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

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

#261

Post by anthk »

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…

>Compiling huge C++

Use ccache and clang. Also, with Linux you can set ZRAM and convert these 6GB in something like 9-10GB.

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

#262

Post by charcircuit »

andai wrote: post #123
charcircuit wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For those curious. https://source.chromium.org/chromium/chromium/src/+/main:ui/... An improvement would be to replace EncodeBGRASkBitmap with FastEncodeBGRASkBitmap so that it uses the fastest zlib level instead of the default (6). This is what the Linux X11 (ozone) implementation uses. This would be an easy fix to upstream if someone wants to do it.

Yeah, like you said they literally already wrote the code that does that, not sure why they didn't use it. Setting compression to 0 is still 2 full seconds of lag for me (down from 8s), so there's still a lot of overhead. There are faster png implementations but I think re-encoding a 2MB JPEG into a 20MB PNG (to be re-encoded back to JPG by whatever program you paste it into) is kind of missing the mark.

Funnily enough a CL moving the computation to a background thread was submitted a week ago. This would prevent the UI freeze.

https://chromium-review.googlesource.com/c/chromium/src/+/42...

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

#263

Post by anthk »

Yuioup wrote: post #245
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.

Plus Qt isn't free, if I'm not mistaken.

Have you been under a coma since 1997? How's everything?

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

#264

Post by anthk »

wk_end wrote: post #197
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.

Qt is actually not that good. I used to work for a large, well-known software company that distributed an app using Qt; every day that I worked on the native client was a nightmare of framework bugs, quirks, and limitations. For all of CSS' quirks and limitations, it's still an order of magnitude less frustrating to develop with a TypeScript/React/HTML/CSS stack than it is to use Qt. TypeScript is also a vastly bette…

Qt has QML. I think that "well-known software company" was not as productive as it was.

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

#265

Post by modo_mario »

emodendroket wrote: post #217
drpixie wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I wouldn't say so in and off itself but it can be argued using a thousandfold more resources to get the same functionality is wrong. The reasons for this are manifold and not just coming from those making cross platform easy to hire for web tech. (Tho it would be nice if those web stacks were also less bloated) In a more ideal world we'd have a few cross UI options already and the companies behind OS's running them would have incentive to support that.

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

#266

Post by jack_pp »

Gigachad wrote: post #188
jack_pp wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't need old as in 20 year old. just cheap / second hand fanless computers like 2nd or 3rd gen NUCs, raspberry Pi's etc

Is anyone actually using the pi as a desktop? Feels like most people need a laptop for portability, which is already many times more powerful than the pi, and then if you do have a non portable desktop, it's for gaming.

I've read comments in the past of people adventuring into these kinds of scenarios though I haven't tried to use a pi as a desktop.

I use old laptops. My daily driver until a year ago was a Dell e7470 which worked well enough for browsing and coding in VSCode.. until the keyboard broke, twice. Now it's gathering dust because I'm too lazy to change the keyboard again but it should work fine on linux atleast.

My current daily driver is a thinkpad t490 with an i7-8565U and 16 GB of ram that was provided for me at work and which I can buy used for 500$ atm.

But if what you want is fanless and decent hardware I'd recommend a NUC.

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

#267

Post by harel »

jkepler wrote: post #256
harel wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it's more than wild man. It's magical! Just yesterday or the day before my 700KB or so Amiga floppy seemed like it would last forever...

Wasn't it just the day before yesterday that Bill Gates famously said nobody would ever need more than 64 KB storage? It /is/ amazing the progress we've seen in our lifetimes. I remember life before the web (http) was invented, before mobile phones (much less smartphones) became commonplace. Some of the supposed 'progress' is really regression---like the number of people who economically could productively use comput…

It was! It was exactly the day before yesterday when he said that. I remember. I started my "career" doing "multimedia" in the 90s. Macromedia Director programming. I also remember those who had a 486 and that one guy who had 486DX. I remember seeing the "web" for the first time somewhere in 1994. I also remember looking at my friend asking if he thinks anyone will ever make money off this thing. We both said "Naahhhhh" at the same time and laughed.

Projects like this bring it all back.

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

#268

Post by dijit »

Sunspark wrote: post #207
serf wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The worst part isn't that the old hardware isn't worthwhile; it's that it has to be hobbled so much in order to be secure on todays' net. Things like Spectre created a lot of additional obsolescence.

I think you can still be secure on the net with the Spectre and Meltdown mitigations disabled on a personal system. If your browser is current, it already has mitigations built into it. Are there any mathematical calculations showing the risk % of disabling mitigations? Or is this just herd activity where everyone sets it as a default because they don't want to accept the liability for the remote chance of lightning…

This is dangerous, and maybe not in the way you expect.

Personal systems are running a lot more untrusted code than, for example, servers.

Mitigations are more necessary on personal computers than on servers.

As for "it's mitigated in the browser", the issue is that there's no "one" mitigation for anything, you have to mitigate it on the OS, in the browser, in the microcode for the CPU. Everything. You can't just apply one mitigation and be done. FWIW the "mitigation" in browsers was to disable high precision timers; which seems to be making its way back, and was never necessary, it just made the exploit easier.

I highly recommend keeping mitigations enabled for personal machines; when it comes to servers with a decent WAF that are not shared amongst users that can run code: disabling mitigations makes more sense. (dedicated databases, for example).

Someone described the mitigations as: "Surrounding a drunk person with trampolines in the hope that when they collapse they will be corrected into the right position", I think this is the most apt example I can think of.

For personal systems that run a lot of untrusted code (due mostly to the web): I wouldn't personally advocate for removing a trampoline.

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

#269

Post by Gigachad »

otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #251
emodendroket wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

"Productive" is a nice euphemism for "I'm a web developer and can't be bothered to learn anything that isn't Javascript".

These same companies are writing custom SSD drivers and cutting edge Rust backends for the absolute best performance. I think it's pretty safe to say they picked Electron because it's the best tool for the job, not because the worlds devs are all too lazy.

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

#270

Post by Gigachad »

MobiusHorizons wrote: post #234
Ygg2 wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

There are a few options depending on your application type. Fltk is old and ugly, but may work for you. There are others that come from the world of game UIs. Things like sdl2, Nuklear, and dear imgui. I’ve also seen some vulkan based frameworks (mostly from the rust community)

Which one of these would allow you to build the discord UI as it is, looking exactly the same on every OS and run in web browsers?
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