Bloat

Posted Aug 6, 2007 20:49 UTC (Mon) by happycube (guest, #42855) [Link]

The real problem is with older hardware - it's impossible to get more than 512MB in an i815-based P3, for instance.

Posted Aug 9, 2007 2:28 UTC (Thu) by jmorris42 (subscriber, #2203) [Link]

I really hate this notion that a three year old computer should be tossed in the trash as so obsolete there is no use it can be put to. Linux used to be a good way to get good use out of older hardware. Not anymore. Now you need hardware equal to, and prior to Vista shipping greater than, the minimum Windows baseline.

And just throwing hardware at the problem doesn't make it go away. Having 2GB of RAM will make it livable but hard drives aren't getting all that much faster. Paging in enough of OO.o and all the libraries it needs to get to mapping the initial window means looking at a throbber almost as long on a hot new monster PC as it does on an older one. Same for all the disc thrashing involved in logon as multi-megabyte blobs of libraries and executables are mapped in to provide what should be small crap like battery indicators and CPU speed monitor widgets in menu bar.

Having more resources is no excuse for sloppy and wasteful practices. And if we want our stuff to be an option for the coming world of smart phones, flash based laptops (without swap) and the embedded world we need to be thinking about getting our act together now.