“Let them eat ram”
I dislike a lot the framing of this.
Yes, the average software runs much less efficient. But is efficiency what the user want? No. It is not.
How many people will tell you that they stick to windows instead of switching to linux because linux is all terminal? And terminal is quicker, more efficient for most things. But the user wants a gui.
And if we compare modern gui to old gui… I don’t think modern us 15x worse.
There isn’t anything fundamentally slower about using a GUI vs just text in a console. There’s more to draw but it scales linearly. The drawing things on the screen part isn’t the slow bit for slow programs. Well, it can be if it’s coded inefficiently, but there are plenty of programs with GUIs that are snappy… Like games, which generally draw even more complex things than your average GUI app.
Slow apps are more likely because of an inefficient framework (like running in a web browser with heavy reliance on scripts rather than native code), inefficient algorithms that scale poorly, poor resource use, bad organization that results in doing the same operation more times than necessary, etc.
The terminal is quicker. Not because of the image is drawn more quickly but because it is more efficient to do anything.
Technically true, but there’s a threshold on responsiveness. If both user interfaces respond in milliseconds, it doesn’t matter if one is more efficient
It does because it highlights that instead of being excited to “have to use the terminal” as it is more “efficient” but instead they prefer the “slower” prettier gui. The user want the stupid animations and the flashy nonsense. The user doesn’t want quick software. They want pretty software.
Ah, you’re one of the Linux gatekeepers. You’re not worth bothering with anymore. Tah tah
How am I gatekeeping?
I am not telling anyone to use Linux in anyway or to not use it in anyway. I am just pointing out that the average user wants a pretty/convenient gui and not the most efficient tool. That isn’t bad. I don’t want to eat some weird mixture of nutrients because it is optimal, I want to eat food that I enjoy eating.
I am calling out the weird focus on efficiency of software when the average user wants a good user experience. The user’s desire is not good nor bad, they just highlights that focusing on criticising efficiency of software is a strange thing to do, if the customer desires something else. It is like complaining that grindr is lacking heterosexual people.
Can you elaborate on that? I disagree but would like to understand why you think that. Maybe you’re referring to something I wouldn’t disagree with.
E.g. From the terminal, I open a known file far more quickly then through an gui. Even if I want to use a gui for the file, issuing the opening command is quicker in the terminal.
GUIs often require the user to scan the interface to find the relevant information as the developer didn’t know what you are actually searching.
With a terminal, the user can be much more precise in what they seeking and consequently, less information is provided and less information needs to be scanned by the user.
The average user doesn’t want to remember and type a specific phrase to do something though. Even if it is “faster” and more “efficient”, the user want to be guided towards the information. The user wants a good user experience, not a fast/efficient one.
Pretty and guided, that is what the average user wants. Modern software is pretty and guided, not efficient and fast. Yes, developer became lazy in optimisation and like to use some big framework to save dev time. But the user also wanted it that way by wanting pretty GUIs because that is easier with the big frameworks.
Ah, that’s efficiency of use and depends more on how familiar you are with the software as well as the design and task. Like editing an image or video is going to be a lot easier with a gui than a command line interface (other than generating slop I guess).
When people talk about how efficient software is, it’s usually referring more to the amount of resources it uses (including time) to run its processes.
Eg an electron app is running a browser that is manipulating and rendering html elements running JavaScript (or other scripts/semi-compiled code). There is an interpreter that needs to process whatever code it is to do the manipulation and then an html renderer to turn that into an image to display on the screen. The interpreter and renderer run as machine code on the CPU, interacting with the window manager and the kernel.
A native app doesn’t bother with the interpreter and html renderer and itself runs as machine code on the CPU and interacts with the window manager and kernel. This saves a bunch of memory, since there isn’t an intermediate html state that needs to be stored, and time by cutting out the interpreter and html render steps.
I know. That is why I started my statement by stating that I don’t like the framing. It treats “efficiency” as the point of software. As the thing, that we should care about when judging software.
But it isn’t. It is user experience. And yes, efficiency is part of that. Both, efficiency in execution and efficiency of use.
And the user experience has improved a lot (ignoring intentional anti patterns to exploit the user that are fairly common, but i think we can agree to ignore that for the sake of the conversation)
But the user wants a gui.
Firstly, plenty of Linux instances have GUI. I installed Mint precisely because I wanted to keep the Windows/Mac desktop experience I was familiar with. GUIs add latency, sure. But we’ve had smooth GUI experiences since Apple’s 1980s OS. This isn’t the primary load on the system.
Secondly, as the Windows OS tries to do more and more online interfacing, the bottleneck that used to be CPU or open Memory or even Graphics is increasingly internet latency. Even just going to the start menu means making calls out online. Querying your local file system has built in calls to OneDrive. Your system usage is being constantly polled and tracked and monitored as part of the Microsoft imitative to feed their AI platforms. And because all of these off-platform calls create external vulnerabilities, the (abhorrently designed) antivirus and firewall systems are constantly getting invoked to protect you from the online traffic you didn’t ask for.
It’s a black hole of bloatware.
I am not saying linux is terminal. I am saying that people tell you that linux is all terminal and that they want a gui.
Linux gui is much prettier than Windows anyway.
TVs became SmartTVs and now need the internet to turn on. The TVs need an OS now to internet to do TV.
Antennae broadcast TV seems like an ancient magic.
We’ve deprecated a lot of the old TV/radio signal bandwidth in order to convert it to cellphone signal service.
But, on the flip side, digital antennae can hold a lot more information than the old analog signals. So now I’ve got a TV with a mini-antennae that gets 500 channels (virtually none of which I watch). My toddler son has figured out how to flip the channel to the continuous broadcast of Baby Einstein videos. And he periodically hijacks the TV for that purpose, when we leave the remote where he can reach.
So there’s at least one person I can name who likes the current state of affairs.
I always have to remind myself being able to stream audio from a cellphone while driving across a city is also a pretty crazy development.
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Vista honestly wasn’t as bad as we all said/remember, but it was the start of Windows optimization downturn. It worked great on top of the line systems with tons of power, and was the best looking Windows Microslop ever developed.
It just happened to also coincide with the start of netbooks and low power computers going mainstream, and marketing thought that the F1 requiring OS should also be sold on a 3 door hatchback with 60 horsepower.
Your mileage with Vista was wildly hardware-dependent. Prior to Vista, if you could run one version of Windows, the next version would run just about as well.
The Indexer and Glass were memory hungry. If you gave it a decent amount of ram, it could look like a dream while it did. If you turned off Aero on an under-specced machine, it could also run pretty well, but if you turned off Aero, you didn’t have much of a reason not to just run 98se.
The other shoe was drivers. Noone was ready for WDDM and a LOT of the small to mid-sized hardware vendors emergency released slow, buggy, memory-hungry drivers that just made Vista feel horrible.
I had some off-the-shelf compaqs that ran beautifully, My dual P3/scsi workstation with tons of ram, ran like hot garbage.
God, I almost trauma blocked the driver situation for that first year or three. My q6600 and 8gb of ram ran like greased lightning, and disabling Aero made it even more responsive than 98SE or XP. (I am a latency and user experience fluidity whore though, so sacrificing eye candy for performance was and still is A-OK with me). The Aero design language was still killer even with the bells and whistles turned off.
The main reason to jump from XP (or 98) was the 64 bit jump and breaking the 4gh ram limit. XP x64 was kinda hot garbage, also due to driver issues if I recall correctly.
Yup. Worst part? We’ve produced people who make this justified: users and idiotic managers (really hard for me to estimate which of them are bigger source of shit). And we keep producing them
I’ll keep saying this: my 2009 i5 750 still feels as fast as my 2 years old workstations and can play almost everything I want with the 1060.
On Linux it really is noticeable
Two possible and opposite interpretations of your comment:
- Modern Linux feels exactly as responsive or worse on modern hardware than old Linux used to feel on old hardware.
- Linux feels much more responsive and fast on modern hardware than it does on old hardware, unlinke other OSes.
Well, until you open a browser… or five, because these days nobody wants to build native applications anymore and instead they shove webapps into electron containers.
Right now, my laptop doesn’t have to run much. Just a combination of KDE, browser, emails, music player, a couple of messengers and some background services. In total, that uses about 9.5 GB of RAM. 20 years ago we would have run the same workload with less than 1 GB.
I recently had occasion to run a headless Linux distrk and got my socks knowcked off when I ran top and saw idle RAM use at fucking 400 MB
Yeah, discotd is eating 1.5gb of ram. Actually crazy
whomst is jeavon
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
Whenever efficiency increases consumption increases. Better steam engines mean more coal consumption. Faster cheaper RAM means more RAM consumption.
The problem is not so much badly written programs and websites in terms of algorithms, but rather latency. The latency of loading things from storage, sometimes through the internet is the real bottleneck and why things feel so slow.
even with mothern ssds, things sometimes feel slower than what they were with hdds with time accurate software, windows 7 was snappy even on a hdd, windows 11 is slow and sluggish everywhere
The modern web is an insult to the idea of efficiency at practically every level.
You cannot convince me that isolation and sandboxing requires a fat 4Gb slice of RAM for a measly 4 tabs.
Can’t wait for the new evidence that Epstein is behind that too.
Actshually it’s bandwidth censorship if you make something too heavy to be used then it won’t get used. It is one of the things China is doing to separate their internet from the rest of the worlds, by having an internet so blazingly fast it is unbearable to goto the world wide web.
So yesh, the epstien class are making the news too slow for typical users to access.
china is making webpages that are less than 20 megabytes…but at what cost?
It is crazy that I can have a core 2 duo with 8 gig of RAM that struggles loading web pages
I bought a desktop PC for a little over 2k in late 2011, and still use it. I’m a back-end developer, and certainly I would like to be able to upgrade my 16 GB RAM to 32 GB in an affordable way.
Other than that, it’s perfectly fine. IDE, a few docker containers, works.
And modern gaming is a scam anyway. Realistic graphics do not increase fun, they just eat electricity and our money. Retro gaming or not at all.
Imagine how things were if they were built to be maintained for 15+ years.
2011 means it’s probably DDR3, which is still fairly affordable
wow, you are right! I didn’t bother to check this whole time of needless suffering, but for what I earn with it in less than an hour I could probably buy 2x8 GB DDR-3, lol!
It just seemed a fair assumption that it would be insanely expensive …
PCs aren’t faster, they have more cores, so they can do more at a time, but it takes effort to optimize for parallel work. Also the form factor keeps getting smaller, more people use laptops now and you can’t cheat thermal efficiency.
It’s all about memory latency and bandwidth now which has improved greatly PC’s are still getting faster. There is a new RAM standards being pushed right now CAMM2 is really exciting it pushes back the need for soldered memory.
The faster single core out of order execution performance on newer x86 CPUs lets it work on that higher bandwidth of data too.
What do you mean pc’s aren’t faster? Yes they have more cores, they also clock higher (mostly) and have more instructions per clock. Computers now perform way better than ever before in every single metric most tasks, even linear ones, could be way faster
My first PC ran at 16MHz on turbo.
PCs today are orders of magnitude faster. Way less fun, but faster.
What’s even more orders of magnitude slower and infinitely more bloated is software. Which is the point of the post.
It’s almost impossible to find any piece of actually optimised software these days (with some exceptions like sqlite) to the point that 99% percent of the software currently in use can be considered unintentional (or intentional) malware.
Particularly egregious are web browsers, which seem designed to waste the maximum possible amount of resources and run as inefficiently as possible.
And the fact that most supposedly desktop software these days runs on top of one of those pieces ofintentional (it’s impossible to achieve such levels of inefficiency and bloat unintentionally, it requires active effort) malware obviously doesn’t help.
Turbo slowed your processor down though
Only on some and name brand PC’s which used it for compatibility. For home built or local store, the turbo would overclock. I remember telling a friend, that although their 16mhz could run at 20, to not do it because it would compromise longevity! Ha! Mind you the cpu’s in those days didn’t have heat sinks but still- Oh no your 386 might not work in 20 years from running too hot!
Browsers are not the same as they where. They are basically bikers ring systems in themselves now.
I came from C and C++ and had learned that parallelism is hard. Then I tried parallelism on Rust in a project of mine and it was so insanely easy.
When you become one with the penguin, though … then you can begin to feel how much faster modern hardware is.
Hell, I’ve got a 2016 budget-model chromebook that still feels quick and snappy that way.
I’ve got a 2007 laptop that was shitty even for its time, and it does the job perfectly as a home server with Debian and a few good open source services I want to host
Sadly, it is not how it is for me. I’ve never (in last 20 years) experienced freezes that bad and that frequent as with my new beefy Linux PC.
But… 2016 was a decade ago. If it feels quick and snappy that way that means the post is right.
Which it kinda isn’t but hey.
the point is the software is what’s wrong, not the hardware. it feels snappy because it’s linux, not because it’s hold hardware.
Except the Linux userbase has been saying that exact thing for the past ten years, so again, has Linux also degraded in sync or, hear me out here, is this mostly a nostalgia thing that makes you forget the cludgy performance issues of the software you used when you were younger and things have mostly gotten snappier over time across the board?
As a current dual booter I’ll say that Windows and Linux don’t feel fundamentally different these days, for good and ill. Windows has a remarkably crappy and entirely self-inflicted issue with their online-search-in-Start-menu feature, which sucks but is toggleable at least. Otherwise I have KDE and Win11 set up the same way and they both work pretty much the same. And both measurably better than their respective iterations 10, let alone 15 or 20 years ago.
Windows and Linux don’t feel fundamentally different these days
Try Windows 11 vs. Linux on a shitty old laptop with a budget 2-core processor and 2GB of RAM. Then tell me Windows and Linux don’t feel any different.
My bf bought me a brand new laptop with Win 10 preinstalled, and even after disabling or uninstalling as much as I could, it was literally like watching a slideshow. Then I installed Linux, and it…worked like you’d expect a brand new computer to work, fast and smooth. Never used Win 11 because I stopped using Windows after that.
For anyone unsure: Jevon’s Paradox is that when there’s more of a resource to consume, humans will consume more resource rather than make the gains to use the resource better.
Case in point: AI models could be written to be more efficient in token use (see DeepSeek), but instead AI companies just buy up all the GPUs and shove more compute in.
For the expansive bloat - same goes for phones. Our phones are orders of magnitude better than what they were 10 years ago, and now it’s loaded with bloat because the manufacturer thinks “Well, there’s more computer and memory. Let’s shove more bloat in there!”
Case in point: AI models could be written to be more efficient in token use
They are being written to be more efficient in inference, but the gains are being offset by trying to wring more capabilities out of the models by ballooning token use.
Which is indeed a form of Jevon’s paradox
Costs have been dropping by a factor of 3 per year, but token use increased 40x over the same period. So while the efficiency is contributing a bit to the use, the use is exploding even faster.
I think we’re meaning the same thing.
Yes, but have you considered if I just rephrase what you just said but from a slightly different perspective?
Jevon’s Paradox is that when there’s more of a resource to consume, humans will consume more resource rather than make the gains to use the resource better.
More specifically, it’s when an improvement in efficiency cause the underlying resource to be used more, because the efficiency reduces cost and then using that resource becomes even more economically attractive.
So when factories got more efficient at using coal in the 19th century, England saw a huge increase in coal demand, despite using less coal for any given task.
Also Eli Whitney inventing the cotton gin to make extracting cotton less of a tedious and backbreaking process, which lead to a massive expansion in slavery plantations in the American South due to the increased output and profitability of the crop.
I always felt American car companies were a really good example of that back in the 60s-70s when enormously long vehicles with giant engines were the order of the day. Why not bigger? Why not stronger? It also acted as a symbol of American strength, which was being measured by raw power just like today lol.
This also reminds me of the way video game programmers in the late 70s/early 80s had such tight limitations to work within that you had to get creative if you wanted to make something stand out. Some very interesting stories from that era.
I also love to think about the tricks the programmer of Prince of Persia had employed to get the “shadow prince” to work…
I feel like this is Windows specific. Linux is rapid on PCs and my MacBook is absurdly quick.
Anyone opening the app menu (from the dock or Home Screen) on an iPad will tell you that it’s not exclusive to windows pcs.
Mint Xfce on my 2015 laptop compared to its previous system was the difference between usable and waiting 10 minutes for it to even boot, and things like gaming, VMs, comically large spreadsheets (surprisingly the memory hog), etc., were an eternal challenge on it. On my current laptop, I have the luxury of picking the systems by aesthetics and non-optimization functions instead. And to compare, I’ve run even the same updates on the two laptops, as the older one still works.
My 12? 13? Year old Dell laptop does just fine running Ubuntu. It’ll probably be fine for my needs for another 3 or 4 years at least.
PC games are software.
Unfortunately many PC games are also like this, astoundingly poorly optimized, just assume everyone has a $750 GPU.
Proton can only do so much.
… and Metal basically can’t do that that much.
Look at Metal Gear Solid 5 or TitanFall 2, and tell me realtime video game graphics have dramatically increased in visual fidelity in the last decade.
They haven’t really.
They shifted to a poorly optimized, more expensive paradigm for literally everyone involved; publisher, developer, player.
Everything relating to realtime raytracing and temporal antialiasing is essentially a scam, in the vast majority of actual implementations of it.
I guess the counter argument for games is load times have dramatically improved, though that’s less about software development than hardware improvements.
If we put consoles in the same bracket as computers, the literally instant quick-resume feature on an Xbox (for example) feels like sci-fi.
Yeah, you kinda defeated your own argument there, but you do seem to recognize that.
You can instant resume on a Steam Deck, basically.
You can alt tab on a PC, at least with a stable game that is well made and not memory leaking.
Yeah, better RAM / SSDs does mean lower loading times, higher streaming speeds/bus bandwidths, but literally, at what cost?
You could just actually take the time to optimize things, find non insanely computationally expensive ways to do things that are more clever, instead of just saying throw more/faster ram at it.
RAM and SSD costs per gig are going up now.
Moore’s Law is not only dead, it has inverted.
Constantly cheaper memory going forward turned out to not the best assumption to make.
App launch time can be annoyingly slow on mac if you’re not offline or blocking the server it phones home to
it can be the difference between one bounce or seven bounces of the icon on my end
What apps out of interest? I’m a new Mac owner, so limited experience, but everything seems insanely quick so far. Even something like Xcode is a one-bounce on this M4 Air.
All of them. The device has to phone home to apple to ask permission to run them.
to test close app (really shut, make sure dot on icon isnt glowing) then open and measure time
close app and then disconnect from the internet and launch again
the speed difference depends on how overloaded apples servers are.
I’ve not come across this but I’ll check it out. Is that App Store apps only?
I think probably 90% of the apps I’ve installed have been through the homebrew package manager which likely means they don’t do any phoning home, but I’ll check out the pre-installed stuff and see if I can replicate.
phones.
Using a smartphone from 5 years ago with modern updates feels worse than the first iPhone.
