I am amazed to discover that Xfce of that era was so CDEsque: https://www.linux.co.cr/desktops/review/2000/xfce-3.3/help.h...

That would have been then already some kind of anachronism. 8MiB RAM was workable (but only barely so with X11) in the early nineties. Late nineties 64MiB or more were common.

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.

Me too, but I was able to do it around 1995-1996 :) Also remember Windows95 can boot with 4MB of RAM, and was decent with 12MB.

I doesn’t feel like that long ago when I built a swarm of Arch Linux based thin clients which PXE booted from a SLES DHCP & NFS host.

That was probably around 2010 or 2015.

Those images had to run on a thin client with 512 MB RAM.

I think I chose XFCE as the DE.

I don’t know how resolution maps to ram in x11 but I assume at least one byte per pixel. Based on that assumption, there’s no chance you’d even be able to power a 4k monitor with 8mb of ram, let alone the rest of the system.

> 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 wireframe. As you can see just that adds up quickly. And that's just the draw buffers. Not mentioning all the different fonts that are simultaneously used, images that are shown, etc.

(Of course, screen bufferes are typically stored in VRAM once drawn. But you need to drawn first, which is at least in part on the CPU)

I am wondering if, with memory and storage prices skyrocketing, there will be more effort on making computing use less resources?

> 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 all available hardware resources."

    "Software gets slower faster than hardware gets faster"

Sometimes there are short periods where the hardware pulls a little bit ahead for a few short years of bliss (for instance the ARM Macs), but the software quickly catches up and soon everything feels as slow as always (or worse).

That also means that the easiest way to a slick computing experience is to run old software on new hardware ;)

Can your "one issue" be tweaked by adding more RAM and allocating it thusly?

I'm using Void with 24gb ddr5 and frequently get system freezes during high productivity. Browser tabs in the background are often contributors, but working with openshot or odb crashes often.

I have several old nuc's and I might try tinycore on one. What do you or most others use it for, primarily?

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.

Odd little rant suddenly appears in the middle of it :D

Here is how I set up minimal Desktop, WATCH 4 VIDEOS ABOUT HOW DEI IS KILLING OPEN SOURCE PROJECTS, and here is my loader.conf ...

Why should I care though?

Indeed. Xenocara would be a better bet. But the more these people have to collaborate with different people, the more empathy they will need.

https://git.sr.ht/~rabbits/fashware

About Nemo (Fran J. Ballesteros from plan9/9front) he has half as encuse as he grew up (for sure) under the Francoist regime probably from the loaded family side, and, thus, he had to swallow tons of literal extreme right wing ideology even at school (Franco's regime). But the point on being a conspiranoid about the Covid... I would expect more sanity from the mindset from a guy perfectly abled in algoritmics, math and by proxy, science. Echo chambers create these kinds of idiots even on really smart people (the far right in Spain used cult like mechanics too), and I'm sure Fran changed a bit over time for the better.

On the Cosmopolitan/APE person, I remind you that if you want to get back to Reissanance times, I'm a Spaniard, and thus, your whole ideology pales against the Iberian Humanism from the School of Salamanca, where at the time we were the Enlightened ones and you were just a bunch of WASP uneducated hicks living in filthy villages in the middle of Europe.

Back to 9intro, even if you dislike ~nemo, 9intro it's still worth to learn programming on 9front, it's a great book to share and learn from. If would be a waste to ditch it just because some old fart doesn't get into the times.

EDIT: ok, now I see ~nemo it's not that old, so a plausible indoctrination from the Francoism wouldn't apply there; but I'm pretty sure being a conspiranoid on Covid doesn't look like the normal socialization out there.

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".

For us not in the know, why is this bad?

Is he ""bigoted"" ? :(

it gets better every day

For us not in the know, why is this bad?