Comment by MrEldritch | Hacker News Reader

Comment by MrEldritch | Hacker News Reader

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(All that being said, I'm also fairly salty about having 8 GB of RAM and a mechanical hard drive rendering my computer incredibly painful to use as technology has marched on. Discord - which I use almost exclusively as an IRC chatroom with persistent while-you-were-gone chat history, embedded media, and fun custom emotes - is an entire Electron app that eats over 100 MB minimum; Firefox is eating 750 MB just keeping this single tab open while I type this. Even with no other applications but those open, Windows 10 and assorted background processes already push me to 5.7 GB allocated. Various Windows background processes will randomly decide they'd like to peg my disk usage to 100% for ten to fifteen minutes at a time, which I imagine is because spinning rust disks are considered deprecated.

I saw a discussion on HN a few months back about a survey of computer hardware, and one dev in the comments was shocked - shocked! - to find out that the typical user didn't have 16 GB and a 4k screen. That definitely rustled my jimmies a bit.)

> I saw a discussion on HN a few months back about a survey of computer hardware, and one dev in the comments was shocked - shocked! - to find out that the typical user didn't have 16 GB and a 4k screen. That definitely rustled my jimmies a bit.)

This is extremely common in dev circles, it's an area where we're completely detached from average users. Just to make the point, here is the mozilla hardware survey that shows >50% of users having 4GB or less: https://hardware.metrics.mozilla.com/ .

If we look at the more technical users on steam (https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey) then only ~15% of users have 4GB or less, along with 40% having 8GB.

There's a good reason macbooks top out at 16GB.

Oh, I recognize that Mozilla survey as actually the specific one that user was talking about! Let me see if I can track down the actual comment thread; it's probably less ridiculous than I actually remember it being.

Ah, found it. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16735354

I'm really surprised at the reaction to the resolution. I like 1080p for movies on my (too) big TV but for coding I was more than satisfied once we got to 1024x768 and haven't thought of it since. My home coding machine is a cheap dell at 1366x768 and I've always been happy with it.

I agree with everything you said. I just have a somewhat different experience with Firefox on Windows 10:

>Firefox is eating 750 MB just keeping this single tab open while I type this.

I have 127 tabs open on Firefox Quantum 61.0.1 (64 bit). It uses ~ 1100 MB spread among 7 processes. I have 6 addons enabled (Decentraleyes, Firefox pioneer, I don't care about cookies, Tab counter, Tree style tab and uMatrix).

Why do you hate spinning disks so much? And no they are not considered "deprecated", they're really the only way to affordably store large volumes of data. It's an old, venerable, and still-very-useful tech

I'm also on a system with 8Gb of ram at the moment. Firefox is using up a hilarious 4.6Gb keeping a few dozen web pages open, but the entire rest of my Linux system, including Inkscape, qCAD, and SketchUp under Wine are using only a combined 907 megabytes. So it's possible part of your problem is just Windows 10.

My i3wm environment doesn't randomly start anything I don't ask it to start and runs very comfortably with 8gb of ram heck it would run fine with 4gb and no swap. Maybe you are running the wrong os.

While it would seem convenient to simply switch operating systems from the popular, widespread options to...whatever i3wm is, practically speaking that is seldom possible.

I3wm is a window manager you can run on any Linux distribution

Can you run recent versions of Photoshop? How about Premiere, or Final Cut?

SolidWorks? CATIA? Matlab?

I find that the best way to do this is to just VNC to a windows or Mac dedicated slave computer to do graphic arts work. VNC is so good nowadays that I can use my QHD phone screen as a second monitor for all my Adobe apps- and the lag nowadays is almost non-existent thanks to super fast wifi.

FreeRDP for connecting to Windows is a good option too.

Should say that KRDC is a good RD connection manager, but it's KDE only unless you wanna install a third of it.

Matlab works on linux.

Premier or Final cut don't but DaVinci Resolve and Lightworks do.

Obviously if your workflow and thus your livelihood depends on a particular tool you should run a platform that runs it but I would question why someone with money would pick windows over mac.

Those are commercial apps for people with real money. OTOH, there are a number of unbeatable free apps that don't have linux ports. Fusion360 comes to mind, its not solidworks level , but its light years ahead of freecad.

Funny thing is I use my i3wm environment on 16gb of RAM and a 4k screen. I'm actually migrating to rat poison because it's so incredibly simple and basic that it has been making me drool. I mean, look at the source code. It doesn't get much simpler than that for a tiled WM.

If you are interested in rat poison, you may also enjoy xmonad. I've used both and much preferred xmonad

Load the entire GHC garbage collected runtime just for my window manager? Isn't this the same philosophy that causes people to use Electron? And that results in unnecessarily large memory footprints and runtime performance penalties?

Xmonad is rock solid, lightening fast, and perfect for many who prefer to minimize their reliance on a mouse

A tiling window manager won't save you when dealing with Electron apps.

I run Linux and StumpWM on my desktop, and recently I had upgrade to 12GB of RAM, because it turns out 8GB is very easy to exhaust these days. I currently have 9.3GB tied up, mostly by browser processes.

Yeah, this. I'm mostly using swaywm instead of Gnome in order to free up about 1 extra gigabyte of RAM for apps, but that equals about one Electron app. The only Electron app I haven't eliminated from my daily usage, though is Patchwork, so it's not so bad.

Oh, no, I'm aware these are very much Win10 specific problems and I look at Linux people with a not insignificant degree of envy. Unfortunately, I do quite like PC gaming.

Modern gnome is a pig, some of this could be tracked back to gnome-shell's use of javascript and css styling if you were so inclined. Most linux users don't really notice it due to the fact that most x86 machines are crazy fast.

OTOH, try starting a modern full blown distro on something like an rpi instead of raspian and you will quickly discover that you _NEED_ more than 4G of ram and a lot of CPU just to start firefox. Its even worse if you don't have hardware GL acceleration.

OTOH, the lightweight desktops (lxqt, lxdt, xfce) really are..

Tiling wm does not an OS make.

I don't think esoteric linuxes are really necessary--I'm running vanilla Ubuntu 16.04 with 16GB RAM and top three processes are only Crashplan (~800MB), Dropbox (~460) and Chrome (327 resident, 1380 shared, per htop, with 6 tabs running). My total usage at the moment is 4.04GB out of 15.4 available, again per htop. Some of the other numbers in this thread are baffling to me.

But I don't run any Electron apps, so there's that.

But, yeah, I guess I wouldn't be able to run this same workload with 4GB RAM. That's what lubuntu is for.

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