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Comment by rektide | Hacker News Reader

Doesn't seem like a real problem. Why are we grumbling about this? No one is making rxvt less an option. Why the fear? Why the negativity?

Does start-up time matter? Who cares? (I have three terminals that have been open for almost a year.) Are we concerned about only first start, or primarily the faster second starts once all the dynamic libraries have loaded? Does anything actually require an i5? Whats wrong with requiring a GPU?

Doesnt it get tiring, being so grumbly about other people having fun & doing cool things? Do you really think we should do as you say & just freeze time, insist on doing nothing?

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I care. I care about start up time. I care because I just had a black out, and that requires booting, I care because I mess with my system and I have to reboot sometimes. I care because I expect software to improve, not get worse. I care about engineering because bad engineering ultimately wastes my time and everyone elses. Everyone can have fun and nobody should prohibit others from doing so. but valid criticism is valid criticism, even though I hate it.

With that said, the counter argument should've been that although powershell does start up slow, (and many other things) it is better than bash in many cases and more performant.

> I care because I just had a black out, and that requires booting, I care because I mess with my system and I have to reboot sometimes.

I have a very hard time believing you are talking about 5 minutes or more per year of wait time. Even two minutes feels suspect.

Personally, kitty or Alacritty or gnome-terminal or terminator or any other graphical terminal I've tried... they are slower to start but it's under 2s, and faster on second load (let's say 1s). It's hard for me to imagine the amount of agony & bitterness, the "I am being deprived of valuable time" for something that costs let's generously say 10 instances of 2s a month, not even a full minute.

And no one is forcing you to switch off what you have. No one is forcing you to stop using serial console or whatever else.

People need to dial down their outrage. This is a huge social problem online. People are vastly overconcerned. Ya'll are not being reasonable. You are being absolutist & maximalists about very particular narrow concerns.

> I care because I expect software to improve, not get worse.

You have an exceedingly narrow & particular view of progress. And it's conservative in that it recognizes & permits no other forms of growth or advancement. You have a high concern that trumps all other concerns & nothing but your own particular view matters.

I'm guessing you simple don't live in the CLI, i.e. where you're constantly opening new e.g. tmux windows.

Shell startup time _absolutely_ matters.

E.g. slow startup interrupts flow for one thing.

> I have a very hard time believing you are talking about 5 minutes or more per year of wait time. Even two minutes feels suspect.

Well, the device I was whining about was a pi4 booting from a usb3 hdd (So yes, it will not be instantaneous! because its not an ssd), not an i20 ssd 100 cores device. And I'm not outraged, I looked at it, saw it was a hog and moved on (because again, I care about that stuff). Though, I am slightly outraged at you putting words in my mouth and making a caricature of my self, you don't know me, I don't have an "exceedingly narrow & particular view of progress", I simply know that a device has limited resources, software uses those resources. Allowing software to get less performant, means the system will get less snappy, and that I do hate (mostly because it automatically alerts me of viruses(still have that paranoia) or a runaway process hogging the CPU).

> Whats wrong with requiring a GPU?

I'm glad that you never encountered this before and I sincerely wish you never will: getting on call 3am in the morning due to server outage and you couldn't diagnose remotely. You rushed to the server room, which was only 50F btw, connected to the machine and brought up a rescue shell. Oh, did I tell you that none of them has integrated GPU?

See, it's not about the time you sit in front of your M1 MacBook and have a nice cup of tea -- it's about the situation where everything goes south and your tools and infrastructures can still have your back

That's a weird strawman. Nobody aims to take away your standard framebuffer / textmode terminal. It's there for a reason and I don't think this post cares at all about that use case. (Also, you should really invest in iLO or your vendor's equivalent - it pays for itself if you do trips like that)

> Does start-up time matter? Who cares?

Yes, me

> being so grumbly about other people having fun & doing cool things

The downstream effect of people "doing cool things" (making insanely bloated crap) is that we often have to use it.

I don't understand this attitude that every claim and endeavor is immune from criticism as long as you can frame it as someone "having fun" (I'm sure these corporate software projects are super duper fun) or being experimental.

> Does start-up time matter?

Yes.

> Who cares?

Me, and my colleagues.

> I have three terminals that have been open for almost a year.

I have 10s of them open at times. Close and re-open at least a dozen ones every day, because what I do requires that.

> Does anything actually require an i5?

Yes "modern" terminals really require some heavy lifting, because "smooth scrolling!"

> Whats wrong with requiring a GPU?

A lot. Showing text shouldn't need gaming level hardware. Then people moan about their battery life.

> Doesnt it get tiring, being so grumbly about other people having fun & doing cool things?

Haha no. Because they do the cool things, and they backtrack and return to roots as they move down the path. Watching this is delightful.

> Do you really think we should do as you say & just freeze time, insist on doing nothing?

Why not try to increase efficiency and try to do cool things without sucking the living light out of our systems, E17 style?

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