Moon Horse

@Lunas-Inferno

She/her/they/them

🏳️‍⚧️ | 26 | ΘΔ OSDD system
🌕Luna, 🐉 Saphira,🦌Willow, 🌑Selina, 🦄Misty, and 🦋Fluttershy though Luna and Selina are the ones that use this account the most.
pfp by @shimmering--sunlight on tumbler
header by @8pxl on tumbler

Moon Horse @Lunas-Inferno11/29/2022, 10:17 PM

walking mirage @atomicthumbs

Nire Bryce @NireBryce11/29/2022, 7:04 PM

is there a slow computing movement

like i don't need messages instantly, i don't need notifications instantly, i don't need my web pages to be pretty just responsive

bc if you're against exploitation we're gonna have to move off of what makes a lot of these things fast but also have long battery life, i feel.

from the comments:

https://artemis.sh/2022/01/12/life-at-800mhz.html

walking mirage @atomicthumbs11/29/2022, 7:31 PM

i have been wishing for a long time that someone would make an operating system that made old computers really useful again. i should be able to use my sony picturebook to accomplish simple tasks but it's so old i'm not even sure it'll run linux anymore

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in reply to @NireBryce's post:

squircular reasoning @spiders11/29/2022, 7:06 PM

https://artemis.sh/2022/01/12/life-at-800mhz.html

Irenes (many)@ireneista11/29/2022, 7:08 PM

ooh, thanks for that. absolutely related.

Andrew @polymath11/29/2022, 7:11 PM

Reminds me a bit of brutalist web design https://brutalist-web.design/

library of squirrel @keisisqrl11/29/2022, 10:22 PM

Y'know... it's webapps that are pushing me to replace my five year old macbook air. Namely it's the Google office suite, which is completely unavoidable and runs like shit. But it's also Zoom a little bit, which is not a webapp or (as far as I can tell) electron, but my poor old macbook does not like compositing twelve video feeds and whatever else has to be going on on screen.

in reply to @atomicthumbs's post:

Nire Bryce @NireBryce11/29/2022, 7:33 PM

see, i hope this too and it's a reasonable pursuit. But I also think we need a movement working towards that for current hardware, because then transitioning is possible

Lapis the Nevrean @lapisnev11/29/2022, 8:00 PM

You can get Linux running on any hardware you have the desire and patience to work with, but you will be doing a lot of your own compiling from a faster machine, because distros often don't ship 32-bit versions anymore and rarely ship a highly backwards compatible 486 variant. Most of the software stack still works fine, but really big applications like a full-fat web browser and its dependencies don't support being compiled 32-bit anymore, which is what's driving the shift.

IME it's most feasible to repurpose the oldest machines into LAN or serial phat terminals to access a server in a closet, so you can use the other machine remotely or to download documents to read locally. I was using an HP Vectra running DOS to ZMODEM games I downloaded on my (modern) desktop and play them!

Birdout: Paradise @SomeEgrets11/29/2022, 8:15 PM

yeah, I don't think x86-64 support is that big a deal, you're still talking decades of support for that. A lightweight WM goes a long way, but yeah, a heavy application is going to be heavy no matter what's running under it, and browsers have got pretty heavy.

Kinda related, I default-block scripts on firefox and only run on a permit list and I wonder how much supposed browser memory bloat is because every site you visit is running three full session profiling suites and communicating with five ad networks. Because it's certainly not a light process, but I don't see anything like the "Chrome eats up ten gigabytes with two sites open" phenomenon people complain about.

Lapis the Nevrean @lapisnev11/29/2022, 8:26 PM

The memory in my main system is filled with Electron apps and web browsers most of the time, unless I'm updating Gentoo, then it's completely consumed by GCC and Clang. It's ridiculous but it makes sense since web browsers are getting close to becoming an entire operating system unto themselves and they're massive both at compile time and run time.

Backwards compatibility with old AMD64 processors is extremely good yes. The only exceptions are a handful of applications like MongoDB that now require AVX and do not have fallback code to compile without. I was thinking more along the lines of picking very old machines that sip power because they can't do very much and playing them to their strengths, which is why I was talking about 486 support.

Birdout: Paradise @SomeEgrets11/29/2022, 8:39 PM

I think looking back too far in time might actually be counterproductive in terms of power efficiency - absolute power draw might trend downward on average, but power saving features like C-states and overall efficiency/operation have got so much better on modern architectures that for the same tasking, you would likely draw more power on older platforms (and because they're able to clock down & suspend, idle power draw is very good as well)

Insofar as it's not reviving older hardware, if we're looking to build more efficient platforms on contemporary hardware, I think there's a lot of merit in pursuing mobile architectures and RISC platforms like ARM (Mac M1 is a good practical case for this...)

They're already designed to be extremely power efficient in Watts/cycle, if we can pair that with lightweight software, we're getting somewhere.

At the same time I think keeping older hardware alive as long as it's useful, within reason, has intrinsic merit too, because there's a reall material, labour, and energy cost to create it in the first place (and the problem of disposal...)

~@modulusshift11/29/2022, 8:43 PM

I'm gonna keep using my yellow M1 iMac forever lol, when nobody's bothering to hack new versions of macOS onto it anymore it's going straight to Linux for possibly another decade of use haha

Michaela Sue @beige-alert11/29/2022, 9:09 PM

I used an Atom netbook for quite a long while but being 32 bit really killed general-purpose use for it. (I upgraded the RAM at one point and wow that Dell was not like the Framework, I think they started manufacture with a memory module on a little platform and then built the entire machine around it...)