1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
|
# Keeping your old tech, a rant
What's with obsession over new tech? We always want the new tech. Why? It's *faster*. Why does it need to be faster? Unless you encoding/editing 8k videos or doing 3D graphics you probably don't need a faster machine. If you must know, one of my secondary machines is 2010 Macbook "pro", that I was given by a friend of mine who was going to get rid of it, crushes Debian Linux + Firefox (which is about all I use it for - livin dat plan9 life). On what? A second gen i5, 4gb of RAM, and a old HDD. If your just browsing the web you don't need a new computer.
I'm a developer (well, on and off) and I work off an IT retired Dell latitude e7450 - 6th gen i5 and 16gb of RAM. An enterprise machine, I got when it was 3 years old, because it was old. too old for what? spread sheets? Nope those seem to work fine. PowerPoints? Word docs? Windows?
Ah we found the issue, Microsoft, who says they care about the environment [1] can't stand to not to add a bunch of useless new features that make your computer idle at 20% CPU usage. I run a windows VM that works to run ONE app (as you can tell I'm not happy about this) and it runs very slow on the same recorces that run a plan9 VM blazing fast, performing full system rebuilds in less than a minute, and kernel build in seconds. I had too double the cpu core count and its still slow as crap.
I'd like to see the stats On the energy savings and carbon reduction if everyone running Windows would switch to freaking Ubuntu or some other easy linux, let alone something like KISS linux, OpenBSD, or Plan9.
And of course you could make an ease of use argument, and you would be wrong. I find something like Gnome or KDE as easy to use or easier than Windows, which is clunky, slow, full of ads, filled with wierd admin GUIS, and buggy .
Apple is just as guilty [2] (No, taking the charger out didn't do anything but lower your shipping cost). They build up a hard-to-break-out-of walled garden where they have full control of your computers life. Sure they give a lot of there "pro" machine a long os support, but they get very, very slow (citation: my 2010 macbook pro when it ran macos).
People want new computers, whether they realise it or not, is because of software feature bloat. People install less bloated, just as functional (if not more so), OS's on old computers because they run faster and generally better. So why are we still buying new computers?
Because most people simply don't know and if they do, there to intimidated by the install process to try. The reason for this is the general public is computer knowledge lazy. They don't care. Why should they care, thier computer boots up every morning, show's all their emails, edits documents, browses the web, and then turn off at night, if it stops doing that well, buy a new one.
To fix this issue we need better education to the general public on how to fix, modify, and keep there computers for longer. I don't know how, but I'll brain storm on it and see what, if anything comes, if you have an idea please email me at fulton at fulton.software. See you on the next post :D
=> https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/corporate-responsibility/sustainability [1]
=> https://www.apple.com/environment/ [2]
|