Teaching my daughter to program on a modern computer, we spend more time bootstrapping and in process, than we do in actual development.
Getting knowledgeable people costs money so we build more abstractions that lower the cost of development and pass the costs of development from the company to the user in the form of requiring more hardware to do the same thing.
How come I need 16Gb of RAM these days when 8Gb did it yesterday? How come my phone needs 4Gb of RAM while my 2012 tablet had 1Gb? Sure the hardware is cheaper but we're still not using the hardware to it's fullest.
Being able to turn the computer on, type in my password and have it be just..ready is so incredibly refreshing. Having a terminal with 0 latency, where copy/paste is sane? Worth a zillion dollars to me right now.
Currently playing with opensuse tumbleweed, i'll probably get frustrated by something and move to arch, so I can fix that something and also be frustrated by a hundred other things.
I generally agree, but I sometimes ran Windows 3.0 on a 386SX-16 in the early 90s, and often wondered why it ran so slow on my admittedly underpowered but supported system.
At some point I read (perhaps in Compute! or BYTE) that Windows made something like 20 or 30 syscalls to draw one line of a window's border. That seemed exceptionally inefficient to me, so I stopped using Windows. I generally worked in DOS, but if I wanted a GUI, Geoworks provided an experience at least ten times better (subjectively) -- smooth UI, ability to multitask, a surprisingly good word processor and other well-designed software included.
Because that was the experience on those old machines. Switch it on, straight to BASIC prompt in a second or so. If you want to program it’s frictionless. And you can’t break it because BASIC is in ROM.
Before that, my 64MB RAM 100mhz Pentium could usually have a couple things open before it'd hit swap too badly. I'm talking like Word and a web browser, not calc and notepad. None of the equivalent programs to those can even open all on their own in a footprint smaller than 64MB these days, let alone with other programs and the OS in the same space. Hell, how many operating systems fit in that with a GUI as capable and usable as, say, Win98se (let alone something really incredible on the performance front, like BeOS)?
Yeah, what the heck is this? I use a win10 box solely for gaming, and every single time I wake from sleep, Antimalware Executable keeps my machine from doing anything for several minutes. It's infuriating.
> Teaching my daughter to program on a modern computer, we spend more time bootstrapping and in process, than we do in actual development.
Arch Linux does not help with this, unless you make it boot into a VIC-20 emulator or something. Arch can help with boot speed, but once you're booted you're back in a full modern OS. So fine, install VSCode and Python... okay, now you get to figure out libraries. Manage terminals. Arrange a filesystem. This is not getting you closer to the VIC-20 or C64's "boot into BASIC".
https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/11533/why...
I can now use simplenote, discord, slack, the jetbrains dev suite, visual studio code, and this is without including separate developments like Steam, which has made it effortless to switch between Windows, Linux and Mac.
That being said, I still consider Mac OS the superior OS (this call home issue from the article aside), mostly because the font rendering still works better after all these years, Windows and Mac still have better quality software available for them, and Mac still does not have the forced updates as Windows does. Also I have noticed that in Ubuntu, some electron apps like Simplenote, the copy and paste of text is funky at times, like not even letting me select stuff.
Things finally improved with XP, but W3.1x and W95 were anything but fast - unless you were playing Solitaire.
sudo pacman -S xonsh
chsh --shell /usr/bin/xonsh
I mean, I know it's happening, I (sadly) expect it to happen now. But seeing all the bits whizzing over the wire brought home just how much your machine is reporting about what you're up to.
care to elaborate a bit? what did you understand?
i just can't get my head around this idea that most non-mobile OSes have become such hostile environments...
yes, the population at large only uses their phones and tablets and doesn't care much. but they would be left without any entertainment if it wasn't for those of us who still need decent non-mobile environments.
Also, they are a threat to a free market for software, as they regulate their walled garden with arbitrary rules and skim off a lot of value.
I honestly don't understand why a large portion of developers have so much love for Apple. I'm personally a proud owner of a desktop PC with an ASUS motherboard. It serves me fine, and gives me full control over the software installed on it. I'm not a laptop-person but I believe there are many perfectly capable non-Apple laptops out there.
Considering the built in one is pretty slow (and gives useless notifications), I expect it would be an improvement.