@kingka, Texrat

I had an old Pentium 200 that I used exclusively as my linux box until roughly 4 years ago. It wasn't fast, and certainly didn't have copious amounts of RAM (32MB, I believe, later upgraded to 64MB), but it was *more* than sufficient for conducting my tasks. What were those tasks?

Watching movies (mplayer ~ 1Mbit/second -- DiVX DVD rips at full resolution)
Listening to music (xmms ~ MP3/ogg <= 320Kbit)
Surfing the net (Dillo/Opera)
3D modeling (using Blender -- no joke)
3D games (Quake 2 + Emulators as high as N64 -- albeit sluggish)
Development (nedit, and command line compilers: gcc mainly)
Word processing (AbiWord)
Graphic Manipulation (GIMP, before the GTK 2 ascension)
Picture viewing (GQView, again, before the GTK 2 ascension)
Web/Database/SSH/FTP Server (running at all times)
etc, etc, etc

I was considered a 'power user' among my peers, and they vocalized their perplexity that I would continue to rock such paltry hardware. But my system often outperformed theirs for the vast majority of tasks. I had found a set of applications that were both full featured and light on both memory and CPU usage.

But as with the most tragic of tales, I was heavily influenced to upgrade (...or I'd still be using the same system. I like to develop given constraint; it ensures my code is efficient. I digress... which is the point of parenthesis, I suppose...) to have the full Web and Office support, and as many of the projects that I loved 'upgraded' their libraries to newer ones that were ridiculously bloated and a good deal slower.

When I moved up to my current system (a mere 1GHz AMD Athalon sumthin'-or-other) I was BLOWN AWAY by how much speed I had with the current applications I used. I was even more blown away by the wretched performance of acclaimed applications like Firefox, OpenOffice, Azureus, etc. If the Blender Foundationcan fit an entire 3D modeling/animation application complete with: rendering engine (raytracing/global illumination/shaders), game engine, particle simulator, video and sound compositor, video encoder, *and* its own user interface (!!) in a package that's a 12MB download and 15MB in memory at startup, why-oh-why is my text only IM client slower to load and consuming the same amount of RAM?

I see similar trends with maemo development. This causes people to complain, though their complaints are misdirected: people blame the impressive N810 hardware for the responsiveness of their applications, when it would be more productive to harass the development community. The hardware is *more* than capable of handling most applications well. I think it's a shame that developers today often rely on processor speed and memory to offset sloppy design and poor design decisions.

We can have PERFECT browsing. We can have 20 apps open simultaneously. We can have flawless video playback. We can have all the applications we love dearly on our desktops. What's more, is we can have them all run at blazing speeds.


}:^)~
YARR!!

Scrapt'n