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List:       fedora-devel-list
Subject:    Re: Fedora minimum hardware requirements
From:       Kevin Kofler via devel <devel () lists ! fedoraproject ! org>
Date:       2021-10-18 15:47:43
Message-ID: skk4v4$ck8$1 () ciao ! gmane ! io
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I am going to reply to the parent and grandparent post at once, starting 
with the parent post:

Stephen John Smoogen wrote:
> This conversation is one that seems to happen to computer people as
> they age. I remember in the early 1990's that the Sun 4.1 installer
> was incredibly bloated and required too much memory/cpu to anyone who
> had installed a PDP, IBM 360x, etc. And the arguments we had when the
> Fedora Core 1 being so bloated to the Red Hat Linux 4 installer. etc

Well, yes, creeping bloat has been an issue all the time, from the 
beginning. Otherwise, it would not be such a big issue. This is exactly how 
exponential growth works: the longer you let it happen, the more outrageous 
the growth ends up being. Hence, pointing out that "it was always like that" 
is not a valid excuse, it is actually the reason things have become as bad 
as they are.

> etc. The standard ending of these conversations is "coders these days
> just don't care about memory/cpu/disk space like we had to".
> [Completely forgetting that was what they were told when they were 20
> years younger.]

I take objection to this statement. I was already having this discussion, 
complaining about the bloat, 20 years ago. (And another 20 years before 
that, I was not even born yet.) Now, we got another factor 10+ multiplied on 
top of that.

> Of course, if memory/cpu/disk was really important... you could still
> use that Fedora Core 1 as your daily driver. It would just take some
> work.

That is not a realistic proposal because that release no longer gets 
updated, which means:
* no security fixes,
* no browser support for today's web sites,
* no client support for today's network protocols,
* no software support for today's file formats,
etc.

"Just use the old version" is a standard answer to people complaining about 
size regressions, but it does not help when only the bloated version is 
still maintained.

Unfortunately, software is not something that is written once and can then 
be used forever, but generally needs constant effort to keep working.

> On Mon, 18 Oct 2021 at 02:20, drago01 <drago01@gmail.com> wrote:
>> Saving disk space and memory for the sake of saving disk space and memory
>> is to use your words "not worth it".

And this attitude is exactly why all the above happens that way.

See my post further up this thread for current use cases in which it is 
actually worth caring about this issue. I do not wish to repeat myself.

        Kevin Kofler
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