On Mon, 25 Jul 2016 17:41:42 -0500 Matt Campbell <[email protected]> wrote:
> So what can we do about this? The only idea I've got is that I and other > software developers should do all of our work on the most underpowered > computer that will let us get buy, rather than the nicest one we can > afford. Then maybe, out of necessity, we won't be so wasteful. But then > maybe we won't be as productive either, particularly if not being > wasteful means we have to write everything in C or C++. And of course, > it won't do any good if I'm the only one who chooses to make those > sacrifices. > > At least with free software, there's always the possibility to fork > projects that succumb to the upgrade treadmill. For example, the MATE > desktop environment is a fork of GNOME 2, and one of its explicit goals > is to run well on non-compositing graphics hardware. I imagine MATE will > run quite well on something like the A20 card. But still, we can't live > in a forked, time-warped world. We have to interact with mainstream > websites, which means using a mainstream browser or at least one of the > major rendering engines. That's part of why we at TinyCore continue to do things. It's quite sad there's not more people in sw after efficiency - offhand I can only mention suckless. Incidentally, TC will run TinyX at 64mb ram, compatible with all the latest X apps, but don't expect Firefox to run with that ram ;) You're also speaking to someone who wrote his own browser out of frustration with the existing ones. Uses Webkit, but with things like WebGL and HTML5 AV disabled, it's quite RAM-light (see the measurements at fifth-browser.sf.net/propaganda.html). I don't really have a solution on how to attract more people to efficient sw dev. Even in libre circles I too often hear "it's only 2gb" "buy a new $thing then" "so get more RAM" (the latter when complaining about gcc needing 9gb in certain times, when I have 8 on this box). For me some of it is by necessity, as a starving hacker I can't buy new hw every time I feel like it, but it also feels nice to have done something optimized and efficient. Sorry for the derail Luke. - Lauri _______________________________________________ arm-netbook mailing list [email protected] http://lists.phcomp.co.uk/mailman/listinfo/arm-netbook Send large attachments to [email protected]
