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Windows 11's built-in Weather app wastes more than 1 GB of RAM

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Re: Windows 11's built-in Weather app wastes more than 1 GB of RAM

#131

Post by shooly »

SBArbeit wrote: post #116
rahulmax wrote: post #92

"Windows users are fundamentally willing to put up with more bullshit than MacOS or Linux users." I read this circa 2010 and it stuck with me ever since. Also, have felt this way over the years, when I see Windows users work.

Super interesting; it's been exactly the opposite in my experience. MacOS/iOS users put up with whatever Apple is telling them they should love - Liquid Glass, right? App Store restrictions, right? Lousy AI, right? - whether it's true or not. Linux users are willing to put up with any amount of work - i.e. bullshit - to make their installations work just to get a UX that's almost as good as Windows from 20 years ago.…

I mean, if the only things you can name are Liquid Glass, App Store and not-so-intelligent AI then it seems like Apple users are actually doing quite well?

It's impossible for every idea to be a hit. Liquid Glass was a miss and they backtracked on some changes and fixed some issues that people were vocal about.

Re: Windows 11's built-in Weather app wastes more than 1 GB of RAM

#132

Post by rstat1 »

aniceperson wrote: post #128
SBArbeit wrote: post #120

Easy workaround for this: 1. Install uBlock Origin in Edge. 2. Start Edge, browse to MSN Weather. 3. Click the "Add an Application" button in the address bar to get a Start Menu icon for the page. 4. Delete the in-box Weather app icon. Now you get the same Weather app in about 130MB of RAM, with no ads. It's not as nice as a native app, of course, but it's 1000% better than the useless ads and MSN feed that you can't…

1. install ublock origin on Firefox. not even being annoying, edge is removing manifest v2 very soon, breaking proper ad blocks just like chrome

[flagged]

Re: Windows 11's built-in Weather app wastes more than 1 GB of RAM

#134

Post by cdud3 »

rpdillon wrote: post #109
lynguist wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure if you're reply hunting or we talk about different apps but how would you fit the Qt runtime, Javascript runtime, font cache, graphics, networking libraries, etc in this limit? This can't physically be under 70 MB, and more like 100-200+ MB.

Sibling comment called it: these are dynamic libs used by the desktop, so the incremental RAM usage is low. That's a good approach! Makes me wonder what the heck MS is doing to get their app to add an incremental gig to memory usage.

Correct.

Re: Windows 11's built-in Weather app wastes more than 1 GB of RAM

#135

Post by ashleyn »

firefoxd wrote: post #36

This took me down a rabbit whole. Why can a simple single purpose app not be just a couple megabytes if not less? The popular options are electron 100MB+, or embedding python3 in your executable which is at least 40MB. But if you build it natively, you should have all of Microsoft tools at your disposition, dlls and such. In theory, this should allow you to make a 1 mb app or less. But in practice, it's the worse opt…

A lot of these applications run in Electron or similar libraries where a whole new browser instance, with all its overhead, is stood up for each application. The simplest answer is we need to stop trying to use web technologies as a one-size-fits-all GUI toolkit.

Re: Windows 11's built-in Weather app wastes more than 1 GB of RAM

#137

Post by SBArbeit »

shooly wrote: post #131
SBArbeit wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Super interesting; it's been exactly the opposite in my experience. MacOS/iOS users put up with whatever Apple is telling them they should love - Liquid Glass, right? App Store restrictions, right? Lousy AI, right? - whether it's true or not. Linux users are willing to put up with any amount of work - i.e. bullshit - to make their installations work just to get a UX that's almost as good as Windows from 20 years ago.…

I mean, if the only things you can name are Liquid Glass, App Store and not-so-intelligent AI then it seems like Apple users are actually doing quite well? It's impossible for every idea to be a hit. Liquid Glass was a miss and they backtracked on some changes and fixed some issues that people were vocal about.

I can name lots of things I can't stand about MacOS and iOS and Apple hardware, but that wasn't the point of the comment. Some of the things I can't stand about Apple are things that people used to Apple's stuff don't mind. Cool for you. But I'm still not moving to The Villages, ever.

Re: Windows 11's built-in Weather app wastes more than 1 GB of RAM

#138

Post by magackame »

blackhaz wrote: post #73
nashashmi wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s an equivalent app to make a comparison with, one from an OS company. But yeah, I still remember when a weather app would take 10 MB and I was complaining (1999)

10 MB is ridiculously overbloated. 1 MB or something in that vicinity should be more like it.

I think you guys on HN can be a bit out of touch maybe? On my linux machine (measured with tux-manager):

  nautilus                            177 MB
  kitty                               150 MB
  alacritty                           107 MB
  mpv --idle --force-window           160 MB
  winit empty window + OpenGL context 100 MB
  tux-manager                         69  MB
  hexchat                             55  MB
  gnome-terminal                      47  MB
  st                                  12  MB
  xterm                               12  MB
All these apps are what you would consider native, good apps. Written with Qt, GTK, some in low level langs like C\C++, Rust as well. There is of course different ways to measure the usage and maybe some more testing needs to be done, but stuff like 1-10 MB seems completely unrealistic. I think any empty Qt/GTK app eats 40 MB at least. Only thing that even gets close is st at 12 MB. And mind you it's a terminal (which is 1000x simpler than any modern GUI app, doesn't load any assets etc) and it doesn't even use any GPU accel (which itself seem to add a lot of baseline cost).

Honestly I was a bit surprised myself. I have a Rust winit + ash vulkan hardcoded triangle demo app and it eats 86 MB (the binary itself is 5.5 MB). I would love to know, if anyone could explain why GPU accel seems to eat up so much RAM. Like yeah, there are a bunch of images that live on swapchain, but they should all be in VRAM. Outside of that I don't see what would require MBs worth of overhead.

Re: Windows 11's built-in Weather app wastes more than 1 GB of RAM

#139

Post by rstat1 »

SBArbeit wrote: post #116
rahulmax wrote: post #92

"Windows users are fundamentally willing to put up with more bullshit than MacOS or Linux users." I read this circa 2010 and it stuck with me ever since. Also, have felt this way over the years, when I see Windows users work.

Super interesting; it's been exactly the opposite in my experience. MacOS/iOS users put up with whatever Apple is telling them they should love - Liquid Glass, right? App Store restrictions, right? Lousy AI, right? - whether it's true or not. Linux users are willing to put up with any amount of work - i.e. bullshit - to make their installations work just to get a UX that's almost as good as Windows from 20 years ago.…

>> Linux users are willing to put up with any amount of work - i.e. bullshit - to make their installations work just to get a UX that's almost as good as Windows from 20 years ago

I put in the exact same amount of effort to install a Linux distro on my laptop that I would have to install Windows.

1. Download the ISO 2. Write to a USB drive 3. Reboot 4. Run the installer. 5. ??? 6. Profit

And all for an experience with way less bloat, none of the bundled spyware, more consistent UI design (depending on which desktop you're using), and better perceived performance.

>>This article highlights a problem that Windows has right now, and one which I agree with, which is shipping web apps instead of native. For now, I have a workaround for it:

This is still a web app, it doesn't solve the problem of MS being too lazy or cheap to make real desktop apps for things. I mean this is the same company who thought taking the Start Menu of all things and re-making it with web crap was a good idea.

Re: Windows 11's built-in Weather app wastes more than 1 GB of RAM

#140

Post by baist0 »

rpdillon wrote: post #107
blackhaz wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

10 MB is ridiculously overbloated. 1 MB or something in that vicinity should be more like it.

I mean, you're getting dumped on for this, but it seems about right? For an extreme example: curl https://wttr.in/ Inside of a conky widget would do the trick, I think. https://github.com/brndnmtthws/conky/wiki/Lua:-Shell-Integra...

LOL. it's a beautiful!
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