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Sijmen Mulder

I commented "laptops don't get slow, software does" on a video on upgrading your laptop and WOW was I taken aback by some of the response.

People actually believe degrading thermal paste is to blame for a messenger app taking half a gig of RAM?

That the Epic games launcher takes ages to launch because it has so many features?

That a news website is downloading and interpreting a small operating system worth of code for-what-reason-exactly is the march of progress?

#performance #software

97 comments
ClaudioM

@sjmulder Those and many others are the reasons I'm so disillusioned by technology if all sorts today.

Ben Foote

@sjmulder I've been screaming this at anyone that would listen for years, and everyone tells me I'm crazy. I remember having a single threaded 486 with 32 megs of RAM that was more responsive than my Windows 11 work computer that has a top end zillion core Xeon and 64 gigs of RAM.

HowToPhil (Phillip R)

@benpocalypse @sjmulder

It's fun to take a "modern" computer and install FreeDOS, AntiX, etc on it and see it completely hit "Warp speed"

Sijmen Mulder

@howtophil FreeDOS is just a different level!

What saddens me is that every few years even Linux gets less and less useful. A Latitude laptop that runs XP super well can barely handle any window manager featuring a task bar.

HowToPhil (Phillip R)

@sjmulder

I do long for the days of FVWM95

AntiX is very usable and fairly "modern" so you might want to check out that distro.

I am not a fan of the kernel folks "retiring" "old architecture"

Linux should still blaze on a 386 and should have /expanded/ to run in some way on 8088/8086/286/etc (semi-RIP ELKS)

Sijmen Mulder

@howtophil I'll try it!

Wrt pre-Pentium machines, it's cool that the 486 is still supported by NetBSD but it requires a good amount of RAM.

HowToPhil (Phillip R)

@sjmulder That's when I start looking at FreeDOS and a totally legit copy of GeoWorks I have (set the filesystem type to os2 in the geoworks conf after install)

HowToPhil (Phillip R)

@sjmulder

I have AntiX on a laptop that originally shipped with XP and it is snappy

antixlinux.com/about/

kali yuga fornication
@howtophil @sjmulder i've still got antiX on this 2007 EeePC and it feels no different than when i first started using antiX on it back in however long it was ago now

with only one major, tragic exception: web browsing
Mark. Just Mark.

@sjmulder @howtophil this makes me think of how useful my Commodore Amiga was back in the pre-web 90's.
1 MB ram, 7 MHz CPU, 80 MB HD and it could do all the docs, spreadsheets, graphics that more serious computers could, as well as play some awesome games.
All with a snappy, responsive, windowed multitasking GUI.

HowToPhil (Phillip R)

@markjustmark @sjmulder My middle-school had Geoworks on some PCs and moving to HS with Windows felt like a step back. "What do you mean no autosave? What about when the power goes out???"

Dave Smith

@markjustmark @sjmulder @howtophil In my first year at Uni, I could work in Turbo Pascal running on a DOS emulator on my A500 with a Norton SI score of 0.2 :) All off floppy disks, couldn't afford the HD

Howard Chu @ Symas

@howtophil @sjmulder 8086? No MMU, 1MB max addressable memory? You could run Minix on that, but don't expect much.

HowToPhil (Phillip R)

@sjmulder I also tend to use "Ubuntu Mate" (Lubuntu before) which cuts out a lot of cruft.

Ben Foote

@howtophil @sjmulder On all my personal machines I run elementary OS ( @elementary ) and it runs like a top.

HowToPhil (Phillip R)

@benpocalypse @sjmulder @elementary

The docker at the bottom is a hard no for me. Not my UI of choice. I like a nice bar with icons, desktop pager, window taskbar, and menus on it

Rich Felker

@sjmulder @howtophil With XFCE window manager and no other "desktop environment" components loaded, it does fine. There's a lot of garbage in mainstream desktop-oriented distros but you can just... not use it. Which is not possible at all on most other systems.

HowToPhil (Phillip R)

@dalias @sjmulder I use Ubuntu Mate most of the time. It's lightweight enough while still making daily tasks easy

ttyS1

@howtophil @dalias @sjmulder indeed, I am also on mate. Couldn't use much anything else.

Nicolai Brodersen Hansen

@howtophil @dalias @sjmulder very true, my father uses my 13 year old Dell XPS with Lubuntu and it runs fast enough for me to not get annoyed.

Damon L. Wakes

@sjmulder @howtophil Yeah, this bugs me too. I've got an incredibly old netbook that i use to write while travelling, and it's becoming more and more of a challenge to find a distro that runs well on it.

Damon L. Wakes

@ubergeek @sjmulder @howtophil I saw a recommendation for that elsewhere in the replies! Definitely one to check out next time my current setup breaks down (or I shell out for a very cheap SSD to swap in and give it a go).

Ubergeek

@sjmulder @howtophil I think Linux "bloat" is manageable. Take antix, for example. Runs just fine on an old 32 bit netbook.

It takes some work to trim it up, or to build minimally from the ground up, but it can be done because it's FLOSS.

Not saying it's a solved problem, but that it can be a solved problem.

Sijmen Mulder

@benpocalypse yes it's infuriating! I have a Pentium III sitting right here rocking Windows 2000 with Visual C++6 and it flies.

Meanwhile in the clockapp people are condescendingly gaslighting me about presumed rose tinted glasses.

cliffordheath

@benpocalypse @sjmulder I will never forget typing "cc hello.c" on the 8MHz 8086-based Altos 586 and seeing the shell prompt come instantly back. I thought it had done nothing, but a.out was there, after running 2 compiler passes, assembler and linker. "/bin/cat" was just 238 bytes, and stdio was a shared lib

Space Hobo Actual

@benpocalypse @sjmulder When that 486 was still current, I remember tech journalists moaning that "Electric Pencil" on 8-bit machines could react faster than they could type, but MS Word on a 486 was becoming excruciating.

Plus ça change...

Potung Thul

@benpocalypse
@sjmulder

My favorite time was when every single program in Windows was huge and bulky, and then along came the smartphones and installing something on the smartphone took maybe only one or two megs, and then you wonder, what is wrong with Windows programs?

m0xEE

@benpocalypse
> 32 megs of RAM
One of the rich kids, huh? 😏
@sjmulder

Oskar van Ganz

@benpocalypse @sjmulder Andy and Bill's law is alive and well: "what Andy giveth, Bill taketh away".

Matthew Wilson

@sjmulder For most people, I suspect that increasing RAM consumption is the big one. The PC that I'm using here is 10 years old. 2 years ago I stuck another 16GB in it and it was like a supercomputer again (relatively).

Sijmen Mulder

@thisMattWilson my impression is that heavy web sites are the real culprit, no matter how fast the rest of the system, that Pentium M is gonna choke on megabytes of JavaScript.

Ubergeek

@sjmulder @thisMattWilson yep. This is where my netbook meets it's match - common websites like discord, YouTube, etc.

It plays YouTube videos just dandy, via mpv. Not via the browser.

George Liquor :verified:

@sjmulder You're so goddamn right. I've "repaired" two different Windows 10 laptops in the past 6 months by disabling Fast Boot.

It's a checkbox in the OS. And it will cripple the OS.

Maddad The Friendly Ghost 👻

@sjmulder

They are probably the same ones that think Linux has Donkey Kong grade graphics lol

Stu

@sjmulder Yup. My Surface Pro 3 is depressingly sluggish on a fully up to date Win 10. Only Office, Firefox, and a couple of tools installed.

I used to say it was "iPad fast, but with a full OS" when it ran Win 8/8.1. I don't know what guff they're doing now, but it makes using this machine feel like an old android phone.

A cool crab wearing shades

@sjmulder I used a low end laptop from 2008* up until a couple years ago when keys started coming off and a replacement keyboard was $50 more than I wanted to spend on it.

It wasn't a stellar experience or nothing, the 4200 rpm hard drive was always slow and stodgy, but you could really feel the way the web was getting more bloated. I'd throw a fresh linux on it periodically whenever I'd fucked something up or there were a lot of security updates in the queue and it was just faster to start fresh without cruft.

*not as my main system but I would typically use it one day a week for entertainment and to write away from desktop

@sjmulder I used a low end laptop from 2008* up until a couple years ago when keys started coming off and a replacement keyboard was $50 more than I wanted to spend on it.

It wasn't a stellar experience or nothing, the 4200 rpm hard drive was always slow and stodgy, but you could really feel the way the web was getting more bloated. I'd throw a fresh linux on it periodically whenever I'd fucked something up or there were a lot of security updates in the queue and it was just faster to start fresh without cruft.

A cool crab wearing shades

@sjmulder I could play locally stored video or music (bluetooth was a bit dodgy but wired was fine) basically without issue. Streaming was slightly dodgier but Youtube worked alright, Spotify would occasionally vomit and require Firefox to be restarted. Google Docs was a bit slow (especially if minimized for a bit) but basically usable. Discord similarly slow but usable.

If it was Xchat instead of Discord and a lightish local word processor I think it would be totally fine.

Elda King

@sjmulder I mean, I had to replace my thermal paste because my 10+ year laptop was throttling a lot, but it is not like fixing that made it run all the software that now require higher specs than it has.

C.

@sjmulder

"Upgrading / replacing / refreshing my heatsink thermal compound" is the go-faster crowd's new "defragging my hard disk".

They're cargo-culting their way through technology, as always.

#CargoCult #faster #techie #wizard

railmeat

@sjmulder Thermal paste? Yeah the newer stuff is hotter, it makes everything run faster.

Heals :heart_nb: (comms open)

@sjmulder clearly degrading hardware causes electron and other website wrappers to manifest in previously good software. It must be the reason.

birdpoof

@sjmulder

Ahh, that just reminded of my obsession with tinyapps.org back in the day. Hey, the site still exists! (The links may not, though.)

Jhooper

@sjmulder developers get lazy. Part of it is because they help push hardware adoption numbers, but also a fair part is that no one really cares to optimize software anymore.

kali yuga fornication
@jhooper @sjmulder not lazy, just crunch, high turnaround, lots of newer people who don't know how because they've never worked on low-level stuff, all having to appease pointy-haired bosses and dunning-kruger dipshit investors who demand features without knowing what they are

also excuse to sell more hardware (and produce more e-waste and more power consumption and carbon emissions and anyway the true telos of mankind is God's punishment for the sins of the biosphere)
@jhooper @sjmulder not lazy, just crunch, high turnaround, lots of newer people who don't know how because they've never worked on low-level stuff, all having to appease pointy-haired bosses and dunning-kruger dipshit investors who demand features without knowing what they are
Pin

@sjmulder I had almost no data left on my phone and I thought "I can use twitter and deactivate images and videos in the app. In the early 00s I had 5GB/month for DSL and it was more than enough." I was really surprised how much data twitter uses...

Jernej Simončič �

@sjmulder I was just ranting while reviewing a changeset in Gitlab, because instead of loading the whole thing at once, Gitlab insists on 1. loading it dynamically and 2. unloading it when I scroll too far away, which completely breaks searching, and makes everything slower because it has to fetch stuff from the server as I scroll around. The full .diff file is 68 kB, apparently that's too much for modern browsers to handle.

DELETED

@jernej__s I'd get it in some cases where we're dealing with gigs or more but that like 2 packets iirc so that's insane, also any site that's unloading stuff like that instead of caching it is evil and I hate it and I feel you

Willow "Wolveric" Catkin

@sjmulder I mean... *technically* there are some modern CPU instructions which should improve the performance of expressions in some cases... though usually having minimal or zero difference... ¯⁠\⁠_⁠(⁠ツ⁠)⁠_⁠/⁠¯

Plus, it's not like new instruction sets are being released each generation, so it isn't like that's a significant factor!

Drikanis

@sjmulder I think PWAs are some of the biggest offenders on that front. I seriously can't even open some apps or sites without running completely out of RAM on some of my older hardware.

Vultumast

@sjmulder My grandparents old computer still works perfectly fine for what they use it for. That being writing letters and such in an old version of word.

Ari [APz] Sovijärvi

@sjmulder The web is already a perfect example of this. The mentality has seen "if the web page is slow, maybe you should upgrade your old piece of junk computer". Then when I put a badly performing web page through the inspector, well oh look at that, the person who made it decided to include several frameworks, probably because those were the answer for "how do I do X in HTML5?"

I have a lot of "junk" computers in use, yet they run just fine with my Linux setup despite others' protests.

kali yuga fornication
@sjmulder there's a specific glitch in the human brain that one would think should be easily patched if we'd been developed by a competent team, but what i've seen of the team leaves me in utter despair of anything ever improving: the *strong, unconscious, auto-confabulatingly-rationalized* presumption that, if some higher power or authority has produced or enacted something that looks like shit, there must be some good reason for it

all we'd need to fix this is to make that presumption always consciously recognized and easily rebuttable

fixing this would solve an incredible amount of our problems

there is as much good reason for it to be the way it is as there is a chance to fix it for a critical mass of humanity (0.00%)
@sjmulder there's a specific glitch in the human brain that one would think should be easily patched if we'd been developed by a competent team, but what i've seen of the team leaves me in utter despair of anything ever improving: the *strong, unconscious, auto-confabulatingly-rationalized* presumption that, if some higher power or authority has produced or enacted something that looks like shit, there must be some good reason for it
ferricoxide

@sjmulder@bsd.network

So much shit, any more, is soooo leaky. It's like, "you do text, why do you need a gig of RAM just to display text???"

I seem to ask that of every tool that uses Electron.

DELETED

@sjmulder some sites run a whole vm in your browser just to keep you from seeing what they’re doing

Gretchen Anderson

@sjmulder the gerbil inside gets old and tires out, duh

Jimmy Havok

@sjmulder 90% of those people have never defragged or run a cleaner app.

Deadly Headshot

@sjmulder
I thought old spinning rust hard drives slowed down though?

Chickerino

@sjmulder that games run worse and worse without any noticable graphical improvements while simultaneously requiring ssds

Bernd Petrovitsch🇦🇹#ZeroCovid

@sjmulder The older of us grow up with "what Andy gives takes Bill away" ...

Raymond Russell

@sjmulder
History shows that machines that have fixed specification get noticeable better software as their commercial lives go on as programmers get to grips with the hardware and squeeze every last bit of performance out of them.
The games at the beginning of the original Playstations life vs. games a few years into its life is a good example. Plus all the home micros from the 80/90's were getting much superior software by the end of their commercial lives.

leah & asm & forth, oh my!

@raymierussell @sjmulder i have been saying this for the commercial lifetimes of several consoles now ;-)

mos_8502 :verified:

@millihertz @raymierussell @sjmulder There is very little I am interested in anymore that can’t be done with a combination of an 80s microcomputer and some modern accessories.

Ark 🏳️‍⚧️

@sjmulder people really believe that? An asus eeepc from 30 years ago that I got my hands on still runs XP fine. Fucking thermal paste isn’t what stops it from running windows 10.

Inkican

@sjmulder if you need me, I'll be in my bunker with my Apple IIe

Matt

@sjmulder Yep, planned obsolescence at work. There are many factors going into this, some are software industry and some are the the nature of hardware. Contingencies for memory access escalation, such as Row-hammer and it's ilk, mean the microcode and/or have have changed such that throughput is reduced. Your disk(s) (platter or solid state) both will degrade in speed for different reasons. A new driver might introduce some chaos into how your OS kernel behaves.

4turrets_nodefects

@sjmulder hey kid, you ever heard of plan 9? 😎️ On a more serious note I have an old thinkpad T400 I still use. still the single best laptop I've ever owned, 16:10 display, best keyboard I've ever used and a trackpoint. Still runs surprisingly well too but yeah it's definitely showing it's age. Really the only thing I like better about modern machines is the battery life.

Sijmen Mulder

@xactoknife Plan 9 is fascinating but I haven't yet had the guts to dive into it myself!

r00sty

@sjmulder it's fascinating the things people choose to believe instead of reality.

Alexander Schmidt-Lebuhn

@sjmulder

To quote a colleague:

"Intel giveth, and Microsoft taketh away"

Bill Zaumen

@sjmulder I once had a sales rep at a major U.S. cell phone carrier tell me, "we find that dirty SIM cards are the main reason for dropped calls." I managed to refrain from laughing at him, but when I told engineers working at AMD and Nokia about what this guy said, they almost fell on the floor laughing. Hint for corporate America: such BS might work in rural Oklahoma, but don't try it in Silicon Valley.

Bill Zaumen

@sjmulder For similar example, some years ago, a friend wanted to copy a large number of images, and get rid of spaces in file names. I plugged his disk into a System 76 Ratel (several years old), ran ls, used emacs to create a script with a series of 'cp' commands, and started the script. After a minute or two of us chatting, I looked at the screen and the program had finished. He was blown away - it would have taken over an hour on his Apple system: showing progress is expensive.

Martin

@sjmulder

How dare you?

But in fact I can imagine that clogged up air vents (is this the right word in this case?) full of dust increase thermal problems resulting in lower frequencies by some hardware protection.

And degraded batteries also lower the time without power supply.

Yet, my 10 year old PC (same for laptop) is still quick as on its first day when firing up mutt or rendering a web page (or mail) with lynx or links. Even when a notification for a new article takes up 110kB or 2614 lines. (For a simple "XYZ wrote something new. Click here to read it: <500 char long link>")

@sjmulder

How dare you?

But in fact I can imagine that clogged up air vents (is this the right word in this case?) full of dust increase thermal problems resulting in lower frequencies by some hardware protection.

And degraded batteries also lower the time without power supply.

Yet, my 10 year old PC (same for laptop) is still quick as on its first day when firing up mutt or rendering a web page (or mail) with lynx or links. Even when a notification for a new article takes up 110kB or 2614 lines....

Astra

@sjmulder@bsd.network gotta admit though, Epic games launcher is bloated no matter what machine you run it on

annie grant

@sjmulder
Developers can find a lot of joy in designing for thrift and efficiency but it requires more thought and planning than throwing together a splashy, bloated product generally does.

nojhan

@sjmulder People also believe that neural networks became faster to train because of GPUs. Software is just too abstract for most people.

Wayne

@sjmulder At work I was running an i3 laptop with 8 gigs of ram. Running a fairly recent 2016 Windows excel and word and caseware. Had a mechanical drive. Ran it on Windows 7 still that was deprecated and then Windows 10. Dispite the 10 minute start up. Where I would go to the bathroom and make some coffee it ran as well as every other machine. Because everyone else had downloaded a bunch of shit into their system. Which was hogging resources. I also had one of the best battery lives. Install only what you need. I got an SSD in the end but I still went to the toilet and made myself some coffee.

@sjmulder At work I was running an i3 laptop with 8 gigs of ram. Running a fairly recent 2016 Windows excel and word and caseware. Had a mechanical drive. Ran it on Windows 7 still that was deprecated and then Windows 10. Dispite the 10 minute start up. Where I would go to the bathroom and make some coffee it ran as well as every other machine. Because everyone else had downloaded a bunch of shit into their system. Which was hogging resources. I also had one of the best battery lives. Install only...

Damon C. Jones

@sjmulder truth. I love putting #ZorinOS on old laptops and handing it back to people.

calm.like.a.bomb

@sjmulder I hate that everyone in software development now uses VSCode, a glorified editor in a full browser. In the meantime I'm using (neo)vim and get 90% of the features, but using a fraction of the cpu and ram.

foofy

@sjmulder as a javascript developer i both hate this trend and am guilty of furthering it 😅

Felix B. Ohmann

@sjmulder yeah well. thats what you get when people have zero understanding of the tools they use.

Reiddragon :ablobcatattention:
@sjmulder meanwhile I found a video just the other day that turns some old PowerMacs into fully usable modern machines just installing modern Linux on them, they're as good as new, meanwhile modern macOS would have no chance running on them even if it still supported PowerPC

and from my own personal experience: had a Lenovo G50-45 which was... not the fastest laptop of 2015, to say the least

Windows 10 struggled to keep a steady framerate on the desktop by 2018, Arch Linux with KDE Plasma would still purr on it like it was brand new by 2020, still handled the older games I played when I got it the same as it did brand new

but sure, hardware just degrades in performance and software definitely doesn't make a mockery of any performance improvements hardware still gets generation to generation
@sjmulder meanwhile I found a video just the other day that turns some old PowerMacs into fully usable modern machines just installing modern Linux on them, they're as good as new, meanwhile modern macOS would have no chance running on them even if it still supported PowerPC
tursiops

@sjmulder yeah i have users in my company that complain that their computer is slow when they're trying to access network file shares on the other side of the world. And i have to explain that it's not a problem with their computer but it's a normal network behavior when accessing remote files....

Felix B. Ohmann

@sjmulder reminds me of this. yeah, lets waste millions ofhours in loading screens because of shitty json parsers:nee.lv/2021/02/28/How-I-cut-GT

ehproque

@sjmulder it saved some developer a couple hours, thus improving the bottomline. Progress!

jessica :lily_autistic: :lily_asexual:

@sjmulder I had an unusable Macbook Air from around 2011, just so slow, sluggish, and laggy.

Not had one single issue with it since I removed macOS and installed Linux on it. First Mint, and now Manjaro. Both work perfectly fine.

It's the software.

augmented jungle

@sjmulder@bsd.network tbh thermal paste in laptops is really shit but all i've seen that do was temperatures getting over 65 degrees on light load and fans getting really loud

Aperture!

@sjmulder i mean it definitely can be both for the record
poorly maintained hardware will perform worse than better maintained hardware, though a large issue with old hardware is the bloat of modern windows and applications

like you won't be able to play diablo 1 well on the systems it was meant to run on if you never changed the thermal paste and left the vents clogged

i agree with the sentiment about software being unoptimized, but laptops do get slow unmaintained, even if software stays the same

but yeah putting linux on an old machine can help it a lot in my experience, but these old guys need some physical and mental care, both need to be fixed for a machine to be happy

@sjmulder i mean it definitely can be both for the record
poorly maintained hardware will perform worse than better maintained hardware, though a large issue with old hardware is the bloat of modern windows and applications

like you won't be able to play diablo 1 well on the systems it was meant to run on if you never changed the thermal paste and left the vents clogged

i agree with the sentiment about software being unoptimized, but laptops do get slow unmaintained, even if software stays the same

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