance on modern OS's, like using terminal based browsers. I'm thinking Links/Elinks but that will only get you so far and so long as the security certificates are available.
Re: If you're happy with OpenBSD, probably any computer is good enough
#226Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Or to condense it further, HN users are human.
No matter how much we deny it! :D
Re: If you're happy with OpenBSD, probably any computer is good enough
#227Earlier quoted context omitted.
> restart Firefox frequently on my X230's running OpenBSD what wildly multithreaded memory hogs are you running? I love my x230s, and I have dozens and dozens of windows open all the time. probably I benefit a good bit from running ublock Origin and uMatrix, but I have gigabytes of RAM free. I don't think running a newer machine would give me any benefits at all.
The problem of Firefox "freezing" (rendering no longer working and UI elements like menu/scroll broken) and requiring a restart I don't think relates to memory. For example the browser is only using around 1.8gb at this moment and the machine has 8gb of RAM. I've been in contact with the Firefox OpenBSD maintainer (landry@) and he didn't have any certain indication from the logs/data I provided. He says he runs into…
Hmmm. Interesting.
What changes when the program closes and restarts other than memory refresh would be the obvious starting point. I like hunting these things down, may take a look!
Re: If you're happy with OpenBSD, probably any computer is good enough
#228Earlier 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.)
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.
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Re: If you're happy with OpenBSD, probably any computer is good enough
#229Earlier quoted context omitted.
What part of SSH takes 6 minutes?
Running sshd on a 33 MHz m68030 (OpenSSH_9.1), and connecting to it from a modern(ish) machine (OpenSSH_8.1p1) takes about six minutes to complete when the system is otherwise idle. Right now it's busy with lots of http requests due to putting the link here, so it's taking about 9 minutes or so ;)
Is that Linux?
It takes too long, but much less than that, on Netbsd @ A1200 with 030, albeit 50MHz.
Re: If you're happy with OpenBSD, probably any computer is good enough
#230I think MorphOS should run on it too https://www.morphos-team.net/hardware