201–210 of 415 posts
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Thank you! I'm also a little shocked, I had no idea Archive.org was doing this. I'm starting to get the impression that there's quite a lot going on under the hood at archive.org, just reams of stuff I've never noticed ...
>I had no idea Archive.org was doing this Well it's the users that are uploading but yeah Archive.org has an insane amount of stuff
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Tell that to the person on a fixed income who has to invest in an expensive new machine because their 2015 laptop (which still has a whopping 4 GB of memory and a CPU that would have been top-of-the-line twenty years ago) has become unusably slow. Software efficiency is a serious equity and environmental issue, and I wish more people would see it that way.
It is depressing that I had this same argument in college a decade ago and people are still so cavalier about not optimizing their code.
Companies will invest in what pays the bills. And hyper optimising for customers with no money isn’t it.
Let’s pause for a bit and dwell on the absurd amount of RAM it takes to run it even after this exercise. Anyone here remember when QNX shipped a demo in 2000 with a kernel, GUI, web browser and an email client on a single 3.5” floppy? The memory footprint was also a few megabytes. I’m not saying we should be staying within some miserly arbitrary constraints, but my goodness something that draws UI and manages process…
I was recently boggling at how a running small python script could take up 30+ MB of RAM. The data it processed was probably < 100kb in total.
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Hasn't it, though? HDR, fluid animations, monstrous resolutions, 3D everything, accessibility, fancy APIs for easier development allowing for more features, support for large amounts of devices, backwards compatibility, browsers are almost unrecognizable in featureset to the point they resemble an OS unto themselves, email clients have stayed mostly the same at least except for the part that they also ship a browser…
> HDR, fluid animations, monstrous resolutions That's the job of the GPU driver, mostly. > 3D everything That's the desktop compositor. Windows 7 already had one and ran on 1 GB of RAM. > accessibility Not everyone needs it, so it should be an optional installable component for those who do. > fancy APIs for easier development allowing for more features That still use win32 under the hood. Again, .net has existed for…
Let’s pause for a bit and dwell on the absurd amount of RAM it takes to run it even after this exercise. Anyone here remember when QNX shipped a demo in 2000 with a kernel, GUI, web browser and an email client on a single 3.5” floppy? The memory footprint was also a few megabytes. I’m not saying we should be staying within some miserly arbitrary constraints, but my goodness something that draws UI and manages process…
> Let’s pause for a bit and dwell on the absurd amount of RAM it takes to run it even after this exercise. I agree and I find the apologists to be completely wrong. I run a modern system: 38" screen, 2 Gbit/s fiber to the home. I'm not "stuck in the past" with a 17" screen or something. The thing flies. It's screaming fast as it should be. But I run a lean Debian Linux system, with a minimal window manager. It's defi…
It really staggers me the lengths some people will go to try and preserve something that is actively against them, when there are alternatives right there. I'm not saying Linux is for everyone, but the kind of people creating and running these scripts really should have no issue daily driving Ubuntu or even Arch. Or if they desperately need photoshop or whatever, get a mac. It's like watching people constantly go bac…
Agreed. My initial response to any post beginning something like "On Windows XP..." "On Windows 7..." "On Debian..." would be like: "Well you already have Windows XP/7/Debian/whatever. If you want to use that, use that. Nobody is forcing you to use Windows 11." For the people who do want to use Windows 11, and who see it for what it is, it's pretty great. For the people who use Windows XP/7 or who stick to some minim…
for the non tech savvy - windows is still a great choice for those wanting to simply game and not learn something new like linux - these are the same folks that do notice a difference in OS being bloating and see ads, while asking for help knowing others know more; which a lot of us do not have the time nor energy to fully support a vast array of friends' systems. these debloated windows are great for those folks, and for me not having to /shurg and have people buy more hdd space for nothing.
was it not linus himself that mentioned that linux as a popular desktop os will not be a thing until manufactures who provide prebuild OS's (and support them) - ship them with linux? but in all honesty i fell that the X vs Wayland needs to be a bit more solidified, similarly with alsa/pulse/pipewire lol ; but those are different issues
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How come people run these Electron apps separately when they run pretty well as tabs/windows in the browser?
Because integration into the desktop is better as an Electron app. Eg sound and video calls, keyboard shortcuts, not having to worry about finding your Discord/Slack/whatever tab
Discord for example is literally just a chrome-less Chrome; the zoom in/out hotkeys in Chrome still work in it.
This is also not mentioning how no Electron program ever visually adheres to the desktop environment it's running in.
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how much backwards compatability do i neee nowadays? my laptop only needs to run a few things: browser vscode steam the microsoft drawing app some office stuff sublime discord which all update pretty regularly. the age of the desktop app has been replaced by the age of the browser and electron based apps. i can imagine businesses who built their own set ups back in the age of the desktop app being stuck with it, but…
What's the use case for needing to run steam but not individual games? Are you using desktop sharing with an ec2 instance or something?
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A lot more than you think: * Steam (the root process, not the subsequent Chromium child processes) is 32-bit, as are a lot of games. * Discord is 32-bit.
How come people run these Electron apps separately when they run pretty well as tabs/windows in the browser?
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Expecting your 8+ year old laptop to run as well as it did when it was new is completely unreasonable. That has never been a reasonable expectation in the history of computing.
I've never expected my computer to run worse over time. There's no real mechanism for that to even happen; it works fine until it fails completely. Recently it's become less possible to run the same software for 10+ years because so many things are subscription only and have unnecessary networking, which makes it necessary to patch security flaws, and then you have to accept whatever downgrade the vendor forces on yo…
File system fragmentation was a very significant problem when most people still used HDDs as their primary mass storage media. SSDs are far less affected by fragmentation because of much faster random access times, but HDDs and thus performance suffered.
The Windows Registry is an arcane secret not even Microsoft fully comprehends at this point, and it can get very messy if a user installs and uninstalls lots of programs frequently. This is, of course, a problem with uninstallers not uninstalling cleanly and not a problem with Windows or the users. With so much crap moving to Chrome online-software-as-a-service outfits, users aren't (un)installing as many programs as frequently anymore, but an unkempt Windows installation can definitely slow down over time.
Software in general also just gets more and more bloated as the moons pass. More bloated software means less efficient use of hardware, meaning less performance and more user grief over time.