Old Computer Challenge - Day 1

Okay, Day 1 is almost over, what have we learned?

Modern software sucks!!

I mean, it doesn’t really, a lot of it is quite beautiful and easy to use, but boy, everything consumes so many resources! Just starting up a web browser (firefox or chrome doesn’t really matter) takes a good ten seconds or more, and then we haven’t even loaded a single page yet.

And webpages are also so slow and bloated these days! I haven’t limited my bandwidth thankfully (otherwise I’d go completely crazy), but just trying to open any normal page I can watch the CPU hang at 100% load for 10, 20, 30 seconds even, and the memory consumption goes up and up and up…. For comparison I installed Windows XP in a VM with the exact same settings as my modern linux (1 core, limited to 50%, 512mb RAM) and it runs! Installed retrozilla browser, and that is lightning fast as well (though not terribly useful any more because it doesn’t render modern sites very well…. and let’s not even think about security). This just shows how much more resource-hungry everything has become.

Oh, sidenote: I noticed that this site here doesn’t render very well on old browsers either, and on links2 (console-based browser) it isn’t useable at all because the links to the posts are not accessible. Ups… I don’t know enough HTML to fix this though, so this is a problem for future me. Maybe I’ll have it sorted for the next OCC in a year ;)

About sites like YouTube… yeah, best not to talk about it.

Listening to a podcast was fine though, I downloaded it through gpodder, copied it to my iPod and enjoyed it free of distraction on my couch :)

Plans for the upcoming days:

• Figure out more console based alternatives to the software I normally use (browser, podcatcher, mastodon-client, mail-client etc.)
• Dive a bit more into Windows XP, if for nothing more than nostalgia’s sake
• Try not to go crazy with everything being so slow! :P