As OSes get worse.
davidsaunders
Posts: 1,559
As OSes get Worse:
Linux: At one time a greate fast efecient OS, now it takes a ton of mem for just the kernel and needed moduals, is slow, and is much less stable than in the past.
Amiga OS Once upon a time the best preemtive multisking GUI OS. Now it is as slow and bloated as the rest.
Mac OS the best Cooperative multitasking system. It does not exist any more, having been replaced by the horibly inefecient 'Mac OS X'.
BeOS / Haiku OS As near as I can tell Haiku has failed at the goal of living up to the speed and efeciency of BeOS.
THE EXCEPTION TO THE RULE
Minix One has got it right, Minix gets better and better.
So why is it that most OSes get more bloted and slow when this is not needed? The 'New features' do not acount for this, nor does the inclusion of more drivers. I can understand the dificulty in developing a system with people that you may never see in person, so each person should be assigned a component, and keep any API/ABI well documented and consistant, this would be the only that I can see to reverse the bloat that we now often call a Operating System Distrobution.
Linux: At one time a greate fast efecient OS, now it takes a ton of mem for just the kernel and needed moduals, is slow, and is much less stable than in the past.
Amiga OS Once upon a time the best preemtive multisking GUI OS. Now it is as slow and bloated as the rest.
Mac OS the best Cooperative multitasking system. It does not exist any more, having been replaced by the horibly inefecient 'Mac OS X'.
BeOS / Haiku OS As near as I can tell Haiku has failed at the goal of living up to the speed and efeciency of BeOS.
THE EXCEPTION TO THE RULE
Minix One has got it right, Minix gets better and better.
So why is it that most OSes get more bloted and slow when this is not needed? The 'New features' do not acount for this, nor does the inclusion of more drivers. I can understand the dificulty in developing a system with people that you may never see in person, so each person should be assigned a component, and keep any API/ABI well documented and consistant, this would be the only that I can see to reverse the bloat that we now often call a Operating System Distrobution.
Comments
Frankly, I don't think it is the OSes fault. The real problem is that when the programmers do a perfect job, they are no longer employed. So people just want to keep their jobs and companies are always looking for new sales. For ages, excellent applications of all sorts have been chewed to pieces by updates for the sake of additional sales.
I was very happy with MS-DOS 3.01, Viscal, DBase, and Wordperfect. Early email was quite adequate. But I suspect we cannot turn back the clock. iPad wants use to 'cloud compute' into the future.
As Mies Van der Roe said, "Less is more, and more is less."
To fool us into thinking the OS is really new all the same functions are accessed in a different way, the menu names are changed, or they are placed in a different sub menus.
I can understand coming out with a new version when there is new hardware to support but in a well designed OS that should only require the addition of a driver, not a whole new operating system and a whole new way of doing all the things you did previously.
frankly we are lucky OSX and Fedora only need 1 GB to run smooth ..
the Winblows guys needed 4 for Vista to run smooth .
what are you gong to do, Shoot Mr Moore ?
DSL is a Fugly Disto that fits on a 500M flash drive and has like a 32 M ram Req . tell me how that is bloated Linux
The truth is Windows 7 does not take up 40 gigs of memory, infact it takes up 16.
The truth is Windows 7 can easily run on 512mb of ram. I have personally done it on a Atom based computer without any problems.
I am not defending Windows because I like them in-fact I am typing this from a Mac. I am only defending it because I hate when people make stuff up.
The great thing is if you do not like all of the modern OSes you do not have to use them. Just install linux and run everything from the command line.
I won't claim that it's still possible to reduce the footprint of a Linux box as much today, but you can certainly run perfectly fine in 16MB of RAM. There are several embedded devices out there with that small amount of memory, including that Linux-in-an-RJ45-plug.
You'll just have to stay away from what _really_ eats RAM, CPU and resources, and that's those extremely bloated KDE/insert-desktop-here systems, and FireFox and the like. Firefox alone is why one of my desktops is a 16 GB RAM computer. On the other hand my main mail handler is still a 64 MB Pentium II.
As for stability.. I've been running Linux boxes now for nearly 20 years.. well, 19.5 years. You can't blame instability on the kernels (Linux is just the kernel). My boxes still have uptimes of up to several years. Firefox, on the other hand.. crashes way too often (granted, I load up a huge amount of windows). If it wasn't for the fact that it can restore itself to whatever was loaded before it crashed it would be utterly useless. And there are other not-too-stable applications out there. What I can trust in though is the kernel itself.
Oh, and of course the kernel runs in several of my little mobile phones. Nice.
Cheers,
-Tor
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Installation/SystemRequirements
I quite like Win7 x64, I've been using it for a couple of years on my laptop (it came with 4 Gbytes of RAM) and haven't had any problems.
But you have to admit, it does have an efficient spell checker
Bloat, in-terms of storage foot print never was at issue for me with OSes. Truth is, there are lots of devices, and people want to use them, and most people don't know much beyond just using them. That means any reasonable OS, expecting to see uses beyond specialized uses, is going to be fat on the disks.
Nice open ones can be trimmed down, as has been said already. No worries, because those that do know more can put that understanding to use and push the limits of what is necessary to get the computing done.
Perfectly happy with that.
That said, I don't like remapping skills, which appears to happen all the time with the Microsoft OSes. Changing how things work, or what names are used to reference things is ok, provided there is a value add. "looks better" isn't generally a value add, unless it's coupled with significant UI changes.
I find most UI changes just move basic problems around, they don't really address them. The exception in my computing experience was both Apple and SGI, both of whom did actual UI research which actually did result in material value added. Microsoft, IMHO, did get some improvement with win 7, to be fair, but they've kind of marginalized it with various other integrated application changes...
What I dislike the most are kludges where core OS capability is missing, replaced by various and usually ugly user land things intended to work around them. The "shortcut" is one of those things in Windows, where symbolic links should have been a part of things, and "run as" is another, where we should have had SUID type capability, both of these things causing a lot bizzare workarounds. Drive letters are another, because they hobble the power of logical file systems, and force devices to be something different than data, bloating all over the place.
Sometimes there are real value adds, and Apple does this with OSX, with great power management, solid UI, and hardware management. Love it, and it was exactly what SGI did, and it's not cheap, nor small, but it is holistic, meaning it is going to just work more than it just won't.
These days I run Windows 64 (finally, it works well in win 7), Linux, and Mac OS X, and I'm largely happy, though I do miss some basic unix kinds of things in win7, they are replaced by some capable, just different tools.
We've arrived at a state today where most basic computing needs are well met by those OSes, and that's a good thing. Damn good thing actually. Totally happy in that respect. It has been a fairly ugly road though, and I missed my IRIX boxes considerably while traveling it.
We are still short a few items, IMHO. System software management still sucks. Apple manages this by keeping system installation means and methods dead simple, and by leaving the UNIX underneath capable, for those times when it gets ugly. So, things are possible, and can be practical in that regard. Windows is better, but... the core vision for how software can be applied to the computer just varies a lot, and it's possible to make a big mess. Not happy, need to pay serious attention. Linux is good, depending on the Linux!
Still though, I had exactly one initial file system in IRIX land, able to clone it, and update it from a older slow box, to a fast, multi-CPU box, across a few versions, with most everything intact. Best system software computing experience I had. Documentation was good too. Those machines shipped with most of a good comp-sci course in systems engineering, and I referred back to that info more than I would care to admit, for longer than I would care to admit, sometimes wishing the others did that level of engineering, once in a while surprised to find they did, but not often.
Today, I find myself in two camps. One is general computing, applications, code, data, "IT" in general, and I think life is good there. When I'm using things, in fairly well defined ways, I have good experiences.
When I want to build or play, it's not always such a good experience, because those layers of code needed to "just make it work" mean we get pretty damn far away from the hardware. It's better to have no OS at all in some respects, which is why I enjoy Propeller and just smaller scale stuff in general.
For all the times I think back to older, simpler, lean environments, I find I've colored my perception of those times in a very interesting way. I forget that I can log onto a box for a month, run a ton of Smile hard, walk around with the computer, put it to sleep, use other machines over the wire in many ways, all while playing my favorite tunes! We've got some great stuff today, and you can pick your OS! The i7 CPU on this machine I'm writing this on is a huge mess! I don't even want to look. Seriously. But, it clocks at 2.5Ghz, with 3.2Ghz bursting, power management that clocks down well below 1Ghz, and it has 6GB of RAM attached, and I can run Linux, OS X (well, not supposed to), and Windows on it, and do so fairly well.
I stuff it and usually some other machine, my Prop machine, into a backpack, along with so much storage I can't even imagine, walk around, and compute where I want, and with a few hookups, on what I want, when I want, and it's fast too.
We live in good times, if we don't color our perception of today, with our often romantic vision of the past, where it really was a more brutal, far more limiting and challenging computing environment. Think about it. We had workstations why? Because they were expensive, and big, meaning we had to go to the computer, sit there, and compute, and anything we wanted to compute with, needed a thick wire attached. I used to have a cube filled with machines, running it's own darn network, because I needed the throughput. Now, those same things can all be done on a pretty little machine I carry around with me, runs on a battery, with few worries.
OBC
I run a stripped down XP.
I'd like something as nicely put together as the iPad but
with a customized Linux version running on it.
Actually we all sort of write our own tiny OS when we work with our
uC's. I like the control that you get from that.
I distrust the whole cloud computing paradigm.
I'd like something to replace the netbook I always have with
me to do research on. I need to be able to run TOR browser
though, I need the layer of encryption between the tablet
and the various wireless routers I connect with.
I'd love a large tablet of about 10" screen size with a custom
Ubuntu OS maintained by the Ubuntu team.
I often leave the Parallax forum open for hours while I'm at work. That's why
you can often see me on in the wee hours from about 1am eastern
to about 9am. I'm just starting my day in Haifa when you guys are
all asleep :-) That's the reason I agreed to be a moderator as I'm
usually the only one on during those hours...in case a spammer sneaks in
I can give them the boot.
In between brainstorming sessions I bring up the Parallax forum window to
see if anyone has posted something of interest.
I am sometimes surprised to see a few of you guys on at those hours though.
Some of you must have insomnia :-)
I'm up sorta late here right now, it's 2 mins till midnite.
Oh, I can't have a webcam built into an Android tablet or netbook. They don't allow
them at work. They removed the one in my netbook so I could carry it here.
Cellphones, webcams, thumb drives..etc are frowned on. I get to have a thumb
drive but it gets dumped every day when I leave so they have a copy of all the data.
They ordered the drive and I reimbursed for it... I couldn't just bring in one I bought
somewhere else.
I suffer from insomnia, which is why you might see me on at 04:00 in the morning, UK time.
I like the Streak because of the small size, it fits in my pocket. The screen on a smart phone would be too small for me, and the iPad is too big. It also has GPS, and 3G for data, so I can use it anywhere. I was going to buy an iPad, but the Streak came out and I went for that, instead. It suits me, and I'm sure that I made the right choice. I might buy one of the other Android tablets if I was in the market for one now, though.
All the facilities I know of that had camera bans now have cell phone bans unless you can show that your phone doesn't have a camera. I avoided upgrading mine for years because of that but finally the battery died, and I really needed one with a keyboard anyway since my wife caught the texting bug. This is a horrible pain in the rear end as now we can't get in touch with service techs who are in these facilities if we need to consult or redirect them in a hurry. (We have a lot of customers who ban cameras out of protection for industrial secrets rather than national security.)
The trend of putting cameras in anything with a powerful enough computer and enough storage to run one is becoming a real headache both for people who don't want certain things photographed and the other people who have to deal with those people. Even the super-cheap Chinese android pad I got for USD$100 has a camera. I think the only way you'd be able to get a pad or netbook without one would be to physically remove it, as Holly's superiors did.
My theory is that the people that write them start off as being very impecunious and have to make do with older computers, and as they, or their company becomes more successful, they upgrade to faster computers. Eventually the developers end up using the fastest and latest computers - far faster than the average user has on their desk. The developers think everything runs more than fast enough. Only their customers disagree!
I have used this theory in reverse when I wrote some practice management software - I went out to the shed and resurrected an ancient computer and wrote the program on that. It forced many different ways of coding, including (shock) the use of GOTO deep inside a sort algorithm. But when the same program was run on a computer of average age (0 to 4 years old), it ran lightning fast.
Maybe OS developers should consider this?
Frankly a 400MHz CPU is bloody old for a desktop so I would have to say the Linux team has it right .
OSX is not as light as the Tux but it too runs well on older HW then one would think .
you can run the latest Version of OSX on a core solo . ..... this to me is darn good .....
Peter
Why? The original operating system fit on a floppy disk.
-Phil
Windows wasn't my first operating system but I remember that Windows 3.0 included enough stuff that everything could be kept compatible. Users want to keep their systems compatible so Microsoft kept adding on instead of starting over from scratch or streamlining.
@local_roger: If the company in question actually does do solid regression testing, they will have maintained a few baseline hardware platforms, perform certifications on new ones, and run metrics to determine the worth of new code changes vs their resource requirements. The CAD company I work closely with does this, and it's quite the investment! Basically, there is a bunker, networked, with a lot of machines running a test suite on auto-pilot. Part of the build process is kicking out the test cases and scripts needed to vet the code changes. Given what I saw, I would not be surprised at all to see a lot of that skipped to ship!
Quite simply, I have a W7 Toshiba NB-250 which came with 1Gbyte of ram, but I upgraded to 2Gbyte. My previous experiences with XP and Vista made me wary of trying to run any MS OS on 512Mbyte of ram. Dual boots on the XP, the Vista, and the W7 all have a smaller footprint than Windows and outperform Windows. The XP machine has 512m DRAM and barely functions in a striped down version of XP Pro while Ubuntu Linux zips along.
On the hard disk side, I ended up with a 240-50 hard disk in the Toshiba NB-250 with only 200Gbytes visible. And the initial software installation included a lot of promotions - Norton Security, M$ Word, and games. As I recall, it was about 40Gbytes of software, but since I striped out much of this I've no idea what the exact original amount was. Attempts to repartition to share Linux with W7 still require 100Gbytes for the W7 partition because of certain files that cannot be moved (I suspect there may be a way to do so, but it is not merely a simple repartitioning).
Yes, my figures were high. But MS has consistently bloated their software and generally required one to upgrade DRAM and storage beyond what their minimum specs are for good performance. My credibility has been questioned herein, but MS has its own problems with credibility. From an engineer's point of view, Linux is less creative with the specifications.
BTW. I have the Atom version of W7 Starter which is a special 32bit version with clear limitations.
Frankly, I feel that the commercial OSes have driven the average consumer's computer purchases like driving sheep to market. Trying to create a stable platform for the long-term in a typical office environment has been a nightmare as workers are forced to retrain and retrain in a context where manpower is quite limited. Only recently has Linux become easy to install and provided a complete office suite with a stable GUI, but that really is nearly everything most people need or want.
A lot of that disk space is probably because of stuff Toshiba is doing and is not part of Windows 7.
I'm running a desktop with Windows 7 Pro 64bit (OEM version from Microsoft, not from a computer manufacturer) and it had no problems installing on an 80G drive (an 80G SSD). There were no other drives in the system and no other partitions. I don't remember how much the initial install took up, but now with plenty of applications installed on the drive (no data) including MS Office, I'm still using 50G or less of the drive space.
I'm not doubting your situation, but the 100G number is because of some effect of your repartitioning and not reinstalling. Reinstalling should bring that number down.