On Mon, 25 Jul 2016 17:41:42 -0500 Matt Campbell mattcampbell@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