> The desktop and its applications were snappy even in a virtual machine configured with only 2GB of RAM and two vCPUs.
It's a sad state of affairs that not all desktops can say that.
It's a sad state of affairs that not all desktops can say that.
Software developers usually get or are given the shiniest, fastest hardware, but that's probably backwards. We should get old, underpowered stuff (and be required to use it by law) and be forced to make do.
That pain would force the optimizations, and those would benefit society 1000x over the cost of our annoyance.
Why not both, a fast and a slow one? In Hollywood film making, the colorist uses a $40k professional mastering monitor to make sure the work is accurate, and also a $100 Walmart TV in parallel to make sure the movie will still look good in your average home and not just on the studio monitors.
Same should be in SW dev: Develop on fast HW but test on slow HW.
People are busy with work, life, etc, and life is too short, and sometimes going the quick and convenient way of having a system that can run Chrome/FF and Youtube/reddit out of the box, saves you time that you can spend with your loved ones or doing hobbies you like outdoors, instead spending hours/days faffing around learning and fiddling with niche obscure SW, just to feel triumphant that you found workarounds to running modern bloated SW on ancient obsolete HW people throw in the trash.
Not promoting wastefulness here, but sometimes there are points of diminishing returns, even for techies on a budget. I just try to see if LinuxLite or Lubuntu can save the system. If it's too slow even for those then it goes in the trash, I'm not wasting time with obscure linux tools I'm not familiar with just to potentially save some worthless e-waste that's not even a museum piece. I know there's some tinkerers out there who can get to run youtube on a Pentium 3 for shits and giggles, but that's where I'd keep it, at tinkering/entertainment, since I'm not a masochist to actually recommend people daily drive such a thing or do that myself, just to prove a point against obsolescence.
For example I tried to donate and find a new home online for my old Core2Quad PC from 2007 with 6GB of ram and 1TB mechanical HDD, and nobody would take it off my hands saying it's far too outdated to be usable today despite that not being true with some lightweight Linux on it, but people aren't looking to run and learn some new unfamiliar OS, they want Windows and Chrome and all that shit they're familiar with and would rather spend money to get something they see as usable instead of taking for free something they see as unusable. So I threw it in the trash.
Then, using an external player for Youtube isn't rocket science. Several people do that with Newpipe for instance.
On Chromium/FFox, yes, it can be done, 1GB it's the lower limit if you set up ZRAM and add some flags to the desktop shortcut. OFC, Ublock Origin it's a must.
UBo, LXDE and Ungoogled Chromium with some custom flags (I can set an /etc/profile.d/chromium.sh guide with ease for any user) can make a Core Duo or Celeron notebook usable with just 2GB of RAM as today that machine can be handled as the new 'low end', kinda like a Pentium IV with SSE2 in 2008-2010.
1GB of ZRAM would be usable enough with ZRAM and just keeping two or three tabs open, something not unusual for the typical user. Even for a researcher. Also, both Chromium and Firefox have automatic tab suspending options, so in the end the CPU usage can be much lower and the RAM one would just be paged (and most JS bytecode or JIT will be GC'ed in the spot for sure, as there's no point on keeping objects for suspended tabs).
Who's this "WE"? Not me I think.
And "back in the day" computers were very expensive warranting the time investment into keeping them going, while now they're disposable commodities. Is it worth it to most (western) people who's labor costs are around 20$-80$/hour to spend hours/days figuring out Linux and several quirky tools and hacks that even tech workers never heard of, just to get a PC working that people wouldn't even take for free? Answer this.
Why not spend all that time in more meaningful endeavors instead of keeping alive a piece of junk. It's cool if that's your hobby, but for most people it isn't.
Everyone did; any experienced user had to seek lighter alternatives at some point.
>Why not spend
Tell that to a musician I know which uses a netbook and it can use Mastodon thru https://brutaldon.org under his old laptop he uses for music production, where audio software works but modern JS crawls it's machine lot.
Ha! No. For some users, their PC is just a tool, a white good, like their washing machine or their car. Do you think every car owner also knows how to change oil, brake pads or fix fender benders? No, they pay a profesional service to take care of it and once they see it doesn't run like they want it to, if they have the money they sell it off or take it to the junkyard and buy a new one, not keep it going forever through endless fixes and tinkering.
If a new washing machine is $200 do you spend $70/hour on a handyman to fix your broken one? Same with computers.
>Tell that to a musician I know
Exceptions that prove the rule. Without any context and what exactly a "old and slow" laptop means and what a person's income is we can talk here all day, as that skews from person to person.
If someone is broke AF then it's normal they'll keep their HW going for as long as possible if and less $20/month means skipping on food. But if someone makes a healthy income, they'll chuck the 6 year old laptop in the trash/ebay once it starts to be too slow for their standards and get a new one, instead of spending precious time learning about installing Linux and alternative foss apps, when they'd rather spend their precious time tinkering with their Harley or going to the beach and spend $1000 on a new laptop that works the way they like it out of the box.
CWM and GNUinos makes it possible.
People today expect to use every modern website be it Youtube or the shitty ones like Reddit without hickups, listen to Spotify, etc.
Typing HTML comments from a 20 year old terminal-like device is a nice flex today, but not a useable daily driver for most real world users.
https://opensourced.me/#desktop-audit-and-benchmark-comparis...