Everything in computers and consumer electronics is bloated today. Smart appliances. TPM hardware on computers. Forced cloud interaction. System crippling DRM. Subscription models for printer ink. Advertisements in every space. Advertisements wasting processing power and memory. A.I. utterly destroying the entire memory industry. Tracking scripts on every site.
Forced obsolescence creating landfills of useful technology that gets thrown away. Stick drift on game controllers creating tons of waste. Phones and computers loaded with useless software by default. Programs and operating systems adding extra steps for once simple processes. Impossible downloads of standard media and sites requiring obnoxious tools like yt-dl to archive a simple video file.
Computers used to be about making life easier and as streamlined as possible.
Everything in computers and consumer electronics is bloated today. Smart appliances. TPM hardware on computers. Forced cloud interaction. System crippling DRM. Subscription models for printer ink. Advertisements in every space. Advertisements wasting processing power and memory. A.I. utterly destroying the entire memory industry. Tracking scripts on every site.
pardon me for barging in on this thread, but i've been thinking about this:
is the problem with "bloat" rooted far beyond the surface-level fluff as far as windows goes? i read Showstopper! in high school (a book on winNT's internal development decades ago) and while iirc NT itself was meant to be portable/mostly ISA-agnostic, i can't help but think dave cutler's work is being tested to its absolute limits (regarding the hybrid kernel & HAL design) and NT was originally meant for workstations 20+ years ago anyway. in fact, ME's fiasco was what made general consumers go from 9x to NT (XP) in 2001.
linux purely as a monolithic kernel seems more logical on low-end constrained environments like the 4GB RAM/64GB eMMC laptops in stores today. to me, the problems go deeper than spyware and electron weather apps.
Damn 2006 was 20 years ago?!. I was thinking 1996.
The NT kernel design itself is from the late 80s based off the work IBM and Microsoft did together. My remembrance of this history is fuzzy, but I believe NT came about because IBM was being too conservative and Microsoft wanted to go in a different direction.
Damn 2006 was 20 years ago?!. I was thinking 1996.
The NT kernel design itself is from the late 80s based off the work IBM and Microsoft did together. My remembrance of this history is fuzzy, but I believe NT came about because IBM was being too conservative and Microsoft wanted to go in a different direction.
The whole point of moving from 32 bit CPU's to 64 bit was address over 4 GB of RAM, and that was something Intel was committed not to do it. AMD did it and licensed it back to Intel in return for settling patent litigation over something unrelated. Its strange that Intel tried to end their own x86 platform at one time and it was so central to the Microsoft Windows platform dominance which to this day still uses that same architecture.
The whole point of moving from 32 bit CPU's to 64 bit was address over 4 GB of RAM, and that was something Intel was committed not to do it. AMD did it and licensed it back to Intel in return for settling patent litigation over something unrelated. Its strange that Intel tried to end their own x86 platform at one time and it was so central to the Microsoft Windows platform dominance which to this day still uses that same architecture.
The whole point of moving from 32 bit CPU's to 64 bit was address over 4 GB of RAM, and that was something Intel was committed not to do it. AMD did it and licensed it back to Intel in return for settling patent litigation over something unrelated. Its strange that Intel tried to end their own x86 platform at one time and it was so central to the Microsoft Windows platform dominance which to this day still uses that same architecture.
x86 is conceptually busted. By the late 1990s, it was clear that the whole CISC concept was conceptually flawed and energy-hungry
They hated having to share IP with AMD, a relic of their IBM contract in the 1980s. A new architecture would have done an end run around AMD
The BIG BUXX were in servers, and if Intel could make a proprietary ISA king of servers, they could kill off AMD
All the technical criticisms about x86_64 ended up being completely right. But it turned out paying an arm and a leg for an UltraSPARC or POWER server was just not worth the performance gain, not really, not when Windows Server on x86_64 was so, so, so much more economical and easier to learn. Plus the UNIX custodians decided it just wasn't important to continue putting their systems in universities, so college kids no longer were learning it.
And that's why we all run absolute dogshit operating systems in enterprise now.
Intel had PAE in the 90s already, 32 bit could very well address over 4 GiB. What it couldn't do is handle very large files (limited to 4 GiB in theory, but 2 GiB in reality), no matter the amount of RAM, virtual memory, or any PAE. 64 bit could handle files over 2/4 GiB easily.
And now that ARM is gaining steam, it finally pushed both Intel and AMD to develop more power efficient x86 chips, proving that if you put your mind to it, you can make x86 power efficient. Just look at the Panther Lake chips, that in some cases can deliver 24 hours of battery life. Plus, the x86 combined with Win32 is what set the backwards compatibility bedrock that we rely on to this day, and get into a whole bunch of headaches the moment we try to steer away from it. Just look at Windows for ARM, Win32 is so tied to the fact that the x86 comes with every CPU instruction needed on-chip, while keeping the on-silicon backwards compatibility all the way back to the 8086, that when you throw it on a RISC chip and have to redo all of these instructions, you run into more issues than it's worth. And if you try to sever the other part of the bedrock, Win32, then you get Linux and it's hate boner for stable ABI's. Combine both and you'll quickly apologize to Windows 11 being a bloated shitheap covered in curry diarrhea, and you'll quickly apologize to x86 being a power hungry clusterfuck of a chip.
And now that ARM is gaining steam, it finally pushed both Intel and AMD to develop more power efficient x86 chips, proving that if you put your mind to it, you can make x86 power efficient.
Well, this is a completely different era of computing. In the 90s/00s, consuming CISC instructions took a proportionally large share of memory. Today, the lion's share of the electricity is eaten by the compute units and the memory controller, not the decoder, and the first thing an x86 decoder does now is break up the instruction into RISC-like uops.
I doubt there are really a whole lot of x86-specific instructions in the Windows kernel.
This got posted in the other thread, but since the other thread is allergic to having any differing opinions, we don't have a generic free-for-all thread for software like we have for hardware and I have a need to rant, I'll do it here.
I really fucking despise these function over form ricers. Look at the CPU/GPU usage. So much CPU cycles wasted on such benign, meaningless bullshit that has zero practical use, and only serves as an exercise in how much time can you waste ricing your PC.
Though the two things that piss me off the most in setups like these, and by extent in the current trends in UI design, are the excessive padding and the animations.
The excessive padding (and corner rounding) in TWM's is something that I cannot comprehend. The great thing about them is that they maximize the screen space used by automatically showing any window in fullscreen, then letting you rearrange them however you want. Every single TWM nowadays, be it a Windows program or a Linux DE, is configured with this excessive padding. It serves me no purpose. It wastes my screen real estate. The window border is what should be telling me where they start and end, the padding is unnecessary. All it does is waste space. And I like how the corner rounding is prevalent in these Linux setups, but the same people will then circlejerk about how Win11 is so shit because it rounds all four corners, in case you needed more proof these "people" never cared about the technicalities and it was always about their obsession with having to say they're better than Windows ever since the FreeDesktop movement began.
Another thing that pisses me off that is prevalent everywhere are the animations. The first thing I do on any Windows machine that I touch: disable mouse acceleration and disable animations. The mouse acceleration is something MS should've stopped enabling by default back in 2000's, but the animations are something I disable on every device I use.
Here's a good exercise, if you have an Android phone, go into the accessibility settings and disable system animations, then do some basic tasks you always do. Have you noticed how your phone feels faster all the sudden? This is why I fucking despise animations in operating systems. They're artificially slowing them down. While your OS is capable of doing an action as soon as you invoke it, for it to show that pretty animation, it has to insert an artificial delay between you invoking it and the action completing to show that animation. While pretty, this will pile up into a feeling of general sluggishness, as that's the natural outcome of adding artificial delays to every action taken by you. Disable the animations, and now you feel the true speed of your OS. Windows has a few extra delays that you'd need to tweak, like the context menu delay that's probably designed with niggers in mind that need to wait a moment before they can decide on what to do next, but the white man already knows what he wants to do so that delay is an obstacle that is thankfully easily adjustable, and it's a registry key that's been in the same place for decades. Case in point:
This is my desktop. YASB+GlazeWM. It's barebones, keyboard centric, and it's configured in a way where it wastes as little desktop space and resources as possible, while remaining functional. Function over form is how operating systems should be done. If I were to set up Linux, I'd go with i3, just because it's not suckless bullshit that wants me to compile C every time I want to change something and because I can pull it from a package manager. I want my shit to be minimal, clean and fast. Get out of my way and let me do what I want to do. Rices like the one from the video would only keep getting in the way and the only practical use for them would be farming karma on r/UnixPorn.
This got posted in the other thread, but since the other thread is allergic to having any differing opinions, we don't have a generic free-for-all thread for software like we have for hardware and I have a need to rant, I'll do it here.
it's always the same ugly Chinese Android head unit UI styling they go for, even KDE has the same problem of looking like a desktop mode for Android 5. They have no taste nor respect for UX on desktop computers.
1080p (normal screen resolution) and below (laptops) usually can't display 2 programs side by side without it being cramped as fuck, forcing you to use virtual desktops for most things. At this point just use a normal WM and alt tab between your windows
This got posted in the other thread, but since the other thread is allergic to having any differing opinions, we don't have a generic free-for-all thread for software like we have for hardware and I have a need to rant, I'll do it here.
It isn't about people being allergic to differing opinions. In fact, I made similar observations on this exact topic as you, and nobody has said anything negative towards me at all. The fact is, like your statement here, you often make statements that are untrue or extremely disingenuous, and people push back on that.
In fact most of the people including the person that originally posted the video said it serves no practical purpose
1080p (normal screen resolution) and below (laptops) usually can't display 2 programs side by side without it being cramped as fuck, forcing you to use virtual desktops for most things. At this point just use a normal WM and alt tab between your windows
