If you are happy not surfing most of the Web, any computer is good enough.
It's usually browsers and web pages that brings these older PCs down.
It's usually browsers and web pages that brings these older PCs down.
what wildly multithreaded memory hogs are you running? I love my x230s, and I have dozens and dozens of windows open all the time. probably I benefit a good bit from running ublock Origin and uMatrix, but I have gigabytes of RAM free. I don't think running a newer machine would give me any benefits at all.
(oh and yeah I have no intention of using a newer system, I bought four X230's and an X220 for dirt cheap lol)
What changes when the program closes and restarts other than memory refresh would be the obvious starting point. I like hunting these things down, may take a look!
if I don't do this when i restart, HN tells me it can't serve pages that fast :)
Also, if you dare,
sysctl hw.smt=1
Also, install and enable obsdfreqd and read the docs at /usr/local/share/doc/pkg-readmes/.
As for login.conf, yeah, I already raised those limits (especially to debug firefox with gdb lol), haven't enabled SMT though. Not sure it will help much with pages bogging down the CPU though, considering, waves broadly at the state of the web today >_>
When a chat and video/audio call client take 4GB all by itself...
If people even used a framework like Qt (a really mature and well-maintained desktop framework the favored framework of KDE Plasma, etc.), their memory usage would be so much lower. (I'm not counting the memory used by Qt's shared .so / dynamic library files.)
I find it far easier to believe that Qt and GTK have fallen behind rather than the whole world is under a grand delusion and didn't know Qt exists.
Whether this is "right" or "wrong" is a difficult question to answer.
Many people on HN either don't understand or don't care for trading off runtime performance and other technical qualities for other things like e.g. development speed, DX, easier hiring, etc.
No matter how much we deny it! :D
Electron would be okay for them and their users on account of that.
Most people on HN understand those tradeoff very well but also understand that those tradeoffs are being optimized for the company's profit and not for the good of society overall. Without meaningful competition (and for Discord that would mean interopable clients, not just alternate chat applicaitons with their own servers) the incentive for making more efficient software is ~0.
For colour, I'll add: it was a fairly old application first developed before QML/Qt Quick. It was also a multiplatform desktop application; then and now it's unclear to me as to whether or not Qt Quick is especially suitable for desktop applications.
We'd been in the process of moving chunks of it into an HTML/JS web view for several years - I think when that decision was first made it was well before QtQuick would've been sufficient for desktop usage. Other reasons we were doing it, besides the aforementioned bugs/quirks/limitations were that it's easier (and cheaper) to hire web devs than native devs, and that it allowed for code/infrastructure/design reuse with our web frontend. QML doesn't address either of those issues.
Admittedly, I haven't tried QML in anger, but I also feel like...given the quality of the rest of the framework, which is comparatively mature, it'd be pretty shocking to me if it didn't have its own slew of bugs/quirks/limitations.
Virtually every company and developer opts for simpler development and worse runtimes. Is that "wrong"? I'm not sure how to answer that. You could probably make a case either way.
Not to mention half the users here rally against EVs, public transport, and probably own an F150. The environment only matters when we are talking about a 1w savings with election vs qt.
Both of these would be using less power with more efficient software.
But no, lets excuse shitty practices that could save a lot (over the entire userbase) for relatively little effort because it doesn't solve everything.
That, imo, is totally unacceptable (also, financially not optimal).
I've had people tell me that the "developer productivity gains" of using Python totally justifies the circa 10 X electricity usage + 10 X hosting/cloud costs. (Yes, developers cost a lot, but the hypothesis that Python/other slow languages result in so much higher developer productivity is a questionable assertion -- especially, in contrast to languages like Kotlin, Go, etc.)
At least with backend software there is a financial incentive for efficient software. For client software there is no incentive unless there is actual competition, of which there is often effectively none as in the user cannot choose better software because interopability is not a thing.
Would it be surprising to find that they were? It's not like developers have a lot of credibility.
I use an old 2008 iMac running Linux frequently and it runs remarkably well. Firefox and MS Edge are certainly the apps that bring it down from a memory perspective ( it only has 6 Gigs ). Electron apps like MS Teams are right up there though and make it chug even more than the browsers do.
To be fair, I have dozens of tabs open including beasts like GMail but I certainly have to restart the browsers from time to time.
Compiling huge C++ code bases is a memory nightmare as well.
I started with C++, did that for about 5 years, then got sucked into web where I've been for about 20 years. In a funny turn of events, my company has adopted C++ and now I'm writing C++ again. I don't hate it, but 15 minutes to compile/boot a server or 5 minutes to run some tests is kind of unpleasant. And the occasionally UB bug or dangling pointer. It's just really outdated. Enough so that I don't want to relearn how to build a GUI in C++. I'll wait a few more years for Zig or Carbon to mature.
Yes, but things they're counting as "best" include considerations other than performance and resource usage. Not that they're wrong in doing so -- everything's a tradeoff, after all, and engineering is mostly about selecting tradeoffs.
But as a user, Electron apps tend to be pretty bad, and so from my point of view, Electron is as well. I tend to avoid them as a result. But my point of view as a user is very narrow.
Use ccache and clang. Also, with Linux you can set ZRAM and convert these 6GB in something like 9-10GB.
But then I'd be reaching way less people than with the web. My web apps can be tried without installing anything, work on mobile and tablets and on any desktop (except may be cool weirdos using iMac g4s).
The web allows me to reach more people; if I'm working on apps that help make the world a better place (or so I think), that feels more important than the RAM they use (even though using more RAM might be driving more e-waste, thus also making the world a bit worse on that count.)
Not unless the company is penny-pinching when it comes to developer PCs.
That said, the cost really is extreme. So much so that there is an ongoing effort to remove Qt from our products entirely. There is general agreement among the devs that the cost is not justified by the benefits, and nobody can remember why it was chosen in the first place.
All that said, I like Qt. It's quite capable and you can produce decent, portable UIs with it. But I agree it's too expensive to justify.
Looking at the rest of the comments I see that Qt core is free, but the rest of it isn't.
While the "web everything" trend is definitely responsible for a lot of the bloat, it is upon closer inspection not the whole story. For example, I remember various "AJAX chat" clients were quite popular around the turn of the century, worked in a browser like IE5 on a system with probably 64-128MB of RAM and a single core Pentium II/III, and you could also do other things like listen to music, play flash games, or read other sites at the same time. Those clients loaded relatively quickly over connections with bandwidth measured in KBps, and I don't recall much in the way of complaints about their resource usage.
I still use it though, and the graphical client running on my system (which is also an RSS reader) uses 23 MB of RAM at the moment, displaying 1375 messages.
The Web stack probably isn’t what you’d come up with if you were starting from scratch. But are C, x86, or a lot of other standards we are living with? It seems like the ultimate demonstration of “worse is better:” people had the option of sitting around waiting for some nicely-designed, clean option that was cross-platform across all desktop devices and mobile devices, or they could piggyback on the Web. And with all the investment that’s gone into it as a result of that popularity, it is now fairly good anyway.
By "only adequate" I mean full-of and/or based-on bad design patterns and techniques: eg. usual for active areas (buttons) to be not distinct from other areas; normal for pages to be based-on inefficient/heavy-weight toolkits (base gmail page is 10MB of download)...
10MB might be a lot relative to what's going on (hard to think of many comparable applications that are as old as Gmail to me) but it's still a blip for most people's connections and certainly less trouble than using an installer.
Better yet, are there any ways to *not even load the other junk*, just load the text only for the reader mode.
As far as I understand, Firefox still loads everything, does the parsing for everything, loads all those ads etc (and no, uBO does not get all of them), and then - *if you click the reader button in the URL box* - it will switch to reader mode. Seems quite backwards to the point of not really a workable solution for the automation junkie programmers of HN.
Would be nice to have a solution with better defaults to give reader mode automatically, default use uMatrix (much better than noscript btw) for control native to the browser, etc for a more snappy and controllable (with paths to private and secure) browsing experience. Having a tui would be icing on the cake.
Lynx just works though, and sidesteps all the js junk.
You can use uMatrix to default block all stylesheets and JS. Then apply your own user stylesheet.
It's not about hating new things. It's about things making tradeoffs that don't make sense to some.
Context: I was on a 3kbps connection and basically everything was unusable, so I ran a textmode browser on a VPS over Mosh.
Also, gopher sites thru gopher://hngopher.com and gopher://magical.fish.
I could even play some streaming radio with OPUS @16KBPS from http://dir.xiph.org once I set mplayer to cache the 90% of the stream.
Some way to tell the server to render text-only, gopher, or gemtext (from gemini protocol)?
The web has gotten exponentially more useful. The fact that my computer needs to be trivially more modern to use it seems like a completely reasonable trade-off.
You couldn't buy a fully functioning computer for $35 in 2023 dollars back before the web "went astray." That wouldn't even buy you a modem!