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Re:The Bullshit Web by MrEldritch on Tuesday July 31, 2018 @06:44PM (#17657962)
> "You actually don't need all that crap to serve adverts, or really even to do tracking: people managed without it in the 90s. It's just that it's more work to get the same effect without a buttload of JS in this day and age"

While I sympathize with this sentiment, this is also the entire history of computing in a nutshell. Moore's Law has driven us orders of magnitude beyond where we were when personal computers first came into existence; but Wirth's law[1] has kept pace. The laptop I'm typing this on right now has 8 GB of RAM, and that's already become pathetically tiny, pretty much the minimum viable for a consumer PC; I have to keep checking my memory usage or I'll spill over into swap (on a mechanical drive) and have to wait several minutes while my computer recovers.

Performance in computer applications fundamentally doesn't improve. Stuff gets prettier, sure, and applications do more. But things will still run about as slowly as they always have, sometimes a little worse. (There are exceptions - some things like loading programs from tape, or loading things from an HDD once SSDs were invented, were so painfully slow compared to their replacement that you'd have to actively try to write slow code to get anywhere near that performance.) It's ease of programming, flexibility, and freedom of design (in aesthetics and interface) that the advance of computing technology has always enabled. And all of those are extremely valuable in their own way, and can make applications genuinely better - even allowing qualitatively new things to come into existence that wouldn't have been feasible before - even if they don't run faster or take up less of your memory.

(To understand why, think about the development of - say - computer games since the 90s. For all that we mock poorly optimized games, how inaccessible would game development be if we required them to be coded as efficiently as Carmack built Doom? For all that mindlessly chasing "better graphics" has ballooned costs and led developers to compromise on gameplay, how many games simply couldn't be translated to 90s-era graphics without fatally compromising the experience? How many projects would never have been started if we set the skill floor for devs so high that a hobbyist couldn't just download Unity and start writing "shitty" code?)

(Or think about something like Python. Python is a perfect example of something that allows devs to massively sacrifice performance just to make programming less work. If we kept our once-higher-by-necessity standards for efficient usage of resources, something like Python's sluggish runtime would be laughable. But I think you, and I, and everyone else can agree that Python is a very good thing.)

[1] "What Intel giveth, Microsoft taketh away."

Re:The Bullshit Web by MrEldritch on Tuesday July 31, 2018 @07:35PM (#17658293)
(All that being said, I'm also fairly salty about having 8 GB of RAM and a mechanical hard drive rendering my computer incredibly painful to use as technology has marched on. Discord - which I use almost exclusively as an IRC chatroom with persistent while-you-were-gone chat history, embedded media, and fun custom emotes - is an entire Electron app that eats over 100 MB minimum; Firefox is eating 750 MB just keeping this single tab open while I type this. Even with no other applications but those open, Windows 10 and assorted background processes already push me to 5.7 GB allocated. Various Windows background processes will randomly decide they'd like to peg my disk usage to 100% for ten to fifteen minutes at a time, which I imagine is because spinning rust disks are considered deprecated.

I saw a discussion on HN a few months back about a survey of computer hardware, and one dev in the comments was shocked - shocked! - to find out that the typical user didn't have 16 GB and a 4k screen. That definitely rustled my jimmies a bit.)

Re:The Bullshit Web by flukus on Wednesday August 01, 2018 @12:48AM (#17659772)
> I saw a discussion on HN a few months back about a survey of computer hardware, and one dev in the comments was shocked - shocked! - to find out that the typical user didn't have 16 GB and a 4k screen. That definitely rustled my jimmies a bit.)

This is extremely common in dev circles, it's an area where we're completely detached from average users. Just to make the point, here is the mozilla hardware survey that shows >50% of users having 4GB or less: https://hardware.metrics.mozilla.com/ .

If we look at the more technical users on steam (https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey) then only ~15% of users have 4GB or less, along with 40% having 8GB.

There's a good reason macbooks top out at 16GB.

Re:The Bullshit Web by MrEldritch on Wednesday August 01, 2018 @01:34AM (#17659955)
Oh, I recognize that Mozilla survey as actually the specific one that user was talking about! Let me see if I can track down the actual comment thread; it's probably less ridiculous than I actually remember it being.

Ah, found it. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16735354

Re:The Bullshit Web by flukus on Wednesday August 01, 2018 @06:37AM (#17661270)
I'm really surprised at the reaction to the resolution. I like 1080p for movies on my (too) big TV but for coding I was more than satisfied once we got to 1024x768 and haven't thought of it since. My home coding machine is a cheap dell at 1366x768 and I've always been happy with it.
Re:The Bullshit Web by JBiserkov on Wednesday August 01, 2018 @05:44AM (#17661005)
I agree with everything you said. I just have a somewhat different experience with Firefox on Windows 10:

>Firefox is eating 750 MB just keeping this single tab open while I type this.

I have 127 tabs open on Firefox Quantum 61.0.1 (64 bit). It uses ~ 1100 MB spread among 7 processes. I have 6 addons enabled (Decentraleyes, Firefox pioneer, I don't care about cookies, Tab counter, Tree style tab and uMatrix).

Re:The Bullshit Web by tomc1985 on Wednesday August 01, 2018 @12:30PM (#17664065)
Why do you hate spinning disks so much? And no they are not considered "deprecated", they're really the only way to affordably store large volumes of data. It's an old, venerable, and still-very-useful tech
Re:The Bullshit Web by c22 on Thursday August 02, 2018 @03:22PM (#17674648)
I'm also on a system with 8Gb of ram at the moment. Firefox is using up a hilarious 4.6Gb keeping a few dozen web pages open, but the entire rest of my Linux system, including Inkscape, qCAD, and SketchUp under Wine are using only a combined 907 megabytes. So it's possible part of your problem is just Windows 10.
Re:The Bullshit Web by michaelmrose on Tuesday July 31, 2018 @09:40PM (#17658958)
My i3wm environment doesn't randomly start anything I don't ask it to start and runs very comfortably with 8gb of ram heck it would run fine with 4gb and no swap. Maybe you are running the wrong os.
Re:The Bullshit Web by TeMPOraL on Wednesday August 01, 2018 @01:22AM (#17659915)
A tiling window manager won't save you when dealing with Electron apps.

I run Linux and StumpWM on my desktop, and recently I had upgrade to 12GB of RAM, because it turns out 8GB is very easy to exhaust these days. I currently have 9.3GB tied up, mostly by browser processes.

Re:The Bullshit Web by NoGravitas on Wednesday August 01, 2018 @08:59AM (#17662043)
Yeah, this. I'm mostly using swaywm instead of Gnome in order to free up about 1 extra gigabyte of RAM for apps, but that equals about one Electron app. The only Electron app I haven't eliminated from my daily usage, though is Patchwork, so it's not so bad.
Re:The Bullshit Web by lphnull on Wednesday August 01, 2018 @12:31AM (#17659691)
Funny thing is I use my i3wm environment on 16gb of RAM and a 4k screen. I'm actually migrating to rat poison because it's so incredibly simple and basic that it has been making me drool. I mean, look at the source code. It doesn't get much simpler than that for a tiled WM.
Re:The Bullshit Web by jshevek on Wednesday August 01, 2018 @12:52AM (#17659794)
If you are interested in rat poison, you may also enjoy xmonad. I've used both and much preferred xmonad
Re:The Bullshit Web by noch on Thursday August 02, 2018 @08:07AM (#17670806)
Load the entire GHC garbage collected runtime just for my window manager? Isn't this the same philosophy that causes people to use Electron? And that results in unnecessarily large memory footprints and runtime performance penalties?
Re:The Bullshit Web by jshevek on Sunday August 05, 2018 @10:42PM (#17694799)
Xmonad is rock solid, lightening fast, and perfect for many who prefer to minimize their reliance on a mouse
Re:The Bullshit Web by eswoo on Wednesday August 01, 2018 @11:41PM (#17669103)
I don't think esoteric linuxes are really necessary--I'm running vanilla Ubuntu 16.04 with 16GB RAM and top three processes are only Crashplan (~800MB), Dropbox (~460) and Chrome (327 resident, 1380 shared, per htop, with 6 tabs running). My total usage at the moment is 4.04GB out of 15.4 available, again per htop. Some of the other numbers in this thread are baffling to me.

But I don't run any Electron apps, so there's that.

But, yeah, I guess I wouldn't be able to run this same workload with 4GB RAM. That's what lubuntu is for.

Re:The Bullshit Web by MrEldritch on Wednesday August 01, 2018 @01:36AM (#17659965)
Oh, no, I'm aware these are very much Win10 specific problems and I look at Linux people with a not insignificant degree of envy. Unfortunately, I do quite like PC gaming.
Re:The Bullshit Web by StillBored on Wednesday August 01, 2018 @12:37PM (#17664144)
Modern gnome is a pig, some of this could be tracked back to gnome-shell's use of javascript and css styling if you were so inclined. Most linux users don't really notice it due to the fact that most x86 machines are crazy fast.

OTOH, try starting a modern full blown distro on something like an rpi instead of raspian and you will quickly discover that you _NEED_ more than 4G of ram and a lot of CPU just to start firefox. Its even worse if you don't have hardware GL acceleration.

OTOH, the lightweight desktops (lxqt, lxdt, xfce) really are..

Re:The Bullshit Web by ovao on Wednesday August 01, 2018 @12:07AM (#17659575)
While it would seem convenient to simply switch operating systems from the popular, widespread options to...whatever i3wm is, practically speaking that is seldom possible.
Re:The Bullshit Web by askl56 on Wednesday August 01, 2018 @12:11AM (#17659589)
I3wm is a window manager you can run on any Linux distribution
Re:The Bullshit Web by theelous3 on Wednesday August 01, 2018 @05:28AM (#17660900)
Tiling wm does not an OS make.
Re:The Bullshit Web by na85 on Wednesday August 01, 2018 @12:16AM (#17659606)
Can you run recent versions of Photoshop? How about Premiere, or Final Cut?

SolidWorks? CATIA? Matlab?

Re:The Bullshit Web by lphnull on Wednesday August 01, 2018 @12:42AM (#17659742)
I find that the best way to do this is to just VNC to a windows or Mac dedicated slave computer to do graphic arts work. VNC is so good nowadays that I can use my QHD phone screen as a second monitor for all my Adobe apps- and the lag nowadays is almost non-existent thanks to super fast wifi.
Re:The Bullshit Web by chupasaurus on Wednesday August 01, 2018 @06:49AM (#17661321)
FreeRDP for connecting to Windows is a good option too.

Should say that KRDC is a good RD connection manager, but it's KDE only unless you wanna install a third of it.

Re:The Bullshit Web by michaelmrose on Wednesday August 01, 2018 @03:41AM (#17660376)
Matlab works on linux.

Premier or Final cut don't but DaVinci Resolve and Lightworks do.

Obviously if your workflow and thus your livelihood depends on a particular tool you should run a platform that runs it but I would question why someone with money would pick windows over mac.

Re:The Bullshit Web by StillBored on Wednesday August 01, 2018 @12:41PM (#17664190)
Those are commercial apps for people with real money. OTOH, there are a number of unbeatable free apps that don't have linux ports. Fusion360 comes to mind, its not solidworks level , but its light years ahead of freecad.