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Unboxing, Detoxing, Adopting Lighter Software
Months ago: The Sixth Anniversary of the Lightweight Alternative to the Web (Gemini Protocol)
A "modern" Web browser takes hundreds of megabytes of RAM just to open. Once you've added a few tabs with "webapps" in them it can take up gigabytes of RAM.
This is not OK.
Why would you blindly tolerate this?
Last night the sister site pointed out that Ubuntu had gotten so bloated [1] that right now, in spite of rising RAM prices [2], Ubuntu wants at least 4 gigabytes of RAM. That seems insane. Why would GNU, Linux and some GUI stuff consume this much RAM?
Hours ago The Register MS [3] suggested not getting more RAM but making applications less RAM-consuming (or choosing applications that are less RAM-consuming). It's a task for both developers and users. Or something users should ask developers to do.
The same applies to servers!
This site used to use up a lot of RAM when it ran Drupal. The memory footprint fell by a considerable amount when we started serving static pages.
It is possible to use less RAM. If we want and try to. █
Related/contextual items from the news:
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Canonical's Ubuntu is Bloatware
Worse yet, it demands (according to them, "recommended") no less than 4GB of RAM (I didn't even have a PC with more than 2GB of RAM until 2020).
How did Ubuntu get so fat? It didn't really improve in any measurable way, it just got newer versions of the same old things.
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Canonical is Making the Cost of PCs Very High, Due to Unnecessary Ubuntu Bloat
Today I saw an article about OEMs considering to sell PCs without RAM and making RAM a sort of addon (or "bring your own RAM", "add your own RAM").
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Memory is running out, and so are excuses for software bloat
Register readers of a certain age will recall the events of the 1970s, where a shortage of fuel due to various international disagreements resulted in queues, conflicts, and rising costs. One result was a drive toward greater efficiencies. Perhaps it's time to apply those lessons to the current memory shortage.
As memory prices continue to rise, it is time engineers reconsidered their applications and toolchains' voracious appetite for memory. Does a simple web page really need megabytes to show a user the modern equivalent of Hello World? Today's Windows Task Manager executable occupies 6 MB of disk space. It demands almost 70 MB before it will show a user just how much of a memory hog Chrome is these days. The original weighs in at 85 KB on disk. Its successor is not orders of magnitude more functional.
Those who remember effective software running in kilobytes rather than gigabytes have long shaken their heads at the profligate ways of modern engineering. But as tech progress marched on and memory densities seemed destined to increase without end, protesting about bloat felt a lot like "old man yells at cloud."