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Comment by robotresearcher | Hacker News Reader

I’m inspired by the message.

On this software itself: I’d like to know how this feels to use. It’s so very lightweight. Does it feel categorically different to what we are used to?

One of the things I miss about the 1980s home computers is that they booted into a usable command line in a handful of seconds, from a few KB in ROM. Imagine what today’s HW could do if we’d retained that level of efficiency.

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we are there now. depending on boot loader/os combination, one can get to the sub 1-5 sec range, if its cli-only.

Clearly havent seen what enterprise hardware is like these days... sure, the OS takes 5 seconds.. but the hardware can take 10 minutes in some cases now glares at hpe gen11 systems. Its seriously bad now. The amount of power and time backround hardware level tasks now take has significantly increased over the last 10 years. Even the ancient dell r710 i have sititng in a closet collecting dust boots faster than todays hp gen11's.

We waste a ton of energy on ineffeciencies in hardware and software today all because we managed to "just go faster".

It feels very different. It's all damn instant. Me happy.

That’s wonderful! I’ve made ultra-lightweight web apps of my own to replace bloated, slow, and poor UIs. It’s a night and day difference when the dependencies are few-to-none. And that’s on a fat browser stack. Your ASM desktop must zip!

Related tangent: https://smolmachines provides microvms with cold-start bootup times around 200ms, and a "pack" utility and format to create self-contained binaries. No affiliation, but I just discovered it a few days ago, sharing bc I find it kind of exciting.

How often do you hit against bugs that stop you from being able to do something and then you have to stop what you're doing and go fix the bug?

For me, I've used i3-wm exclusively for 4 years now, and it has always felt instant. I struggle to believe that getting whatever incremental performance at the cost of increased bugs is worth bothering about it.

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