Re:FediMeteo: A €4 FreeBSD VPS Became a Global Weather Service
by bityard on Wednesday December 31, 2025 @08:49AM
(#46444014)
It's just the price of progress. When I started playing with Linux, a full fledged Linux desktop with web browser and all ran very happily on a machine with 16 megabytes of RAM. At the time, there were distributions that fit on a floppy disk.
Both are more or less impossible now, but I don't think we should think of 100mb of "background state" as bloated. The fact that your can get a lot of useful stuff done on Linux in under 512mb in 2026 while Windows and Mac need multiple GB just to get out of bed is pretty awesome.
Re:FediMeteo: A €4 FreeBSD VPS Became a Global Weather Service
by andai on Thursday January 01, 2026 @01:33AM
(#46451838)
So... what's the progress exactly? Everything is bloated now and looks way less cool!
Re:FediMeteo: A €4 FreeBSD VPS Became a Global Weather Service
by array_key_first on Sunday January 04, 2026 @01:30PM
(#46490742)
Lots of this is more aggressive caching and pre-allocation. Also, most Linux apps, both gui and console, are C and C++. They're basically almost as fast as they can get.
That's probably not the only reason but it bothers me that I never considered that before! I remember at some point it used twice as much RAM for basically the same thing, and I remember being bothered by that.
But I guess what you get in exchange for that is the ability to put in basically unlimited RAM.