Re:De-Bloated Windows 11 Build Runs on 2GB of RAM
by michaelmrose on Saturday February 04, 2023 @02:54PM
(#34657551)
SSD access times are as much as 100,000 ns memory 50 ms SSD do not negate the virtue of cache.
Re:De-Bloated Windows 11 Build Runs on 2GB of RAM
by jeroenhd on Sunday February 05, 2023 @03:34PM
(#34669022)
True, but with those access times you can wait a lot longer for content to be loaded into RAM. Hard drives are the reason for many years games needed to duplicate their assets, for example, because seek times slowed down loading time and putting the same content in the file twice but at the right place would speed up the loading process significantly. Games today still have special HDD code because of the difference in performance class.
SSDs won't replace RAM but many RAM caches aren't performance critical; sometimes you need your code to be reasonably fast on a laptop with a 5400 rpm hard drive and then you have very little choice of data structures. With the random access patterns SSDs allow this complication quickly disappears. You won't find many Android apps that will cache 8MB block reads to compensate for a spinning hard drive, for example.
Accessibility has actually gone down with the switch to web applications. Microsoft had an excellent accessibility framework with subpar but usable tooling built in, and excellent commercial applications to make use of the existing API, all the way back in Windows XP. Backwards compatibility hacks such as loading old memory manager behaviour and allocating extra buffer space for known buggy applications may take more RAM but don't increase any requirements.
Inagree that requirements have grown but not by the amount reflected in standby CPU and memory use. Don't forget that we've also gained near universal SSD availability, negating the need for RAM caches in many circumstances. And that's just ignoring the advance in CPU and GPU performance since the Windows XP days, when DOS was finally killed off and the amount of necessary custom tailored assembly drastically dropped.
When I boot a Windows XP machine, the only thing I can say I'm really missing as a user is application support. Alright, the Windows XP kernel was incredibly insecure, so let's upgrade to Windows 7 where the painful Vista driver days are behind us and the kernel has been reshaped to put a huge amount of vulnerable code in userspace. What am I missing now? Touchscreen and pen support works, 4k resolutions and higher are supported perfectly fine, almost all modern games still run.
The Steam hardware survey says it all. The largest target audience using their computer components the most runs one or two 1080p monitors, has 6 CPU cores and about 8GB of RAM. Your average consumer doesn't need or use all of that. HiDPI and HDR are a niche and designing your OS around a niche is stupid.