nice, now open a web browser and any modern website /s
It should run very quickly given that there are few things competing with it for resources like CPU cache space.
It's like "your car is going to get dirty why even wash it?"
200 MB RAM FreeBSD desktop
81–90 of 223 posts
Re: 200 MB RAM FreeBSD desktop
#82I remember booting up Debian into an X11 session on a laptop with only 8 MB of RAM. (This would have been circa 2000, and I think I had to try a few different distros before finding one that worked. Also I don't think I did anything with it beyond Xterm and Xeyes.)
Ran linux in an 8 mb 486 in the 90s. X ran in 256 color mode and twm or mwm were the window managers. It was so hard to use though. Had to setup modelines settings for your monitor in a textfile and theoretically could damage it with wrong iputs. Programming X fuggedabout it - I was from turbo borland msdos land where everything was neatly documented and designed with clear examples to make programming easy. I was lucky to get an x program to even compile. Hard to find books back then. Pre Amazon. Xv image viewer probably the only thing i used X for. Actually used the machine most of the time in the text mode terminals using alt function keys and used lynx as a browser (before javascript… but gopher was becoming obsolete at that point… ftp still popular though ) with random assortment of svgalib programs for any graphical stuff. Still there was something magical about seeing that black and white check pattern come up and the little X mouse cursor appear.. like there were… possibilities.
Re: 200 MB RAM FreeBSD desktop
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Coyuld anyone summarize why a desktop Windows/MacOs now needs so much more RAM than in the past Just a single retina screen buffer, assuming something like 2500 by 2500 pixels, 4 byte per pixel is already 25MB for a single buffer. Then you want double buffering, but also a per-window buffer since you don't want to force rewrites 60x per second and we want to drag windows around while showing contents not a wirefram…
You don't need to do all of this, though. You could just do arbitrary rendering using GPU compute, and only store a highly-compressed representation on the CPU.
Yes, but then the GPU needs that amount of ram, so it's fairer to look at the sum of RAM + VRAM requirements. With compressed representations you trade CPU cycles for RAM. To save laptop battery better required copious amounts of RAM (since it's cheap).
Re: 200 MB RAM FreeBSD desktop
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
seriously, what's with people's love of this guy? besides politics, I have not seen anything that suggests engineering prowess from this guy, only "rust bad".
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 good will and cohesion that used to exist within the open source software community.
This used to be about making free software to people so that they weren't abused by corporations. Now it's about pushing agendas and creating exclusion criteria. There's only one group in this scenario that benefits from this outcome.
If you don't like Lunduke then you should recognize the factors that give rise to people like him. Unless your solution is to completely eliminate anyone who disagrees with you then your apparent mindset only furthers the problem.
I wish we could put all this aside and just enjoy open source again.
Re: 200 MB RAM FreeBSD desktop
#85Re: 200 MB RAM FreeBSD desktop
#86Earlier 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…
Which is baffling as to why they chose it - I remember there being memory leaks because GObject uses a reference counted model - cycles from GObject to JS then back were impossible to collect.
They did hack around this with heuristics, but they never did solve the issue.
They should've stuck with a reference counted scripting language like Lua, which has strong support for embedding.
Re: 200 MB RAM FreeBSD desktop
#87[flagged]
For us not in the know, why is this bad?
Even ignoring all the politics and crazy stuff from the "maintainer"; most of their contributions were just shuffling code around and causing a lot of breakage. The typical "but this looks nicer so its better" type of programmer, not the type of code I'd rely on personally.
Re: 200 MB RAM FreeBSD desktop
#88It used to be like that, computer had limited resources and desktop environments were light. Then at some point RAM became less and less of an issue, and everything started to get bigger and less efficient. Coyuld anyone summarize why a desktop Windows/MacOs now needs so much more RAM than in the past? is it the UI animations, color themes, shades etc etc or is it the underlying operating system that has more and mor…
> Coyuld anyone summarize why a desktop Windows/MacOs now needs so much more RAM than in the past Just a single retina screen buffer, assuming something like 2500 by 2500 pixels, 4 byte per pixel is already 25MB for a single buffer. Then you want double buffering, but also a per-window buffer since you don't want to force rewrites 60x per second and we want to drag windows around while showing contents not a wirefram…
Per window double buffering is actively harmful - as it means you're triple buffering, as the render goes window buffer->composite buffer->screen, and that's with perfect timing, and even this kind of latency is actively unpleasant when typing or moving the mouse.
If you get the timing right, there should be no need for double-buffering individual windows.
Re: 200 MB RAM FreeBSD desktop
#89A 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 worth doing anything with.
I got OpenSolaris booted on a Pentium II box that had 384mb of RAM then ran Openbox and a communications suite of SILC, IRC, Pidgin, Finch (a text frontend to libpurple), and some XMPP+OTR clients -- all in Solaris Zones to not get my shit wrecked by the same RCE exploits I was using against other Pidgin users (which seemed to be as numerous as exploits for the official AIM client). This was before Facebook.
Solaris Zones gave me that feeling of power over software that Qubes enthusiasts like to talk about, similar dopamine+endorphin flow to being a military dictator of a 3rd world country. Shit was so cash.
Thanks to Unix' elegance, I still had a life until moved enough herb to assemble another box I could run Counter Strike: Source (on FreeBSD, Cedega for the win) on.