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Comment by D13Fd | Hacker News Reader

This is fascinating to me. 4GB of memory is not enough, on an OS "optimized for low memory devices"? What crazy world do we live in?

I remember browsing the web with 64 mb of RAM, upgraded from 16 MB, and a 100 MHz CPU.

I'm not saying you're wrong in any sense. I'm just marveling at the state of memory use in computing.

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As someone who lived through "64K should be plenty" and often used computers with little more than 4K RAM, I absolutely agree. This is one of the major "bloatware" features of modern computers which could extend Moore's Law a decade or more with mere software changes.

you may like what Niklaus Wirth argued 1995 https://people.inf.ethz.ch/wirth/Articles/LeanSoftware.pdf

a Pi would probably zoom through browsing HTML 2.0 websites made in 1995 without much memory fuss, even in a modern browser. there just aren't many such websites

And then some.

I shipped a system two years ago that consisted of a handful of Pi4's running Chromium in kiosk mode, each pointing at a different page that was being served by an Intel NUC running .NET Core Razor pages on the local network.

And one of those pages was playing 2-6 video loops! Smooth experience without a hiccup. I mean, I expected it to work just fine, but I was still impressed.

HN is a refreshing exception

As a web developer, this is one reason I enjoy working with microcontrollers in my spare time. There's something immensely satisfying in writing software that does something useful on a chip with 80 KB of RAM.

One of the problems with hardware constantly better is we are increasingly becoming modes tolerant of poorly optimized code. Fact: all second hand devices like cheap tablets, windows xp computers and what not work great until you connect them to the internet. I’m still waiting to be able to run complete hardware virtualization from an ARM processor so I can turn my phone into a hypervisor

My Linux machine boots X with less than 300 MB (no desktop, StumpWM, SystemD and PulseAudio on NixOS). It's probably possible to compress it further.

The problem might come from heavy webapps, but its doable to work with just 2 GB and 4 GB never posed a problem.

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