> Haha, makes me remember a comment from just the other day on Phoronix flexing that he booted into KDE, and it used only 1.7GB RAM (as a way to prove how lightweight it is).
Whenever i see such RAM usage scenarios i wonder what exactly is being tested.
Last time i checked, starting my environment had around 300MB of use (or something like that) - but when i measured (and stored) the free memory right before the window manager starts and a bit after, it turned out my window manager (Window Maker) actually only used about 5MB or so. The overwhelming majority of the rest was spread between background processes, many of them before even Xorg had a chance to blit a pixel on screen.
(and FWIW around that time i also checked KDE -it was KDE5 not 6- and its memory usage wasn't much, i don't remember how much it was but was much less than 1.7GB - probably 100-150 MBs or so, IIRC)
I kinda see him as the Andrew Ryan of Mars' Rapture :-P
(if you haven't played Bioshock this probably wont make much sense - but if you have and listened to all the audiologs, i'm sure you'll find a bunch of parallels)
> How many program positions on your desktop can you reliably remember without having to search
This is why being able to move the icons where you want is helpful: takes advantage of spatial memory :-).
(though on Linux where i use Window Maker - and thus have no desktop icons - i just use task-specific workspaces and each workspace has its own icons/launchers on the clip for the stuff i use most often, which acts as a workspace-specific dock)
The fact that TDE exist is great and proves that unlike other OSes where you are forced to upgrade everything to whatever the OS developer wants and have no choice in the matter (aside from not upgrading, which isn't a real option because both hardware and software support drops like flies over time) regardless of how this affects your workflow, on Linux you can simply get to have all the latest stuff under the hood (kernel, drivers, etc) while at the same time preserving the workflows you want.
Some elbow grease might be necessary - like all the time the TDE developers have put towards their project - but the important part is that it is possible.
That said, i do think that TDE would benefit from a couple of more aesthetically pleasing themes in the screenshots - even the original KDE3.5 default theme (preferably with a bit less gradient galore) would be better than the current shots that look like a hodgepodge of themes thrown together.
I haven’t kept up with Windows over the recent years but it looks like Cairo Desktop exists that allows some degree of shell customization in that world. Many years ago lots of shell options like LiteStep existed (they weren’t the most stable, but they existed). Many were likely hacked out solutions as they hooked in via replacing the explorer library IIRC.
So while in Linux it’s intentionally modular, I wouldn’t say it’s the only place it’s possible. Maybe the most practical, for sure.
As we move more to service oriented everything though, that becomes increasingly less feasible. I suppose to some degree it’s more flexible because web apps at some point give you all the rendering code locally to muck with however you may want to but the frequency of change in UIs on top of its complexity seems like this world will always be unapproachable for customization, and that’s for services that are using browsers. Forget it if theres some local application doing rendering (like the Microsoft app with Azure services).
The problem with Windows is that you do not have the source code so you rely on excessively brittle hacks. For example when i was using Windows 8 i used to run some program that forced some handle that uxtheme used to close which caused controls to fall back to using the classic win9x theme (which was disabled on the UI in Win8) - and for that to work it had to freeze some system process for a bit, force the handle to close and unfreeze it. That process worked for Win8, it broke on Win8.1 until someone found a workaround but you had to replace some apps with alternatives to work and was completely broken on Win10 (and i guess Win11 too) and was never fixed.
Meanwhile if i desire i can download the official source code for Gtk and modify the painting code to be as pixel perfect as i want (and in fact i did exactly that some years ago to make XFCE look like Windows 95 because the available themes looked off :-P).
For webapps, yeah you can't do much but personally i prefer local apps where possible anyway - and for the other stuff, if i care enough, Stylus and Greasemonkey are there to help. I do use a custom Stylus theme i wrote for HN for example :-).
> You can disable this behavior for specific targets using make’s built-in .PHONY target name, but the syntax is verbose and can be hard to remember.
I think this is overstating things a bit. I first read `.PHONY` in a Makefile while i was a teenager and i figured out what it does just by looking at it in practice.
Makefiles do have some weirdness (e.g. tab being part of the syntax) but `.PHONY` is not one of them.
> Juniors today can learn exponentially faster with LLMs and don't need seniors as much. [...] Take me for example, I've been programming for 20 years
You are not a junior, you already rely on 20 years of experience.
Last time i did any sort of web development was 20 ago, but i thought to try some C# (touched last time ~10 years ago) + Blazor for an idea i had and it took me a couple of days to feel comfortable and start making stuff. While i haven't written for the web in a very very long time, my experience with other tech helped a lot.
His experience is the same in mine , the juniors in our team are super productive in a way that realistically would not have been possible for them before these tools. They just don't get stuck that much anymore so they don't need the seniors as much. I do think the field will be somewhat commoditized in the coming decade.
The web, especially frontend feels far more foreign than any backend or "traditional" programming. The errors suck, sometimes you get no error and have no idea why it isn't working etc. So in a sense I feel like a junior
Just seeing the issue submissions can have a cost in terms of emotional impact. Of course, you can shield yourself from any feedback, but that has its costs as well (e.g. not getting genuine high-quality error reports). One has to live with those trade-offs.
That's a good thought in isolation. The problem however is how are you going to ensure the money collected for that purpose go to the projects that actually need it and there wont be any corruption involved?
It isn't hard to notice, for example, that in EU where gamedev companies often receive grants for various nebulous reasons tend to be companies that do not need the money in the first place (and yes, of course there are devs who received money that needed them, somehow people have to excuse the existence things they benefit from).
I don't think you're going to solve corruption perfectly in any system, but isn't that a bit of a red herring?
We manage to do this within other fields of endeavor, at least in the United States, by using an intermediary. Examples: National Science Foundation, Corporation for Public Broadcasting, National Endowment for the Arts.
Redistributing tax money to economically unproductive (and usually worthless, as evidenced by the fact that people wouldn’t pay for it voluntarily) endeavors is a whole debate that has nothing to do with open source software.
Ultimately if people value things, they will buy them. Forcing people to pay for things they don’t want to buy simply because you think it would be good for them is a special kind of tyranny.
It's definitely not a red herring. Software is there to do something. Art isn't. If you're spending money on software, it's to do something, and if it's the wrong thing it's a waste of people's money.
Whenever i see such RAM usage scenarios i wonder what exactly is being tested.
Last time i checked, starting my environment had around 300MB of use (or something like that) - but when i measured (and stored) the free memory right before the window manager starts and a bit after, it turned out my window manager (Window Maker) actually only used about 5MB or so. The overwhelming majority of the rest was spread between background processes, many of them before even Xorg had a chance to blit a pixel on screen.
(and FWIW around that time i also checked KDE -it was KDE5 not 6- and its memory usage wasn't much, i don't remember how much it was but was much less than 1.7GB - probably 100-150 MBs or so, IIRC)
reply