4 ms·

I still think that the desktops eat a huge amount of resources. Win98 ran correcly with 32mb and you had more or less the same features of nowadays desktops.

anthk 4y ago
FVWM ran under 8MB almost as fast and it had far more features window-managing wise. On "the same features".... no. Not even close. No Unicode, no CJK input with IBUS, no GVFS/Kio for thousands of protocols and devices (MTP), no memory protection...
tux2bsd 4y ago
- anthk 4y ago
  Win98 was a turd. Even SE crashed a lot. No memory protection. No daemons to mount zillions of remote drives or USB devices with GVFS/Kio. Guess why NT based OSes used far more memory. >Firefox - SJW_crap = better,smaller,faster,securer. But SJW_crap became their primary objective so we're doomed... IE+Active X+OLE+Windows 98 = malware haven. Firefox supports audio/video securely, and even WebGL support. And WASM. Yes, you could do that with Flash and a Pentium III with Street View, but your computer was an ad-ridden malware epidemic party.
  - tux2bsd 4y ago
    You've chosen to miss the point, and you're also comparing sand to ice. win98lite, was windows install modification for win98 to remove some stuff so you could play computer games more while you weren't defragging your hard drive. Wakey wakey.
    - anthk 4y ago
      I know w98lite. My first Windows OS was W98SE. And, guess, what? Often tuning some registry keys gave me more performance than blindly using W98lite.
      - tux2bsd 4y ago
        Good for you.
itvision 4y ago
IceWM takes less than 20MB of RAM - it represent Windows 98 quite well. Full featured DEs offer features far exceeding what Windows 98 had: applets, advanced window management, 24bit graphics (Windows 98 icons were mostly 8bit) + transparency, a ton of convenient APIs. Coding in pure Win32 is quite difficult.
- magicalhippo 4y ago
  > Coding in pure Win32 is quite difficult. True, but Delphi with its VCL showed it didn't have to be.
  - itvision 4y ago
    Delphi produced quite bloated code. I remember a default Delphi application with 0 lines of actual code showing nothing but an empty screen compiled into something like 300KB circa 2000 all thanks to VCL while its pure C Win32 counterpart compiled into a few kilobytes.
    - hawski 4y ago
      300kB. How goalposts moved since then.
      - itvision 4y ago
        LMAO. Yeah, an average HTML page nowadays without graphics and built-in fonts is easily above 500KB considering all the embedded JS and CSS.
    - ZoomZoomZoom 4y ago
      If you use an alternative set of libs, such as KOL&MCK, you get fully featured GUI programs in tens of KB range (about 50KB for an empty window with a button, IIRC) while having all the benefits of the coolest RAD which Delphi/Lazarus provide. ...And then you UPX it to shave some more bits. ;)
    - tecleandor 4y ago
KingLancelot 4y ago
Dude, right? Where has all this new resource usage come from? In middle school my family XP computer had 512MB of RAM total, and absolutely nothing has changed since then. Why is everything so fat now?
blackhaz 4y ago
Indeed. I recently took out my Pentium 133 MHz running Windows 98 and Office 97. Same, if not more pleasant experience, than modern Windows machines. Very little has changed in principle besides animations and advertisement.
- hedora 4y ago
  Try dosbox on a raspberry pi. Win 3.11 flies (office and all), though I'm running it on a giant desktop these days. I haven't bothered with Win 95/98 emulation, since I mostly use that setup for games, and Steam already has modern-ish windows games covered.
cerved 4y ago
I'm all for a good hyperbole. Sure, there's plenty of unnecessary and bloated features in modern Windows. Notably the memory leaking garbage news widget. But there's also plenty of useful features. Multiple desktops, search, multi window handling etc.
prmoustache 4y ago
I remember that when my father upgraded for a k6 II machine I adopted his old pentium 100mhz (overclocked from 90) with 40MB of ram and it was less than snappy in win98. It was actually the reason I started using linux, to maximise the use of the resources. On win98 that machine was pretty much single task while on linux I could use command line and tui applications to play music, work on a school document with abiword or staroffice, chat with irc/ICQ/jabber while browsing with netscape/mozilla then phoenix/firebird. On windows 98 listening to mp3 on winamp audio was quickly stuttering if I was doing other stuff at the same time.
- anthk 4y ago
  You could use groff+mom for school docs.
  - prmoustache 4y ago
    Yeah but those were my formatting year. I remember a lot of people recommending latex which led me to start using lout[1] for a while which felt easier to learn and had a much smaller installation footprint. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lout_(software) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lout_(software)
- ralph0 4y ago
  Funny this. 20+ years ago I had a similar (K6 II) machine w/Win98. I used one of those sketchy "IE Extractor" apps downloaded from who-knows-where to remove IE and replaced it with Mozilla. Performance increased noticeably; apps opened near-instantaneously upon clicking. Since then, I've never had a PC/OS combo as fast as that. Need to work on that now...

anthk 4y ago

FVWM ran under 8MB almost as fast and it had far more features window-managing wise. On "the same features".... no. Not even close. No Unicode, no CJK input with IBUS, no GVFS/Kio for thousands of protocols and devices (MTP), no memory protection...

tux2bsd 4y ago

anthk 4y ago
Win98 was a turd. Even SE crashed a lot. No memory protection. No daemons to mount zillions of remote drives or USB devices with GVFS/Kio. Guess why NT based OSes used far more memory. >Firefox - SJW_crap = better,smaller,faster,securer. But SJW_crap became their primary objective so we're doomed... IE+Active X+OLE+Windows 98 = malware haven. Firefox supports audio/video securely, and even WebGL support. And WASM. Yes, you could do that with Flash and a Pentium III with Street View, but your computer was an ad-ridden malware epidemic party.
- tux2bsd 4y ago
  You've chosen to miss the point, and you're also comparing sand to ice. win98lite, was windows install modification for win98 to remove some stuff so you could play computer games more while you weren't defragging your hard drive. Wakey wakey.
  - anthk 4y ago
    I know w98lite. My first Windows OS was W98SE. And, guess, what? Often tuning some registry keys gave me more performance than blindly using W98lite.
    - tux2bsd 4y ago
      Good for you.

itvision 4y ago

IceWM takes less than 20MB of RAM - it represent Windows 98 quite well. Full featured DEs offer features far exceeding what Windows 98 had: applets, advanced window management, 24bit graphics (Windows 98 icons were mostly 8bit) + transparency, a ton of convenient APIs. Coding in pure Win32 is quite difficult.

magicalhippo 4y ago
> Coding in pure Win32 is quite difficult. True, but Delphi with its VCL showed it didn't have to be.
- itvision 4y ago
  Delphi produced quite bloated code. I remember a default Delphi application with 0 lines of actual code showing nothing but an empty screen compiled into something like 300KB circa 2000 all thanks to VCL while its pure C Win32 counterpart compiled into a few kilobytes.
  - hawski 4y ago
    300kB. How goalposts moved since then.
    - itvision 4y ago
      LMAO. Yeah, an average HTML page nowadays without graphics and built-in fonts is easily above 500KB considering all the embedded JS and CSS.
  - ZoomZoomZoom 4y ago
    If you use an alternative set of libs, such as KOL&MCK, you get fully featured GUI programs in tens of KB range (about 50KB for an empty window with a button, IIRC) while having all the benefits of the coolest RAD which Delphi/Lazarus provide. ...And then you UPX it to shave some more bits. ;)
  - tecleandor 4y ago

KingLancelot 4y ago

Dude, right? Where has all this new resource usage come from? In middle school my family XP computer had 512MB of RAM total, and absolutely nothing has changed since then. Why is everything so fat now?

blackhaz 4y ago

Indeed. I recently took out my Pentium 133 MHz running Windows 98 and Office 97. Same, if not more pleasant experience, than modern Windows machines. Very little has changed in principle besides animations and advertisement.

hedora 4y ago
Try dosbox on a raspberry pi. Win 3.11 flies (office and all), though I'm running it on a giant desktop these days. I haven't bothered with Win 95/98 emulation, since I mostly use that setup for games, and Steam already has modern-ish windows games covered.

cerved 4y ago

I'm all for a good hyperbole. Sure, there's plenty of unnecessary and bloated features in modern Windows. Notably the memory leaking garbage news widget. But there's also plenty of useful features. Multiple desktops, search, multi window handling etc.

prmoustache 4y ago

I remember that when my father upgraded for a k6 II machine I adopted his old pentium 100mhz (overclocked from 90) with 40MB of ram and it was less than snappy in win98. It was actually the reason I started using linux, to maximise the use of the resources. On win98 that machine was pretty much single task while on linux I could use command line and tui applications to play music, work on a school document with abiword or staroffice, chat with irc/ICQ/jabber while browsing with netscape/mozilla then phoenix/firebird. On windows 98 listening to mp3 on winamp audio was quickly stuttering if I was doing other stuff at the same time.

anthk 4y ago
You could use groff+mom for school docs.
- prmoustache 4y ago
  Yeah but those were my formatting year. I remember a lot of people recommending latex which led me to start using lout[1] for a while which felt easier to learn and had a much smaller installation footprint. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lout_(software) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lout_(software)
ralph0 4y ago
Funny this. 20+ years ago I had a similar (K6 II) machine w/Win98. I used one of those sketchy "IE Extractor" apps downloaded from who-knows-where to remove IE and replaced it with Mozilla. Performance increased noticeably; apps opened near-instantaneously upon clicking. Since then, I've never had a PC/OS combo as fast as that. Need to work on that now...