I haven't had any problems with bugs, installing software or anything else that you mentioned actually. Granted I don't use new hardware very often. Ubuntu runs on my desktop and laptop without a problem(it even hibernates?). The most irritating thing I've had to do so far was install restricted Nvidia drivers on my desktop and restricted ATI drivers on my laptop. It required a couple of clicks and then downloaded and installed for me. I can certainly see why Windows would be useful for people that want to play the latest and greatest games, or if they needed software available only for that OS, but I don't see a need to knock linux. And as far as it being a total piece of crap (as a desktop OS) for anyone aside from "hardcore geek users"…I don't consider myself a hardcore geek, and my wife doesn't know a thing about computers, but requested I remove windows and put linux on her computer after 1 week of Windows XP. (She hates it!).

True it's probably using a few hundred MB or more considering I'm currently using Chrome with seven tabs open and am using a grand total of 144 MB.

What are you basing that on? Since IE7 and 8, IE has been a lot less integrated with the Windows shell.

I just realized that Ubuntu does use quite a bit more memory than I thought. Of course I'm sure it scales depending on the memory available, but system monitor shows nearly 300mb with nothing extra but the system monitor and kildclient(27mb) running. I also noticed extremely high cpu usage with the system monitor active, not sure why.

Screenshot

Basing it on the facts. Just because it's less integrated doesn't mean it's not at all. So there are processes related to IE code that won't show up in task manager as belonging to the "IE" application - which is only monitoring iexplore.exe like it always has. That's why people who get into a tizzy over how Firefox supposedly uses more memory think IE is superior. Because in FF's case the OS reports what FF actually launched since it's not part of the OS. IE uses memory even when you're not using the browser interface.

IE being superior to FF is just sill. It's flat out slower than FF. Then again FF is also hands down slower than Opera and Chrome.

Yeah, well. There are people who will swear up and down that IE is superior because they see iexplore.exe never take much more than the 30MB of memory it starts with, compare it to FF, see a huge difference, then laugh at it without ever understanding what they're using. IE is slow, buggy, bloated, behind the times, and just plain ugly as hell. FF kicks the crap out of it any day. Opera could if it's interface wasn't such a nightmare of usability. I'll concede Chrome but it's not refined enough in the privacy options area for me to be comfortable with a switch.

You still haven't used it in years have you? I really haven't found it to suffer from any usability issues in the last 5-6 releases.

All of you who are supporting Vista/Windows 7/etc because "we have 2G of RAM these days", or "Hey, it's a dual-core 3GHz CPU"… just think back for a moment.

Do you remember how snappy and responsive computers like the C64, Atari 800, Amiga, even the old Apple II were? You flipped the machine on and in about 5 seconds you could start doing something with it. Sure, if you wrote a program to calculate PI, it ran a LOT slower – and sure, you couldn't multi-task (but did you really need to?).

Now, imagine how incredibly fast our modern hardware COULD be, it it weren't shackled with megabytes upon megabytes of layered OS libraries that wrap and encapsulate everything in so many ways that you couldn't even LIFT the API manual if a complete one existed (which it doesn't).

My 5 year old desktop is a 3GHz P4 with 3G of RAM. It is 3000 times faster (in raw megahertz) than the 1MHz Motorola 6510 that my C64 had. It has 50,000 times more RAM than my C64. It FEELS considerably slower and less responsive. It certainly doesn't feel like *I* am doing 3000 times more work. In fact, I'm probably doing less work because of all the time I have to spend updating drivers, fiddling with desktop settings, etc, etc.

So, as you're supporting Microsoft in forcing the hardware market to continue producing the faster hardware that's required to make their ever-more-bloated software *SEEM* to be improving, think about how fast you COULD be running things with a really lightweight OS.

There's no way back, of course, but the Microsoft/OSX/Linux bandwagons don't have to be the only ways forward. Yes, I lump them together, because even though the unix variants are more efficient at first, once you layer X windows on top, they too become bloated and sluggish (just not quite as much as Windows).

I hear ya, the latest Kubuntu 8.10 with all its kde gimmickry turned on is a tad slower on my 2.8gig athlon with 4gig ram, than Xp on the same machine. The trouble is, consumers want all that crap, and people like you and I want something that does the job fast and with ease. I seem to find myself caught somewhere in the middle most of the time, I just want things to work, and to be easy, i dont care for all the bells and whistles and I do no want hell from dependencies, i switched back to linux f/t because i could not get rubygem to install eventmachine in andlinux and the command line svn client is a bugged heap of crap that would not update from my repo in windows command line. If i could personally do without certain apps i would use something like XFCE and zip along at light speed, rather pointless installing most of KDE and Gnome in XFCE just to access a few programs.

Actually I just used it the other night to grab a couple of torrent files. The 9.6 version even. Nothing has changed. It's sill a nightmare of usability.

I think you forgot how crappy the graphics were back then, and how much crap Windows supports that we'd be the first to complain about if it didn't. Sure it can be better, but as long as open source projects don't provide a true alternative I'm not complaining and happily mess around with Cygwin.

Actually I remember the graphics on my C64 being pretty damn good for their time. Often of much higher quality than the Atari or Apple II and sometimes rivaling that of the Amiga. I even remember the sound quality being unmatched. This was all back when PCs were boat anchors that beeped if you were lucky and EGA Enhanced was the new big thing.

How long ago was that?

I'm not sure I see your point. You commented about how crappy the graphics were back then and I disagree with that assessment. They're crappy now and I doubt you'd find many people willing to go back to those conditions today but saying they were crappy back then justifies Windows 7 using 1GB of system memory today is some pretty convoluted logic.

EDIT: Heh, just clarifying that I'm not replying directly to Samson (I know it wasn't MY point you were trying to see).

My point was, computers used to do what YOU told them to do, and they were fun and amazing to play with. Now, YOU do what the computers (as proxies for Microsoft, Linux, etc) tell you to do. You upgrade when they say you "need" to upgrade, you buy new hardware so they're satiated, you learn how to use new desktop mechanics and software suite API's because it's what "everyone" uses and you have no choice if you want to work with the rest of the world.

On my C64, I didn't feel limited by the sound or graphics of the hardware… I felt that it was my own (lack of) skill that prevented me from getting something to look or sound the way I wanted them to. Now, I feel that my skill doesn't matter, because I'm expected to learn visual studio, and expected to program for the DirectX API, and expected to adapt myself to writing software that will "work with" everything else, even if it doesn't do what *I* want.

I find that sad.

That's probably one of the reasons I still plug away at text games, since they don't bind me by 12 API's and 25 toolkits just to get something up and running. :)

What I really meant is that from the now perspective things were really really crappy. I'm not sure if it adds up to 1GB but if you see Firefox taking up 100 mb for some web browsing I can't quite see the complaints about the operating system itself taking up a tenfold of that.

If the operating system is taking up a 10-fold amount of memory over a large network application with graphics capabilities that should tell you something of the amount of bloat that's in it. 1GB taken up to idle at your desktop is insane. Both are clearly bloated for the sake of being bloated. I find it difficult to fathom how FF needs 100MB to display web pages. I find it equally difficult to fathom how Windows needs 1GB to show you a desktop full of icons. Of course, these days Windows is trying to be everything + the kitchen sink too. It does things far beyond what an OS truly needs to do. They clearly are of the attitude "if the space is there, we should make use of as much as we can".

I remember getting the response once that they 'couldn't read the attached resume' and if I could attach a microsoft word file instead. The resume was a .html file - it's a mad world out there.


You're one of those, 64K should be enough for everyone, people? ;)

I'm more one of those Why not code it better so it only needs 64K people. :)

If you've ever looked at the Windows API (well, one of the many), you've probably noticed that there are about a dozen ways to do any particular thing you want to do…. many of them are legacy code to support older applications that were written when THAT was the new be-all-end-all library, and many of them are there because the team working on the file browser API layer, the team working on the database abstraction API layer, and the team working on the generic toolkit API layer ALL decided to write their own routine to do the same thing through a lower-level API… and they all got accepted and became further standard API's.

When you only had 64K, you made sure to write code efficiently AND make sure you didn't squander it with multiple copies of the same thing. In short, people are horribly lazy because they've been encouraged to be lazy. Object oriented modular code is considered more important than efficient code, because it can be made to work quickly and cheaply… not always for the better.