I installed linux mint xfce edition on a laptop with only 8 gb of ram, and while there were a few hiccups where I had to adjust, it's a breath of fresh air. Super low memory usage, no wayland nonsense, it. just. works.
I still have fond memory of my brother upgrading his windows XP desktop to 1 GB RAM to play BF2142 and I was like "school hasn't even taught me that number yet".
What the hell happened to software development when "only 8 gb of ram" is used sincerely?
Oh man, don't even get me started. My first computer had a whopping 24 mb of memory. That computer browsed the web, with javascript. Now just my browser winds up eating ~ 3 gb of ram on a regular basis, with just youtube easily eating 600 mb of ram. That's more ram than I put in my first gaming pc back in 2003!
I built a AI / ML / gaming desktop last year, and I just said 'to heck with it, 64gb of ram!' Hopefully that'll hold me for a while
> My first computer had a whopping 24 mb of memory. That computer browsed the web, with javascript. Now just my browser winds up eating ~ 3 gb of ram on a regular basis, with just youtube easily eating 600 mb of ram.
Eh, that’s a massively disingenuous take when you consider capabilities. Web browsers back then could not do even 1% of what we can do now with modern browsers, where we can run damn near full fledged desktop level apps in a browser or with frameworks like electron. With that vastly increased power comes increased requirements, which is a complete non issue given memory is dirt cheap nowadays.
Everyone says that it’s a step backwards, and even I did for awhile until I, you know, actually used it.
I don’t mean “install it and run it for an hour and declare it sucks”, but actually try and learn the way that the devs wanted you to use it, and stick with it for a week or two. When I did that, I actually found myself really liking it.
One of my biggest pet peeves in tech, and I am guilty of this myself, is when people make no effort to actually understand a product, and then declare it as “worse”. I feel like Gnome 3 was a victim of this; it was different than Gnome 2, different enough to where it arguably should have had a different name, but people just universally declared it as shit because it wasn’t exactly the same as Gnome 2.
Regardless, my overall point stands, replace desktop environment with any of the ones listed (though TBH I never have given KDE a fair shake so I can’t speak to it).
Agreed. Gnome shell is actually super keyboard driven. But the KDE folks point out the fact that there isn’t a start menu to click and declare it bad UX. It’s just sad.
It may be keyboard driven, but especially under Wayland (see Talon [0]), it's almost unusable for disabled users. The situation was better a few years ago.
Agreed. Using Gnome at work for a few weeks convinced me to ditch my custom twm setup and move all my personal machines to Gnome as well. It is different, but once giving it time and a honest try I found its a far better experience than any other desktop environment I've worked with.
