💾 Archived View for adamthiede.com › log › 2022-12-18.gmi captured on 2023-11-04 at 11:26:05. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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On my laptop I use Alpine Linux. When I boot it up, a few things like my graphcal environment, newtorkmanager, crond, and a few other general daemons start to make sure the computer works correctly. When I open a terminal and type `free -h`, it's using 253MB (about) of memory.
In comparison to Fedora with GNOME, this is quite low. In comparison to modern versions of Windows, this is basically nothing. Initially I rejoiced that I was able to get a working, usable system with so little resources.
But back in the late 2000s, I had a Dell Dimension desktop computer in a spare room in my parents' house. It was the "old computer", so it lived by itself in a room with no Internet access. It ran Windows XP of course! Occasionally I would play Halo on that PC, while listening to music in iTunes or Windows Media Player. I don't rememeber its other specs, but I remember that computer had 256 MB of RAM.
Today I rejoice that my computer, at idle, doing absolutely nothing but being prepared to run programs for me, in a deliberately "minimal" environment (Alpine Linux with a window manager) is using exactly as much memory as my old computer had total, available to it, and that thing was able to do quite a bit with all that memory.
Where did we go wrong?