[Arm-netbook] "Good enough" computing and the upgrade treadmill

[Lauri Kasanen]

On Mon, 25 Jul 2016 17:41:42 -0500
Matt Campbell <mattcampbell at pobox.com> 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