Why is it in the 2000’s it took 30-60 seconds to open, Word, Photoshop, Gimp or some other program. With today’s computing power it still takes 30-60 seconds to open same said programs… Also fuck MS Teams.
Fuck Teams, all my homies hate Teams
Gimp opens on linux pretty much in an instance though
Maybe I should give it another shot then, it’s been a few years. But last time I used it as default to open pictures on my set up it would pop up with its image and take at least 10 seconds to load the image. I got to annoyed with it I change it to just open in my browser.
Because storage is cheap, so it’s not worth optimizing that heavily for, because the optimization creates a huge amount of headaches.
There’s a reason that today you can just download an app, and it just installs, runs, and uninstalls itself cleanly.
There’s no fighting with dependencies, or installing versions of libraries or frameworks before you can install an app, or having apps conflict with other apps, or having bits of app installations lying around conflicting with things.
That’s because we used to spend a lot of time and effort making sure that only a single copy of each dependency was installed on a system. If two apps both relied on the same library, one would install it, and the other would then be dependent on it as well and not install its own copy. If the original is removed you have a problem. If it thinks something else is dependent on its asset still and doesn’t remove it when it should you’ve got a problem. If they were both dependent on different major versions of a library, you could run into conflicts and compatibility issues (hello dll hell). Either the apps would have to manage all that, or the OS would, or eventually the user often would.
Now every app just bundles all its dependencies with it. It means the app comes as a clean bundle, there’s no conflicts, it can install cleanly, and there’s so much less time spend on packaging apps and debugging various system configurations.
Quite frankly this makes way more sense as a model for distributing anything. Yes it costs more in storage, but it pays off massively in resiliency and time savings for everyone.
Also, unless everything is done with vectors, high def image / video assets are not small and can very quickly add up.
Except that it’s not just storage, but also increased memory footprint and CPU usage in a lot of cases. Take something like Slack which is a huge resource hog.
It’s also worth noting apps have to ship higher resolution assets now, due to higher resolution displays. This can include video, audio, images, etc. Videos and images may be included at multiple resolutions, to account for different sized displays.
For images, many might assume vectors are the answer, but vectors have to be rendered at runtime, which increases startup time in the best case scenario, and isn’t even always supported on all platforms, meaning they have to be shipped alongside raster assets of a few different sizes, further increasing package bloat. And of course the code grows to add the logic to properly handle all the different asset types and sizes.
All this (packaging dependencies, plus assets/asset handling) to say it isn’t always malware, ads, electron, etc. Sometimes it’s just trying to make something that looks nice and runs well (enough) on any machine.
A good package manager like those commonly used on Linux solves this problem
Cause they work better. Brand new ads, awesome new subscriptions. Flashy new AI features that definitely work super well and are definitely useful.
/s
ads, tracking, and the use of shitty bloated frameworks (like electron) so the tech bro owners can save time and money at the expense of ours.
There’s sort of an unholy synergy between hardware companies wanting to sell more hardware and software shops wanting to cut development costs. The selection pressures are to build bloated software that needs fast hardware to run.
I have bypassed this issue by exclusively using open-source terminal software. If my softwares aren’t launching in 2-3 seconds, i usually try to find alternatives.
it gets hard to do this when my bank or other assorted corporation forces me to use their shitty shit.
shitty shit
Bloat! Somebody call the police!
And then you have Arch Linux. [insert chef’s kiss]
npmBigger monitors, smaller phones, higher color depth, lower latencies, customizable window decorations, chronal themes, AI, blockchain, more devices, trackers, architectures, platforms, malwares, internet protocols, programming languages, human languages, ads, ads, ads, ads, doom, power saving, content, content moderation and I’m sure there’s plenty more reasons that might contribute to the growth.
Not saying I like or want all those things, simply that they might be contributing to size increases. Part of me wishes we could go back, then i fire up windows xp pro sp3 on an eee pc netbook i have that miraculously still works and i remember why i prefer to stay in the present, at least until AI kills us all.
Not IT though, I’m just a guy.
Where did you get “smaller phones” from?
I probably should have used ‘smaller chips’ instead. another idea would be using ‘thinner phones’ or ‘lighter phones’. i was a weird writing headspace when i wrote that and liked the flow of going from ‘bigger’ to ‘smaller’.
You can thank the hackers for bloating our stuff with security patches (among others)!
And by that you mean spyware, trackers, and ad platforms baked into the apps?
Nah its mostly nuget packages. And everything has more dependencies now, including all the dependencies 😅
nuget packages? is that what we can node_modules these days?
Nuget is dotnet’s package manager
Lmao, I guess I wasn’t too far off.
C# is usually used server-side. How would nuget bloat affect client-side applications that users use?
I meant node packages 😅. C# can be used in front end too though, but probably quite rarely used 😅
