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Bloat and the hidden costsBloat and the hidden costsPosted Jan 26, 2012 5:37 UTC (Thu) by jmorris42 (subscriber, #2203)Parent article: An LCA 2012 summary
One not so obvious cost of bloat is that Linux isn't any more usable on last years hardware than the commercial competition. Run a thought experiment.
Imagine that Linux, from the kernel to the desktop had made size and performance important, such that it could run a modern looking desktop in half the ram and at half the CPU usage. A couple of years ago there was a brief moment when Linux was actually shipping on netbooks. Imagine that this smaller and faster Linux had shipped on those machines and that, since a key design goal of the original netbook was low cost, the products were down scaled to match. Say 500Mhz and 256MB ram. Now imagine trying to shoehorn Windows XP on those, even if Microsoft was essentially giving it away.
Now imagine resource usage low enough that the netbook revolution could have been launched a couple of years before ASUS partnered with Intel but on REALLY low spec units on the scale of the WinCE mini laptops of that era.
Can anyone fault Google for dumping all of the GNU/X userspace for android and just keeping the Linux kernel? The first Google phone had 128MB of ram (after DSP/GPU overhead), imagine them trying to showhorn gtk, alsa, a few *kits in that... oh wait, Maemo did it so we don't have to imagine. Just picture a phone as slow as an N770. That would have been a iPhone killer fer sure!
Again, imagine we had cared about performance before the mad rush to own phones and tablets. We would now own that space. But developers write for developers hardware.
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Bloat and the hidden costs Posted Jan 26, 2012 9:11 UTC (Thu) by fuhchee (subscriber, #40059) [Link]
Good point. But what now? What FOSS projects are trying to shrink resource consumption - other than a certain web browser to go from absurd to merely ridiculous?
Bloat and the hidden costs Posted Jan 26, 2012 11:30 UTC (Thu) by njwhite (subscriber, #51848) [Link]
http://suckless.org/ is one such project, and there are others scattered around (mupdf, for example). Their idea of 'usability' is rather a long way from say Gnome's, which is great for experts, but doesn't address issues such as low resource computing for all. Oh, and a nice light alternative to glibc is musl http://www.etalabs.net/musl/
Bloat and the hidden costs Posted Jan 30, 2012 20:52 UTC (Mon) by BenHutchings (subscriber, #37955) [Link] Say 500Mhz and 256MB ram. Now imagine trying to shoehorn Windows XP on those, even if Microsoft was essentially giving it away. You do realise that Windows XP was released in 2001, right? That was a very good system spec for that time, and it is more than adequate to run XP. Your point that the Linux desktop is bloated is even more valid than you think!
Bloat and the hidden costs Posted Jan 31, 2012 9:22 UTC (Tue) by Fowl (subscriber, #65667) [Link]
Just a minor nit; while a system like that may be adequate to run XP "gold", add in SP3 then combine with some modern apps (or modern web sites even in IE6) and it's painful.
If you're not savy enough to run without anti-virus, you may as well give up.
Bloat and the hidden costs Posted Jan 31, 2012 18:14 UTC (Tue) by Jonno (subscriber, #49613) [Link]
While that meets the official "System Requirements" for Windows XP, it will not do if you wanted to use the OS to launch anything more demanding than notepad.exe.
Even back in 2001 when Windows XP was released it was "common knowledge" that the practical minimum requirement for Windows XP was 512 MB RAM. Much the same way that the "common knowledge" practical minimum requirement for Windows Vista is 2 GB RAM, even though the official System Requirements is only 512 MB (with which I seriously doubt you will be able to even launch notepad.exe)
Bloat and the hidden costs Posted Feb 2, 2012 13:58 UTC (Thu) by nye (guest, #51576) [Link]
>Even back in 2001 when Windows XP was released it was "common knowledge" that the practical minimum requirement for Windows XP was 512 MB RAM
It really wasn't. I got my first summer job in 2001, and used the money to build a machine with 384MB of RAM, which everyone considered ludicrous. It was a couple of years after that before 512MB became at all commonplace (and indeed three or four years ago 512MB was *still* the default on machines marketed to everyday users).
The release version of Windows XP runs just fine with 128MB; SP3 is basically unusable without at least 512 (though I still see people using it with 256).
Bloat and the hidden costs Posted Feb 2, 2012 14:09 UTC (Thu) by renox (subscriber, #23785) [Link]
> We would now own that space.
The thing is even if you reduce desktop resource usage, modern applications need lots of resources, so this may not help so much..
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