wanted to make a post about the perpetual arms race between hardware engineers making their devices as fast as possible and software engineers making their programs as unoptimized as possible, but i couldnt figure out a way to word it
all im gonna say is, theres functionally no reason a phone needs 16 gigs of ram and an insanely fast processor to run youtube. and "tick-tock". and occasionally texting your friends. maybe listen to music now and then. the fact that an iphone 8 is "outdated" and "slow" is stupid. why should an App with words and pictures use 6 gigs of ram. why should my device be able to handle 4k video. i cant even see the pixels anymore at 1080p on a 6 inch screen. cameras in phones are really good now? ok. only because companies stopped investing in producing small digital cameras. game graphics are super impressive on phones now? dont care. we had a tool for that. called a "handheld gaming console". you kids wouldnt understand.
fifty million fucking tonnes of e-waste every year because software vendors insist on writing everything in ffffffucking javascript. fuck you.
every bump in minimum system requirements comes with a cost of human life. every new generation of goddamn telephone flings another Foxconn sweatshop worker out of a window, buries another Congolese child under a cobalt mine collapse, dumps a thousand tonnes of toxic waste into the biosphere.
don't be the reason someone throws their computer into a landfill and buys a new one.
it's not obsessively low spec, but it will absolutely run and run well on a pentium 4, core 2 duo or an atom and 512MB-8 gigs of RAM, depending on how much multitasking and project building you do.
Linux, in general, seems to have missed the point - the kernel's going to phase out "x86-64 v1" now because it's "too old". the graphics drivers dropped Rage128, despite servers and embedded using that well into the 2010s. the march for newer, faster, 'better' continues on, and leaves working workstations in the dust. and when you do try to run Linux on older hardware, unless it's old and horrifically outdated versions of Linux desktop OSes, you're in for a bad time, and will wind up outstripping your hardware demands.
