5 ms·

I feel similarly about Windows. Way, way more resource hungry. Tens to hundreds of times, depending on the metric. Barely does more than Win95, as far as user-f

I feel similarly about Windows. Way, way more resource hungry. Tens to hundreds of times, depending on the metric. Barely does more than Win95, as far as user-facing features. Shit I bet most of the important features would have fit in 5-10MB of "power tools" addons with barely-measurable effects on memory and cycle use. Win95 ran very comfortably on 64MB (with an M) of memory and a 4GB disk. You can't even install the OS on a disk that small anymore, let alone have room left for anything else. As for Linux, I remember using Windowmaker for a long time, and later XFCE, because Gnome and especially KDE (funny how those have reversed position performance-wise now, eh?) would make my poor Celeron laptop cry. But they did run, and didn't even come close to maxing out my 384MB of RAM in that machine.

AnIdiotOnTheNet 4y ago
What hardware giveth, the software developer take the away. For a variety of reasons, today's devs are terrible at writing software that is even remotely efficient.
- tux2bsd 4y ago
  for i in 0..1000000; do long slow test echo "not last" > /dev/null; if last thing then do slow test again to be sure then echo "last"; done
lambdaba 4y ago
> Win95 ran very comfortably on 64MB (with an M) of memory and a 4GB disk. I ran it on 8mb ram / 850mb disk. Did upgrade to 16mb ram and the performance boost was palpable, but, again, used it at 8mb for a while. Also a fresh install took up a whooping 50mb!
- corrral 4y ago
  Right, hence the "very comfortably". That wasn't min specs, that was a very happy Win95 system. > Also a fresh install took up a whooping 50mb I do wonder WTF modern Windows is doing with tens of GB of disk space, not even counting swap & such. Seems like it jumped up dramatically after WinXP—even the otherwise-kinda-decent Win7 used crazy amounts of disk. "They started including a bunch of drivers" bullshit, Linux has always included loads of drivers with most default installations and it's so much smaller that just calling it "smaller" doesn't do the difference justice, plus there are surely a lot of those that could easily be made a download or optional default-off package (extremely niche or very old hardware).
ChuckNorris89 4y ago
>I feel similarly about Windows. Way, way more resource hungry. Tens to hundreds of times, depending on the metric. You're incorect here as that's not an apples to apples comparison. If you've got the RAM, Windows (and MacOS too I bet) does a lot of caching on boot of frequently used apps and files to RAM, as any sane desktop focused OS should do to give you a good experience, and it frees it back up as it starts to be needed by other apps. If you've got free RAM, why shouldn't the OS put it to good use to improve the UX? I never understood the obsession of many enthusiasts, to spec PCs with huge amounts of RAM, then smugly compete for the least amount of idle RAM used by their system. That's not the metric of a good desktop OS. What do you gain by just staring at large amounts of RAM that you paid for just sitting idle and unused by anything? RAM is there to be used, and if free RAM is available and the OS is smart about using it and freeing it on the fly to boost the UX, then please by all means go ahead and use as much as you want if that will improve the UX. My parents run Windows 10 on my 11 year old 4GB laptop with a spinning rust drive, using Chrome as a browser and it works without ever crashing or needing to kill apps, so IMO, Windows is stellar at managing memory/resources even when in very short supply. Meanwhile on the same laptop, Ubuntu's Gnome would just completely lock up after a long Chrome browsing session, or its OOM would just straight up kill Chrome, both cases yielding a much worse UX than on Windows, making it the far superior desktop OS in this case. IMHO a better and more realistic metric should be idle CPU usage, and how the OS deals with low memory scenarios, like the one I described above, not by how little idle RAM it uses on PCs with large ammounts of it as that's just pointless.
- mwcampbell 4y ago
  I think that's missing the point of the GP, because our Windows 9x machines with 64 MB of RAM also had plenty of room for cache. Of course, there have been real advances in GUIs since Windows 9x, and the 9x kernel was hardly state of the art even for its time. But I don't know if a minimum of 2 GB of RAM, and probably more like 4 GB for a usable system, is really necessary.
  - ChuckNorris89 4y ago
    You can't apples to apples compare windows 95 RAM usage logic with the one implemented in Windows 10/11. Of course old OSs used less.

AnIdiotOnTheNet 4y ago

What hardware giveth, the software developer take the away. For a variety of reasons, today's devs are terrible at writing software that is even remotely efficient.

tux2bsd 4y ago
for i in 0..1000000; do long slow test echo "not last" > /dev/null; if last thing then do slow test again to be sure then echo "last"; done

lambdaba 4y ago

> Win95 ran very comfortably on 64MB (with an M) of memory and a 4GB disk. I ran it on 8mb ram / 850mb disk. Did upgrade to 16mb ram and the performance boost was palpable, but, again, used it at 8mb for a while. Also a fresh install took up a whooping 50mb!

corrral 4y ago
Right, hence the "very comfortably". That wasn't min specs, that was a very happy Win95 system. > Also a fresh install took up a whooping 50mb I do wonder WTF modern Windows is doing with tens of GB of disk space, not even counting swap & such. Seems like it jumped up dramatically after WinXP—even the otherwise-kinda-decent Win7 used crazy amounts of disk. "They started including a bunch of drivers" bullshit, Linux has always included loads of drivers with most default installations and it's so much smaller that just calling it "smaller" doesn't do the difference justice, plus there are surely a lot of those that could easily be made a download or optional default-off package (extremely niche or very old hardware).

ChuckNorris89 4y ago

>I feel similarly about Windows. Way, way more resource hungry. Tens to hundreds of times, depending on the metric. You're incorect here as that's not an apples to apples comparison. If you've got the RAM, Windows (and MacOS too I bet) does a lot of caching on boot of frequently used apps and files to RAM, as any sane desktop focused OS should do to give you a good experience, and it frees it back up as it starts to be needed by other apps. If you've got free RAM, why shouldn't the OS put it to good use to improve the UX? I never understood the obsession of many enthusiasts, to spec PCs with huge amounts of RAM, then smugly compete for the least amount of idle RAM used by their system. That's not the metric of a good desktop OS. What do you gain by just staring at large amounts of RAM that you paid for just sitting idle and unused by anything? RAM is there to be used, and if free RAM is available and the OS is smart about using it and freeing it on the fly to boost the UX, then please by all means go ahead and use as much as you want if that will improve the UX. My parents run Windows 10 on my 11 year old 4GB laptop with a spinning rust drive, using Chrome as a browser and it works without ever crashing or needing to kill apps, so IMO, Windows is stellar at managing memory/resources even when in very short supply. Meanwhile on the same laptop, Ubuntu's Gnome would just completely lock up after a long Chrome browsing session, or its OOM would just straight up kill Chrome, both cases yielding a much worse UX than on Windows, making it the far superior desktop OS in this case. IMHO a better and more realistic metric should be idle CPU usage, and how the OS deals with low memory scenarios, like the one I described above, not by how little idle RAM it uses on PCs with large ammounts of it as that's just pointless.

mwcampbell 4y ago
I think that's missing the point of the GP, because our Windows 9x machines with 64 MB of RAM also had plenty of room for cache. Of course, there have been real advances in GUIs since Windows 9x, and the 9x kernel was hardly state of the art even for its time. But I don't know if a minimum of 2 GB of RAM, and probably more like 4 GB for a usable system, is really necessary.
- ChuckNorris89 4y ago
  You can't apples to apples compare windows 95 RAM usage logic with the one implemented in Windows 10/11. Of course old OSs used less.