I'm rather agnostic about computer power. On the one hand, why are we worrying about such things as bigger and better gadgetry when we don't even know where the energy to power all this stuff is coming from in five, ten years? And headroom? There's been plenty of room and power since the late '90s, i.e., do we really need such gains in speed and power when most users don't really have *serious* need for it? When I started out, you either were a cs major with access to shiny, networked Unix workstations, or you were a peasant autodidact trying to scrape along with stand-alone PC stuff (DOS, then early Windows, Basic, Turbo C++, etc), maybe fooling around with modems and bulletin board silliness. I remember when 16mg of memory -- the minimum required for the first WinNT -- had finally come down to just $600.!!! And yeah, you hocked your soul for it because you wanted to get into some form of networking -- without spending the money for very pricey Novell training. There were hot copies of SCO floating around, but NT was only ~$250. And then came the Windows Dev Kit, all 38,531 floppy disks of it copyable. Around '92-'93 some grad students at U of Washington had befriended me and let me play on their Sun stations (the old pizza boxes with the massive 100lb CRTs!), and that was like being a grown-up. I was so excited! Then one day one of the grown-ups said he'd heard of this Linux thing and that I could probably put it on my puny little 486 with its $600 worth of 16mg memory. Unfortunately, the video card (256k) was too weak-unsupported, so back to MS-land for me. But hey, MS was hiring and I got temp spots with The Beast off-and-on until '95. Then I got married and followed my wife out to U of Missouri where she was doing a grad degree. I got hired by Campus Computing--and FINALLY! I got my hands on some serious Unix! Mizzou had worked a deal with SGI for a stable of sleek, shiny SGI workstations, and I got my very own. Linux was also coming in the campus mix, so yes, Mizzou was a Unixae sorta place, back-end-wise. And from there I never left Unix/Linux shops. I hope there's always a "Linux for the Poor." I remember being poor (then rich, then poor, then rich, then poor ...) and yeah, being able to get into (and stay with) computing should be affordable and accessible to us frugal and/or unwashen types. Olwe Bottorff Grand Marais, MN --- On Sun, 6/27/10, Jason Hsu, embedded engineer, Linux user <jhsu802701 at jasonhsu.com> wrote: From: Jason Hsu, embedded engineer, Linux user <jhsu802701 at jasonhsu.com> Subject: [tclug-list] Linux bloatware: trying too hard to be like Microsoft? To: tclug-list at mn-linux.org Date: Sunday, June 27, 2010, 9:23 PM I find it ironic that Linux set out to be the bloatware buster, but the leading distros have themselves become bloatware. Just look how much the hardware requirements have escalated in the history of Ubuntu, Fedora, and many other leading distros. There was a time when 256 MB of RAM was plenty. In fact, my very first distro was Fedora Core 1 (which came with the book _Linux For Nongeeks_). On this computer (1 GHz, 256 MB of RAM), Fedora Core 1 was reasonably fast. This computer falls short of the requirements of today's Fedora. I don't recommend Ubuntu (or even Xubuntu) for anyone with less than 512 MB of RAM. As these leading distros increase their hardware requirements with each version and cut off support for older versions, they're throwing away a segment of their users. Why do these distros need so much more RAM and processor speed? What's driving the escalating hardware requirements? I'm glad that there is antiX Linux. This is my primary OS. antiX Linux has compatibility with the superior Debian repository (unlike Puppy Linux, which still has a weak repository), user-friendliness (unlike Debian, which requires so much tweaking), AND is plenty fast with only 256 MB of RAM. The success of antiX Linux makes me wonder why other distros have much higher hardware requirements. What exactly do the users get for their extra processor speed and RAM? Why do these other distros need more processor speed and RAM to do the same thing that antiX Linux does? -- Jason Hsu http://www.jasonhsu.com/ee.html http://www.jasonhsu.com/swrwatt.html http://embeddedengineer.wordpress.com/ http://www.jasonhsu.com/linux.html _______________________________________________ TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota tclug-list at mn-linux.org http://mailman.mn-linux.org/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mailman.mn-linux.org/pipermail/tclug-list/attachments/20100628/e28fc584/attachment.htm