161–170 of 223 posts
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My first PC had 16 MB of RAM, which later obviously became too slow to be usable. I remember I had to wait around a minute for Fallout to load a level, which you had to do fairly frequently.
4 minutes to load Enclave level save game with pentium 200mhz with 32mb ram
A long time ago the power supply blew out in the machine I played Counter Strike: Source on and I was a teenager just barely 16 with no money so I couldn't replace it. I was able to keep in touch with my drug dealers and my girlfriend's friends (who were also all super hot) which was very important to me at that age, in an environment where you really needed a car or people who had cars to do anything with anyone wor…
Thanks for letting all these nerds on HN know how important it was to maintain contact with a drug dealer and super hot girls when you were a hip teenager, I mean... i totally get it because I was also a really cool hip teenager. Did we just become best friends?
> super hot girls
Yeah a San Francisco 7 was like an 8 in Los Angeles and easily a 10 in most towns (in those days).
They were prowling MySpace just as much as anyone else. You know what they're up to.
While this is cool, it all goes out the window the minute you run any app
Unused RAM is wasted. But used RAM is also wasted, sometimes. If I can accomplish the same thing with less RAM, that's better, because it lets me do other things at the same time. It doesn't mean I'm not going to use that RAM, that would be pointless. My desktop running dwm typically idles at ~50GiB RAM usage from random crap I've got running. But I can prove that the desktop is using no more than like 300MiB.
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It's the web browser and electron based apps that are the primary consumers of ram on my desktops with the DE and OS ram usage being minimal by comparison. I have an ancient laptop from 2008 with 4GB of ram that runs a modern KDE desktop and related applications just fine that I use for troubleshooting stuff. However, the moment I open a web browser it basically falls to pieces. I hate everything about this. :-/
4GB still seems excessive, by at least one and probably several orders of magnitude, for what vanilla KDE actually does: browse files, manage windows, and edit text. And KDE is one of the best modern options.
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Exactly. The issue today is that even if you optimize your OS and DE to be very memory efficient, it matters very little as soon as you open a modern web browser. And without a modern web browser a big part of the online experience is broken.
Eh, kinda. Work forces me to have Jira, Confluence, Gitlab, Copilot, the other Copilot formerly known as Outlook, the other other Copilot formerly known as Teams, as well as Slack of course, and a dozen other webslop apps open… and it still all fits in Which is a lot worse than the <1GB you'd get with well-optimized native tools, but try running Win11 with "only" 8GB RAM.
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People like his technical opinion because they like his politics. That’s the whole grift-influencer economy. If someone is good at one thing (and validates some of my views), then obviously he’s right about everything.
When people feel underrepresented to the point of being bullied they turn to any voice which seems to reflect even a tiny fraction of their frustrations. There's a real mean spirit in open source lately and a lot of it seems to revolve around political views. There's become this idea that if you and I disagree on politics then it would be impossible for us to write quality software together. It's damaged a lot of goo…
Lunduke spreads misinformation. That's anti Open Source, anti community.
I remember, in 2007, running FreeBSD on a desktop with 512MB RAM and only using 64MB of it running full GNOME 2 and a running instance of Firefox with a couple tabs. A totally standard desktop experience. Even better, my laptop at the time had only 128MB of RAM and ran Windows XP - a supported, albeit minimal, configuration. XP was bloatier than FreeBSD of course, and ran correspondingly less well, but replacing expl…
It's the web browser and electron based apps that are the primary consumers of ram on my desktops with the DE and OS ram usage being minimal by comparison. I have an ancient laptop from 2008 with 4GB of ram that runs a modern KDE desktop and related applications just fine that I use for troubleshooting stuff. However, the moment I open a web browser it basically falls to pieces. I hate everything about this. :-/
There is bloat everywhere.
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You need window surface buffers in order to do seamless compositing, scaling etc. It's quite technically possible to achieve pixel-perfect 2D rendering with GPU-side compute, but in many ways it's still an open problem.
Scaling is for legacy apps, right? Modern apps should get the area to render and the desired pixel density. Not sure what you mean specifically by "need" in "need ... to do compositing". Compositing is just a way (e.g. rerender only on changes, cache results) of running a desktop environment. Strictly speaking you don't need compositing, you can just use immediate mode across the DE and apps. The tradeoff of course i…
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If the system totally freezes such that you can't even ssh in, that's just flaky hardware and you should replace it.
It's a newer Lenovo vpro, not because I wanted that, but because it's what I got. It came with 16g of reputable ram, then I added 8g ~1 year ago for $20, the exact same module which is now $120. Orher than a bad ram chip, what else would be the culprit?
Buying more ram is no longer an option, so I added a 128gb swap partition on nvme. I incorrectly assumed with 64gb I didn't even need swap. No crashes since.
If you don't want to move partitions around, you can add a swap file. ChatGPT or whatever can give instructions.
If someone wants really low ram consumption for a desktop. They should try out tinycorelinux which I have ran the whole system in It's truly the most minimalist gui option just out there. It uses flwm & there own iirc very minimalist xorg server but most apps usually work The one issue I have is that I can't copy paste text or do some simple stuff like moving my mouse on some text but aside from that, Tinycorelinux's…