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A comment on Microsoft donates the Mono Project to the Wine team. Parent comment

Re:Microsoft donates the Mono Project to the Wine team by prewett on Tuesday August 27, 2024 @08:32PM (#41374825)
"Gratuitous software" would be excessive and unnecessary software. Which I think a lot of commercial (particularly "news") websites qualify for, and "modern" websites in general. NPM makes it easy to just install something, which requires all kinds of other things, which duplicate each other, etc.

Strangely enough, I think the LaTex distribution qualifies, too. I tried to install it recently, and it wanted 1 GB of disk space! That's multiple times the size of the entire system disk when LaTeX was created...

Sooner or later a lot of the web is going to run on WASM, at which point we'll have a virtual machine running in a user program running on an OS which incompletely virtualizes the bare machine (hence why we've ended up with WASM). Extra gratuitousity if the browser is an Intel binary being run on an M* processor via Rosetta translation... Maybe eventually we'll realize that the OS needs to provide a full virtual machine, complete with window to draw in, filesystem isolation like Plan 9, etc. But, inertia will probably make it take while.

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Re:Microsoft donates the Mono Project to the Wine team by uncanneyvalley on Tuesday August 27, 2024 @10:26PM (#41375396)
Matryoshka virtualization
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Re:Microsoft donates the Mono Project to the Wine team by bmacho on Wednesday August 28, 2024 @05:32AM (#41377694)
> Strangely enough, I think the LaTex distribution qualifies, too. I tried to install it recently, and it wanted 1 GB of disk space! That's multiple times the size of the entire system disk when LaTeX was created...

There is the TinyTeX distribution, which is smaller. (Despite its name, it isn't tiny, or small, or medium in size, but it is also large. But smaller than the default LaTeX distribution with all the possible packages, source code and documents.)

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Re:Microsoft donates the Mono Project to the Wine team by mickmcq on Wednesday August 28, 2024 @11:40AM (#41380718)
My impression is that TinyTeX downloads required packages on the fly and can be quite tiny if you don’t use many packages.
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Re:Microsoft donates the Mono Project to the Wine team by bmacho on Wednesday August 28, 2024 @03:07PM (#41383066)
Well here in the project readme there is a table with the sizes: https://github.com/rstudio/tinytex-releases (a bit outdated, they didn't refresh it). I downloaded TinyTex-1 for Windows, it's 338 MB uncompressed. It is _huge_ in my book.
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