11 ms·

Hasn't it, though? HDR, fluid animations, monstrous resolutions, 3D everything, accessibility, fancy APIs for easier development allowing for more features, sup

Hasn't it, though? HDR, fluid animations, monstrous resolutions, 3D everything, accessibility, fancy APIs for easier development allowing for more features, support for large amounts of devices, backwards compatibility, browsers are almost unrecognizable in featureset to the point they resemble an OS unto themselves, email clients have stayed mostly the same at least except for the part that they also ship a browser and few of us even use 'em anymore! Some of those features combine exponentially in complexity and hardware requirements, and some optimizations will trade memory for speed. Not going to defend particular implementations, but requirements? Those have definitely grown more than we give them credit.

agumonkey 4y ago
more features but not sure features i want or need, nor in fun interactions that said 2GB is acceptable considering the state of everything not saying i wouldn't like to have QNX class back
grishka 4y ago
> HDR, fluid animations, monstrous resolutions That's the job of the GPU driver, mostly. > 3D everything That's the desktop compositor. Windows 7 already had one and ran on 1 GB of RAM. > accessibility Not everyone needs it, so it should be an optional installable component for those who do. > fancy APIs for easier development allowing for more features That still use win32 under the hood. Again, .net has existed for a very long time. MFC has existed for an even longer time. > support for large amounts of devices No one asked for Windows on touchscreen anything. Microsoft decided that themselves and ruined the UX for the remaining 99% of the users that still use a mouse and a keyboard. > backwards compatibility That's what Microsoft does historically, nothing new here. > browsers are almost unrecognizable in featureset to the point they resemble an OS unto themselves No one asked for this. My personal opinion is that everything app-like about browsers needs to be undone, yesterday, and they should again become the hypertext document viewers they were meant to be. Even JS is too much, but I guess it does have to stay.
- djur 4y ago
  > Not everyone needs [accessibility], so it should be an additional installable component for those who do. The UI has to be designed from the ground up to support accessibility.
  - grishka 4y ago
    [flagged]
    - dagmx 4y ago
      Accessibility is much more than just labels for a screen reader. Please stop trivializing anything that you don’t use directly, it’s a common thread between all your comments, and it’s a disservice to both the points you’re trying to make and the people who actually use those things . Accessibility includes interaction design, zoom ability, audio commands, action link ups, alternate rendering modes, alternate motion modes, hooks for assistive devices to interact with the system. It goes far deeper into the system than just labels for a screen reader. If you stopped to just think about the vast number of disabilities out there, you’d realize how untrue your statement is.
      - grishka 4y ago
        My point is that accessibility being a thing shouldn't ruin the UI for the people who don't need it. There's no need to visually redesign anything to introduce accessibility. Apps don't need to be made aware whether some control has focus because the user has pressed the tab key, or because it's being focused by a screen reader, or because of some other assistive technology. Colors and font sizes can also be configured and they've been configurable since at least Windows 3.1 — and that is exposed to apps. Again, I don't see how the things you specified can't be built into existing win32 APIs and why anything needs to be designed from the ground up to support them.
        dagmx 4y ago
        Your point about “apps don’t need to be made aware” is precisely the reason accessibility is part of the system UI framework. Accessibility is also not something that is just a binary. You may be slightly short sighted and need larger text, you might need an OS specified colour palette that overrides the apps rendering. There’s just so many levels of nuance here. It’s not just “apps can configure a palette”, it’s that they need to work across the system If you have the time, I really suggest watching the Apple developer videos on accessibility to see why it’s not just as simple as you put it. Microsoft do a lot of great work for accessibility too , they just don’t have much content up to delve into it. As to why it has to be developed from the ground up, it doesn’t, but it needs to be at the foundation regardless. Apple for example didn’t redo their UI for accessibility, however Microsoft take a more “we won’t touch existing stuff in case we break it” approach to their core libs. Also , again, I’d point out that you’re purposefully trying to trivialize something you don’t use.
flohofwoe 4y ago
> fancy APIs for easier development allowing for more features Windows didn't really see a lot of actual progress in this area since the Win2k days. Lots of activity and churn yes, but little actual progress.
- _Algernon_ 4y ago
  Further abstractions on top of windows have though: websites, electron apps, etc.
jeroenhd 4y ago
Resolutions and HDR are one area where I think the extra RAM load and increasing application sizes make complete sense. However, my monitors run at 1080p, don't do HDR, and my video files are rncoded at a standard colour depth. Despite all this, the standalone RAM usage has increased over the years. Accessibility has actually gone down with the switch to web applications. Microsoft had an excellent accessibility framework with subpar but usable tooling built in, and excellent commercial applications to make use of the existing API, all the way back in Windows XP. Backwards compatibility hacks such as loading old memory manager behaviour and allocating extra buffer space for known buggy applications may take more RAM but don't increase any requirements. Inagree that requirements have grown but not by the amount reflected in standby CPU and memory use. Don't forget that we've also gained near universal SSD availability, negating the need for RAM caches in many circumstances. And that's just ignoring the advance in CPU and GPU performance since the Windows XP days, when DOS was finally killed off and the amount of necessary custom tailored assembly drastically dropped. When I boot a Windows XP machine, the only thing I can say I'm really missing as a user is application support. Alright, the Windows XP kernel was incredibly insecure, so let's upgrade to Windows 7 where the painful Vista driver days are behind us and the kernel has been reshaped to put a huge amount of vulnerable code in userspace. What am I missing now? Touchscreen and pen support works, 4k resolutions and higher are supported perfectly fine, almost all modern games still run. The Steam hardware survey says it all. The largest target audience using their computer components the most runs one or two 1080p monitors, has 6 CPU cores and about 8GB of RAM. Your average consumer doesn't need or use all of that. HiDPI and HDR are a niche and designing your OS around a niche is stupid.
- michaelmrose 4y ago
  SSD access times are as much as 100,000 ns memory 50 ms SSD do not negate the virtue of cache.
  - jeroenhd 4y ago
    True, but with those access times you can wait a lot longer for content to be loaded into RAM. Hard drives are the reason for many years games needed to duplicate their assets, for example, because seek times slowed down loading time and putting the same content in the file twice but at the right place would speed up the loading process significantly. Games today still have special HDD code because of the difference in performance class. SSDs won't replace RAM but many RAM caches aren't performance critical; sometimes you need your code to be reasonably fast on a laptop with a 5400 rpm hard drive and then you have very little choice of data structures. With the random access patterns SSDs allow this complication quickly disappears. You won't find many Android apps that will cache 8MB block reads to compensate for a spinning hard drive, for example.
znpy 4y ago
to be honest i'd give up most of today's niceties to get a snappier computer experience. and to be honest, nowadays the biggest issue is the web browser and the sheer amount of memory and processing that modern websites use. it's unbelievable.
- mixedCase 4y ago
  It is still possible to have a snappy computer experience. Go Linux, use a very configurable distro (Arch, Gentoo, NixOS), choose a lightweight DE and app ecosystem and it will get you there for the most part. Browsers are still going to be the sticking point, but with agressive adblockers/noscript and hardware that's not terribly old (NVMe storage is priority 1), and you should be set. But of course, snappiness isn't free and you have to spend some time doing first time set-ups and maintenance.
  - znpy 4y ago
    I’m on debian and using xfce. The problem is the web browser. I’ve got 16 gb of ram and the browser is using most of them. I can literally see the swap space emptying when i have (as in “im forced to”) sacrifice my browsing session (xkill the browser) due to constant swap out to disk. And I’m using a pci gen 3 nvme disk, and already lowered swappiness. The problem is the web browser.
    - enticingturtle 4y ago
      Are you actually seeing degraded performance, or do you just have an aesthetic dislike of swapping?
      - znpy 4y ago
        I’m seeing literal freezes (can’t do anything, even mouse pointer is frozen). But if I kill the browser everything becomes snappy again.
        4y ago
yobbo 4y ago
> HDR, fluid animations, monstrous resolutions, 3D everything May I remind of https://www.enlightenment.org/ https://www.enlightenment.org/ 20 years ago, there were "live cds" that could do most of what you mention, at maybe 512 MB ram.
- mixedCase 4y ago
  I ran e16 and then e17 as my main desktop back in the day for a good while. I'm sorry but what we had back then was nowhere even near what I'm talking about. It definitely was pretty for the day, though.
  - anthk 4y ago
    Then, OSX. A G4 with 512MB of RAM could perfectly do that at 1280x800.
    - whartung 4y ago
      NeXTSTEP 3.1 ran fine at 1152x832 4 shade mono with 20MB of RAM. 32MB if you were running color. It was also rendering Display PostScript on a 25Mhz '040. One of the first machines in its day that allowed you to drag full windows, rather than frames on the desktop. High tech in action!
      - talideon 4y ago
        You could also do that in '92-ish on RISC OS 3 running on a 1MB Acorn Archimedes with 12MHz ARM2 processor, with high quality font antialiasing. Those were the days!
  - prmoustache 4y ago
    What do we have today that we didn't have back them in term of bare desktop support? I mean we have larger resolution support amd scaling for hidpi, better/faster indexation, better touchpad support. Can you name anything else? Localization hasn't progressed that much, I remember already being able to select some barely spoken dialects on linux 20y ago?
wslh 4y ago
Please don't miss the malware within the OS itself: license services for software such as Microsoft Office and Adobe, and other applications without enough resource bounds.
ilyt 4y ago
> Hasn't it, though? HDR, fluid animations, monstrous resolutions, 3D everything, accessibility, fancy APIs for easier development allowing for more features, support for large amounts of devices, backwards compatibility, Soo the feature windows 7 had? I remember running 3D desktop with compositor and fancy effects on 1GB RAM laptop on Linux... RAM requirements for Windows as OS are ridiculus.
pigsty 4y ago
Installing command line tools on my Mac through homebrew takes up hundreds of megabytes each time I download anything. I know that it installs various libraries. I do not know why those libraries are dozens of megabytes each.

agumonkey 4y ago

more features but not sure features i want or need, nor in fun interactions that said 2GB is acceptable considering the state of everything not saying i wouldn't like to have QNX class back

grishka 4y ago

> HDR, fluid animations, monstrous resolutions That's the job of the GPU driver, mostly. > 3D everything That's the desktop compositor. Windows 7 already had one and ran on 1 GB of RAM. > accessibility Not everyone needs it, so it should be an optional installable component for those who do. > fancy APIs for easier development allowing for more features That still use win32 under the hood. Again, .net has existed for a very long time. MFC has existed for an even longer time. > support for large amounts of devices No one asked for Windows on touchscreen anything. Microsoft decided that themselves and ruined the UX for the remaining 99% of the users that still use a mouse and a keyboard. > backwards compatibility That's what Microsoft does historically, nothing new here. > browsers are almost unrecognizable in featureset to the point they resemble an OS unto themselves No one asked for this. My personal opinion is that everything app-like about browsers needs to be undone, yesterday, and they should again become the hypertext document viewers they were meant to be. Even JS is too much, but I guess it does have to stay.

djur 4y ago
> Not everyone needs [accessibility], so it should be an additional installable component for those who do. The UI has to be designed from the ground up to support accessibility.
- grishka 4y ago
  [flagged]
  - dagmx 4y ago
    Accessibility is much more than just labels for a screen reader. Please stop trivializing anything that you don’t use directly, it’s a common thread between all your comments, and it’s a disservice to both the points you’re trying to make and the people who actually use those things . Accessibility includes interaction design, zoom ability, audio commands, action link ups, alternate rendering modes, alternate motion modes, hooks for assistive devices to interact with the system. It goes far deeper into the system than just labels for a screen reader. If you stopped to just think about the vast number of disabilities out there, you’d realize how untrue your statement is.
    - grishka 4y ago
      My point is that accessibility being a thing shouldn't ruin the UI for the people who don't need it. There's no need to visually redesign anything to introduce accessibility. Apps don't need to be made aware whether some control has focus because the user has pressed the tab key, or because it's being focused by a screen reader, or because of some other assistive technology. Colors and font sizes can also be configured and they've been configurable since at least Windows 3.1 — and that is exposed to apps. Again, I don't see how the things you specified can't be built into existing win32 APIs and why anything needs to be designed from the ground up to support them.
      - dagmx 4y ago
        Your point about “apps don’t need to be made aware” is precisely the reason accessibility is part of the system UI framework. Accessibility is also not something that is just a binary. You may be slightly short sighted and need larger text, you might need an OS specified colour palette that overrides the apps rendering. There’s just so many levels of nuance here. It’s not just “apps can configure a palette”, it’s that they need to work across the system If you have the time, I really suggest watching the Apple developer videos on accessibility to see why it’s not just as simple as you put it. Microsoft do a lot of great work for accessibility too , they just don’t have much content up to delve into it. As to why it has to be developed from the ground up, it doesn’t, but it needs to be at the foundation regardless. Apple for example didn’t redo their UI for accessibility, however Microsoft take a more “we won’t touch existing stuff in case we break it” approach to their core libs. Also , again, I’d point out that you’re purposefully trying to trivialize something you don’t use.

flohofwoe 4y ago

> fancy APIs for easier development allowing for more features Windows didn't really see a lot of actual progress in this area since the Win2k days. Lots of activity and churn yes, but little actual progress.

_Algernon_ 4y ago
Further abstractions on top of windows have though: websites, electron apps, etc.

jeroenhd 4y ago

Resolutions and HDR are one area where I think the extra RAM load and increasing application sizes make complete sense. However, my monitors run at 1080p, don't do HDR, and my video files are rncoded at a standard colour depth. Despite all this, the standalone RAM usage has increased over the years. Accessibility has actually gone down with the switch to web applications. Microsoft had an excellent accessibility framework with subpar but usable tooling built in, and excellent commercial applications to make use of the existing API, all the way back in Windows XP. Backwards compatibility hacks such as loading old memory manager behaviour and allocating extra buffer space for known buggy applications may take more RAM but don't increase any requirements. Inagree that requirements have grown but not by the amount reflected in standby CPU and memory use. Don't forget that we've also gained near universal SSD availability, negating the need for RAM caches in many circumstances. And that's just ignoring the advance in CPU and GPU performance since the Windows XP days, when DOS was finally killed off and the amount of necessary custom tailored assembly drastically dropped. When I boot a Windows XP machine, the only thing I can say I'm really missing as a user is application support. Alright, the Windows XP kernel was incredibly insecure, so let's upgrade to Windows 7 where the painful Vista driver days are behind us and the kernel has been reshaped to put a huge amount of vulnerable code in userspace. What am I missing now? Touchscreen and pen support works, 4k resolutions and higher are supported perfectly fine, almost all modern games still run. The Steam hardware survey says it all. The largest target audience using their computer components the most runs one or two 1080p monitors, has 6 CPU cores and about 8GB of RAM. Your average consumer doesn't need or use all of that. HiDPI and HDR are a niche and designing your OS around a niche is stupid.

michaelmrose 4y ago
SSD access times are as much as 100,000 ns memory 50 ms SSD do not negate the virtue of cache.
- jeroenhd 4y ago
  True, but with those access times you can wait a lot longer for content to be loaded into RAM. Hard drives are the reason for many years games needed to duplicate their assets, for example, because seek times slowed down loading time and putting the same content in the file twice but at the right place would speed up the loading process significantly. Games today still have special HDD code because of the difference in performance class. SSDs won't replace RAM but many RAM caches aren't performance critical; sometimes you need your code to be reasonably fast on a laptop with a 5400 rpm hard drive and then you have very little choice of data structures. With the random access patterns SSDs allow this complication quickly disappears. You won't find many Android apps that will cache 8MB block reads to compensate for a spinning hard drive, for example.

znpy 4y ago

to be honest i'd give up most of today's niceties to get a snappier computer experience. and to be honest, nowadays the biggest issue is the web browser and the sheer amount of memory and processing that modern websites use. it's unbelievable.

mixedCase 4y ago
It is still possible to have a snappy computer experience. Go Linux, use a very configurable distro (Arch, Gentoo, NixOS), choose a lightweight DE and app ecosystem and it will get you there for the most part. Browsers are still going to be the sticking point, but with agressive adblockers/noscript and hardware that's not terribly old (NVMe storage is priority 1), and you should be set. But of course, snappiness isn't free and you have to spend some time doing first time set-ups and maintenance.
- znpy 4y ago
  I’m on debian and using xfce. The problem is the web browser. I’ve got 16 gb of ram and the browser is using most of them. I can literally see the swap space emptying when i have (as in “im forced to”) sacrifice my browsing session (xkill the browser) due to constant swap out to disk. And I’m using a pci gen 3 nvme disk, and already lowered swappiness. The problem is the web browser.
  - enticingturtle 4y ago
    Are you actually seeing degraded performance, or do you just have an aesthetic dislike of swapping?
    - znpy 4y ago
      I’m seeing literal freezes (can’t do anything, even mouse pointer is frozen). But if I kill the browser everything becomes snappy again.
      - 4y ago

yobbo 4y ago

> HDR, fluid animations, monstrous resolutions, 3D everything May I remind of https://www.enlightenment.org/ https://www.enlightenment.org/ 20 years ago, there were "live cds" that could do most of what you mention, at maybe 512 MB ram.

mixedCase 4y ago
I ran e16 and then e17 as my main desktop back in the day for a good while. I'm sorry but what we had back then was nowhere even near what I'm talking about. It definitely was pretty for the day, though.
- anthk 4y ago
  Then, OSX. A G4 with 512MB of RAM could perfectly do that at 1280x800.
  - whartung 4y ago
    NeXTSTEP 3.1 ran fine at 1152x832 4 shade mono with 20MB of RAM. 32MB if you were running color. It was also rendering Display PostScript on a 25Mhz '040. One of the first machines in its day that allowed you to drag full windows, rather than frames on the desktop. High tech in action!
    - talideon 4y ago
      You could also do that in '92-ish on RISC OS 3 running on a 1MB Acorn Archimedes with 12MHz ARM2 processor, with high quality font antialiasing. Those were the days!
- prmoustache 4y ago
  What do we have today that we didn't have back them in term of bare desktop support? I mean we have larger resolution support amd scaling for hidpi, better/faster indexation, better touchpad support. Can you name anything else? Localization hasn't progressed that much, I remember already being able to select some barely spoken dialects on linux 20y ago?

wslh 4y ago

Please don't miss the malware within the OS itself: license services for software such as Microsoft Office and Adobe, and other applications without enough resource bounds.

ilyt 4y ago

> Hasn't it, though? HDR, fluid animations, monstrous resolutions, 3D everything, accessibility, fancy APIs for easier development allowing for more features, support for large amounts of devices, backwards compatibility, Soo the feature windows 7 had? I remember running 3D desktop with compositor and fancy effects on 1GB RAM laptop on Linux... RAM requirements for Windows as OS are ridiculus.

pigsty 4y ago

Installing command line tools on my Mac through homebrew takes up hundreds of megabytes each time I download anything. I know that it installs various libraries. I do not know why those libraries are dozens of megabytes each.