totally agree that the logical future is a single powerful system for the house with thin clients and little baby machines for surf/browse/email/stream. most of what anyone is doing could work great on a $20 raspberry pi, but manufacturers have convinced everyone that every house needs like 3+ systems that can all do climate modeling or geospatial analysis.
if like 90% of the heavy traffic internet wasn’t riddled with the latest UX complicating popups and malformed ad technology, most of the complaints of “my computer is slow” would probably vanish overnight.
tell me about it. get linux and a good adblocker and you probably could still use a core 2 duo system for most peoples everyday tasks.
I will tell you about it.
I booted up a T60. That’s right, from 2006, back when Lenovo had just bought ThinkPad from IBM, so it still has the IBM ThinkPad logo, anyways. It has a Core Duo, no no, not a Core 2 Duo, Core Duo the 32bit one. Put an SSD in it, put Debian with XFCE on it, and it runs very well. Emails, LibreOffice, Music, no problem. Besides both batteries being dead, it’s good for a few more years.
yeah, but opening up one of the modern shitwebsites in firefox or chrome will absoultely choke that machine to death.
web bloat is the only reason i upgrade hw
Software bloat is real.
A modern web page (with no hi-res images) can take >1GB RAM, when '90s web browsers typically took <1MB. Modern Adobe PDF reader takes >200MB, when some of the longest video games I’ve loved are <=10MB. Heck even a modern indie-made game with tons of gameplay is still sometimes <200MB.
The cause really is just shitty code and corner-cutting. Optimizing anything is rarely regarded as worth it nowadays, even if a small amount of work leads to 10x performance gains.
Unfortunately even the default Lemmy UI is pretty heavy. A clean load of this page and the comments transferred 1.92MB on the wire (6.61 decompressed). I blame Inferno. Not because Inferno is specifically bad, but because I have been convinced that anything that is React or React-like is bad.
On Diethex it’s 204kB and 217kB respectively, and that’s because the OP’s image is 108kB.
A comparable Reddit page https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/1bja5qu/robert_de_niro_80_and_his_10months_old_daughter/ initially loads about as much as Hexbear, even including all the ad scripts, but transfers megabytes more as you load and scroll comments.
Where they super begin to differ is that one Reddit tab is currently sitting at 400MB+ RAM usage, compared to Hexbear’s 140, compared to Diethex’s 20**.
** I think one thing that is hard to track about page memory usage is the web browser will over-allocate to speed up page navigation and then eventually reclaim when you have mostly settled where you are. So after a few minutes it’s now:
DietHex: 20MB
Hexbear: 60MB
Reddit: 160-260MB
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