191–200 of 223 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
what's especially strange to me is that in the more distant past, he was a pretty normal guy - at least as normal as any other linux user. Heck, he had a super great podcast (Linux Action Show). Something changed in the 2014ish time-frame when it got more and more politically extreme.
what do you think changed culturally around 2014 (I'd say it started a little earlier, maybe 2011)?
Those screenshots also contain the RSS, as luck would have it.
34MiB when on the desktop (clean), running X.org, AwesomeWM and xcompmgr (for compositing). Screenshot: https://github.com/aktau/awesome/blob/master/screenshots/200...
57MiB with a couple of applications open. From memory: urxvt running htop, thunar (XFCE file manager) and the Mirage image viewer (which is Python, not otherwise known for efficiency). Screenshot: https://github.com/aktau/awesome/blob/master/screenshots/200...
Nowadays, even with a tiling WM that's supposed to be lightweight (say: Sway), the minimum appears to be well over 300MiB (see https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/1njecy5/wayland_comp...). GNOME 49 takes up around 1GiB last time I tried it (NixOS). Interestingly https://www.reddit.com/r/swaywm/comments/oghner/how_does_the... from 5 years ago mentions Sway only using 115MiB. What happened?
Theories I have:
- 32-bit to 64-bit means all points are double the size. That would account for something.
- Wayland vs X11. I should compare Sway versus X.org+i3.
- General library and system daemon bloat.Earlier quoted context omitted.
Windows95 was decent even with 8 MB, on a 66 MHz or 100 MHz 486 CPU. With either 4 MB or only a 386 CPU, it was definitely crippled, making an upgrade not worthwhile.
Windows 95 on a 386 CPU with enough RAM was alright. Not fast but very useable. https://youtu.be/Pw2610paPYM?t=72 But most 386 didn't have 8+ megabytes, and some 386 had a 286 like data bus, making it even slower. (386SX)
I benchmarked it for PC Pro Magazine when it came out.
We had to borrow a 4MB 386SX from a friend of the editor's, as we had nothing that low-end left in the labs.
In our standard benchmarks, which used MS Word, MS Excel, PowerPoint, Illustrator, Photoshop, WinZip, and a few other real apps, Win95 1.0, not 95A or OSR2, was measurable faster than Windows for Workgroups 3.11 on MS-DOS 6.22, hand-optimised.
When it needed the RAM, 95 could shrink the disk cache to essentially nothing. (Maybe 4 kB or something.) Win3 could not do that.
It was SLOW but under heavy load it was quicker than Win3 on the lowest-end supported hardware.
Under light load, Win3 was quicker, but Win95 scaled down very impressively indeed.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Lunduke spreads misinformation He doesn't. He just reports events as a journalist. He doesn't fight against open source.
Name how it's possible to improve security on X11 without breakig changes. Lunduke made factually wrong claims for hype. His mob are keen to attack Open Source developers.
Namespaces. It's been done already. Look into XLibre.
>Lunduke made factually wrong claims for hype.
Citation needed.
>His mob are keen to attack Open Source developers.
Doesn't own a mob, and never happened. Horrible accusation, by the way.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Lunduke spreads misinformation He doesn't. He just reports events as a journalist. He doesn't fight against open source.
Name how it's possible to improve security on X11 without breakig changes. Lunduke made factually wrong claims for hype. His mob are keen to attack Open Source developers.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> is it the UI animations, color themes, shades etc etc or is it the underlying operating system that has more and more features, services etc etc ? ...all of those and more? New software is only optimized until it is not outright annoying to use on current hardware, it's always been like that and that's why there are old jokes like: "What Andy giveth, Bill taketh away." "Software is like a gas, it expands to consume…
Indeed. Much of a modern Linux desktop e.g. runs inside one of multiple not very well optimized JS engines: Gnome uses JS for various desktop interactions, and all major desktops run a different JS engine as a different user to evaluate polkit authorizations (so exactly zero RAM could be shared between those engines, even if they were identical, which they aren't), and then half your interactions with GUI tools happe…
A couple of years ago I saw a talk by Sophie Wilson, the designer of the ARM chip. She had been amused by someone saying there was an ARM inside every iPhone: she pointed out that there was 6-8 assymetric ARM cores in the CPU section of the SOC, some big and fast, some small and power-frugal, an ARM chip in the Bluetooth controller, another in the Wifi controller, several in the GSM/mobile controller, at least one in the memory controller, several in the flash memory controller...
It wasn't "an ARM chip". It was half a dozen ARMs in early iPhones, and then maybe dozens in modern ones. More in anything with an SD card slot, as SD card typically contain an Arm or a few of them to manage the blocks of storage, and other ARMs in the interface are talking to those ARMs.
Wheels within wheels: multiple very similar cores, running different OSes and RTOSes and chunks of embedded firmware, all cooperatively running user-facing OSes with a load of duplication, like a shell in one Javascript launching Firefox which contains a copy of a different version of the same Javascript engine, plus another in Thunderbird, plus another embedded in Slack and another copy embedded in VSCode.
Insanity. Make a resource cheap and it is human nature to squander it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Indeed. Much of a modern Linux desktop e.g. runs inside one of multiple not very well optimized JS engines: Gnome uses JS for various desktop interactions, and all major desktops run a different JS engine as a different user to evaluate polkit authorizations (so exactly zero RAM could be shared between those engines, even if they were identical, which they aren't), and then half your interactions with GUI tools happe…
I've found that Gnome works about as well as other "lighter" desktop environments on some hardware I have that is about 15 years old. I don't think it using a JS engine really impacts performance as much as people claim. Memory usage might be a bit higher, but the main memory hog on a machine these days is your web browser. I have plenty of complaints about gnome (not being able to set a solid colour as a background…
IMHO, I find the reverse. It feels like a phone/tablet interface. It's bigger and uses way more disk and memory, but it gives me less UI, less control, less customisation, than Xfce which takes about a quarter of the resources.
Example: I have 2 screens. One landscape on the left, one portrait on the right. That big mirrored L-shape is my desktop. I wanted the virtual-desktop switcher on the right of the right screen, and the dock thing on the left of the left screen.
GNOME can't do that. They must be on your primary display, and if that's a little laptop screen but there is a nice big spacious 2nd screen, I want to move some things there -- but I am not allowed to.
If I have 1 screen, keep them on 1 screen. If I have 2, that pair is my desktop, so put one panel on the left of my desktop and one on the right, even if those are different screens -- and remember this so it happens automatically when I connect that screen.
This is the logic I'd expect. It is not how GNOME folks think, though, so I can't have it. I do not understand how they think.
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…
The computer I installed Slackware 2.0 was a P75 with 16 MB of RAM! Naturally this cannot work when every application is an instance of Chrome. I am glad for the RAM prices, maybe this will teach a new generation on how to care about their data structures again.
I have been thinking that exact same thought recently.
I hope prices stay elevated for a few years, so people learn to be a bit more frugal with resources.
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. :-/
Try Alpine Linux, with Xfce which can do most of the same things. Then enable swap compression -- add this to the end of the kernel line in your bootloader:
zswap.enabled=1
This compresses everything going to swap, and decompresses it coming back: less disk reads and writes, and less space used.
Everything gets quicker.