[rescue] tired of current GUIs / a rant about the daily garbage we put up with

[Lionel Peterson]

Be aware when comparing different configurations:

New hardware running old software;
New hardware running new software;
Old hardware running new software;and
Old hardware running old software.

On PCs it's common to run new software on older computers, making them seem
slow, as seen in the older workstation 'market' (actually community) older
software on older hardware is likely faster.

Running latest software on latest hardware, no speed issues are typically
noticeable.

And the last option, older software on latest hardware is a rare occurrence,
but can make the old software really fly.

"Back in the day" programmers had reasons to optimize their code, but when the
user-base has no issue with gigabyte software deployments, running on 6-12
core multi-GHz machines with terabytes of storage and a couple dozen gigabytes
of RAM what's the incentive?

The question was raised here about minimal computing environment, I recently
played with the new Raspberry Pi 4 B+, and it's quite a capable operating
environment (running off-the-shelf Debian/Raspian OS), esp. compared to the
previous Raspberry Pi 3 B+. The improvements in I/O channels, networking make
a novelty system into a quite usable system. Do I prefer it to my i5 and i7
laptops? No, but if I had to I could work on it without too much complaining.
Of course, I'm talking about the latest 4GB model with USB 3.0 and a pretty
capable 1 GB/sec Ethernet port along with dual band WiFi supporting a
quad-core CPU. Only in 2019 would that be considered 'modest'...

Ken, N2VIP

> On Oct 23, 2019, at 14:28, Robert Toegel <rjtoegel at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I never realized it
> until students were amazed how fast some of my old equipment was.  Of
> course schools never got top of the line equipment anyway.