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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

#151

Post by vinyl7 »

keicwifjwud wrote: post #119
karmakurtisaani wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This has strong "How much could a banana cost? 10 dollars?" vibes. Back in my day 100MB was all you had for all your compute, and somehow programs still ran.

> Back in my day Back in my day systems used to be a lot simpler too. These “back in my mind” comparisons show a clear lack of understanding of the subject matter. 1996 apps are not the same as 2026 apps. Expectations are different. Design languages are different. Even the UX is entirely different. 1GB is clearly overkill, no question. But ~100MB to ~300MB is perfectly reasonable and you know it.

99% of apps have the same or less functionality today as they did in 2001, but are significantly slower and worse.

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

#154

Post by guiambros »

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.

Unrelated, but it reminds me of this C64 demo [1] I posted earlier this week: the whole thing in 17.8 KB.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49205592

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

#155

Post by preg_match »

torh wrote: post #141
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.…

> to make their installations work just to get a UX that's almost as good as Windows from 20 years ago To be fair, that was the peak of Windows UI. Also, KDE Plasma is way ahead of Windows (any of them).

I agree, KDE Plasma runs circles around every UX available now or at any time in the past. And it's not even close.

I've tried using MacOS, and there are so many frustrating things you just have to put up with. Windows is much worse, but to be fair Windows was okay at one point. KDE is, out of the box, seamless, sensible, fast, and unbelievably feature-packed. But even if the default experience isn't your taste, it's trivial to customize it to work however you want. Whatever panels you want, where ever you want, with whatever widgets you want. WYSIWYG with point-and-click. And the windows, too. Window rules, KWin scripts (which are actually full-blown plugins), whatever you want. I want Steam to always open full screen on start up on my second monitor on the third desktop? Sure, I can do that, again point-and-click.

I truly cannot sign the praises of KDE enough. I think everyone who dislikes KDE has probably not delved deep enough. I can recreate the entire GNOME desktop in KDE in an hour. I can recreate MacOS in 30 minutes.

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

#156

Post by baist0 »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #13

...you know, I keep reading all this stuff about memory prices, and it does suck, but memory is still much cheaper per gigabyte than it was ~15 years ago. Which matters because the things most consumers are doing on their computers haven't changed in the past 15 years. We browse the web, edit photos, message friends, and so on. AI generally runs on remote servers anyway. For years, everyone kept saying it was fine th…

You are destroying the subtle mechanism of corporate enrichment.

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

#157

Post by lelanthran »

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…

> This took me down a rabbit whole.

The rabbit was too hungry to even stop to chew you?

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

#158

Post by baist0 »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #68
Wowfunhappy wrote: post #13

...you know, I keep reading all this stuff about memory prices, and it does suck, but memory is still much cheaper per gigabyte than it was ~15 years ago. Which matters because the things most consumers are doing on their computers haven't changed in the past 15 years. We browse the web, edit photos, message friends, and so on. AI generally runs on remote servers anyway. For years, everyone kept saying it was fine th…

We had modern programming toolkits that traded some efficiency for ease of use 20 years ago, along with GPU compositing for maximum smoothness. And that's when Vista came out requiring a whole 1GB to run properly. And other than doubling for 64GB that didn't change through 7, 8, 8.1, 10. Electron was never a great idea but more and more basic things keep moving to it and the result is a disaster. When you use it for…

moder engineers.

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

#159

Post by debazel »

hyperhello wrote: post #78
benj111 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That still isn't a good look.

I’m not sure if you mean a good look for the process or for the author but paging space is just saying “gimme a gigabyte” like saying “gimme a plate” is at a barbecue. The resources themselves aren’t being used at that point.

On Windows over allocating virtual memory (commit charge) is still bad. Unlike on Linux, once the total commit charge hits your physical RAM limit + SWAP limit, Windows will start crashing your applications and refuse to allocate more virtual memory, even if that memory has not been touched yet.

This is also why it is very important to have plenty of SWAP space on Windows, even if you have 64 GiB+ of memory. Because applications love to over allocate commit charge.

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