4 ms·

People blame Windows for bloat, but Linux today is the true bloated software in my opinion - Linux used to be the OS we turned to run on machines where Windows

People blame Windows for bloat, but Linux today is the true bloated software in my opinion - Linux used to be the OS we turned to run on machines where Windows used to crawl. But look at the state of Linux today. As someone asked in the Youtube comment too, I wonder where the bloat is in Linux that makes it so slow today, compared to its breezier past?

MuffinFlavored 6y ago
Got any citations/benchmarks for what is slower about Linux today? I'm guessing the kernel itself isn't taking more than 30mb of RAM these days. What's next? udev/systemd? X11 server / Wayland + display manager?
caslon 6y ago
Anecdotally, this comment annoyed me so much that I decided to reboot my machine (that I typed this comment on) and see what the memory situation looked like. As I correctly remembered, it still starts up in under three seconds & using under 40MB, after init launches my web server, networking & other various tools for convenience.
kop316 6y ago
I'm not sure if this is sarcasm? I'm typing this on a Thinkpad x200 (Intel Core 2 Duo from 2008) running up to date Debian GNU/Linux with MATE, and it runs great!
- anthk 6y ago
  Compared to a NetBSD/OpenBSD setup with Mate it's dog slow.
  - kop316 6y ago
    umm...ok? What was this post trying to get across? Without any concrete benchmarks, it comes across to me like some sort of flexing for reasons that I have no idea why.
retrac 6y ago
Is it slow? I mean, Linux itself. Yes, the kernel is bigger these days. But once it's up and running it should be handling system calls as fast as about 20 years ago. Often faster. So, I'm not sure core things are slower. But libraries have gotten bigger. Much bigger. Open up a web browser and you load several hundred megabytes of libraries. You got Unicode, and data for your vector fonts, and code for special tweaks on rendering everything from Taiwanese vs. Mainland Chinese character forms to obsolete Russian diacritics, libraries for parsing image, audio and video codecs, libraries for 3D rendering, and Javascript and WASM dynamic translation, and parsers for 30 years of crufty non-standard web standards. Oh, and of course everything over the network is encrypted now. So it's a mix of asking more from the machine - 4K displays involve a lot of pixel-pushing. And associated code size to do those things. Which makes it slower to load, and everything becomes very miserable when you run out of RAM. Now if you configure a kernel with not much more than the features you would have had in the '90s, use lightweight libraries, stick to the command line, and give it enough RAM? Modern UNIXes actually are still quite snappy on even the most pitiful hardware. I have an old Mac with a 68030 running at 16 MHz. I put NetBSD on it a few years ago, just as a lark. For poking around the file system and using vi, it might as well have been my modern desktop for user response times. (It even runs X11 tolerably... as long as you stick to twm and xterm.) Of course much of it really is just bloat. Editors should probably not be implemented in Electron.
- quonn 6y ago
  > Of course much of it really is just bloat. Editors should probably not be implemented in Electron. Maybe. On the other hand, vscode feels faster than Visual Studio or Eclipse or IntelliJ ever was.
  - pjmlp 6y ago
    Easy when it doesn't do half as much.
    - quonn 6y ago
      For some things (let‘s say frontend development) it does a lot. Even with a large number of plugins it still feels snappy.
ashleyn 6y ago
I wonder if the spectre/meltdown mitigations have anything to do with it. Or stack smashing protection perhaps. A LOT of security mitigations over the years probably will make considerably slower code on older processors.

MuffinFlavored 6y ago

Got any citations/benchmarks for what is slower about Linux today? I'm guessing the kernel itself isn't taking more than 30mb of RAM these days. What's next? udev/systemd? X11 server / Wayland + display manager?

caslon 6y ago

Anecdotally, this comment annoyed me so much that I decided to reboot my machine (that I typed this comment on) and see what the memory situation looked like. As I correctly remembered, it still starts up in under three seconds & using under 40MB, after init launches my web server, networking & other various tools for convenience.

kop316 6y ago

I'm not sure if this is sarcasm? I'm typing this on a Thinkpad x200 (Intel Core 2 Duo from 2008) running up to date Debian GNU/Linux with MATE, and it runs great!

anthk 6y ago
Compared to a NetBSD/OpenBSD setup with Mate it's dog slow.
- kop316 6y ago
  umm...ok? What was this post trying to get across? Without any concrete benchmarks, it comes across to me like some sort of flexing for reasons that I have no idea why.

retrac 6y ago

Is it slow? I mean, Linux itself. Yes, the kernel is bigger these days. But once it's up and running it should be handling system calls as fast as about 20 years ago. Often faster. So, I'm not sure core things are slower. But libraries have gotten bigger. Much bigger. Open up a web browser and you load several hundred megabytes of libraries. You got Unicode, and data for your vector fonts, and code for special tweaks on rendering everything from Taiwanese vs. Mainland Chinese character forms to obsolete Russian diacritics, libraries for parsing image, audio and video codecs, libraries for 3D rendering, and Javascript and WASM dynamic translation, and parsers for 30 years of crufty non-standard web standards. Oh, and of course everything over the network is encrypted now. So it's a mix of asking more from the machine - 4K displays involve a lot of pixel-pushing. And associated code size to do those things. Which makes it slower to load, and everything becomes very miserable when you run out of RAM. Now if you configure a kernel with not much more than the features you would have had in the '90s, use lightweight libraries, stick to the command line, and give it enough RAM? Modern UNIXes actually are still quite snappy on even the most pitiful hardware. I have an old Mac with a 68030 running at 16 MHz. I put NetBSD on it a few years ago, just as a lark. For poking around the file system and using vi, it might as well have been my modern desktop for user response times. (It even runs X11 tolerably... as long as you stick to twm and xterm.) Of course much of it really is just bloat. Editors should probably not be implemented in Electron.

quonn 6y ago
> Of course much of it really is just bloat. Editors should probably not be implemented in Electron. Maybe. On the other hand, vscode feels faster than Visual Studio or Eclipse or IntelliJ ever was.
- pjmlp 6y ago
  Easy when it doesn't do half as much.
  - quonn 6y ago
    For some things (let‘s say frontend development) it does a lot. Even with a large number of plugins it still feels snappy.

ashleyn 6y ago

I wonder if the spectre/meltdown mitigations have anything to do with it. Or stack smashing protection perhaps. A LOT of security mitigations over the years probably will make considerably slower code on older processors.