Comment by bityard
1 month ago
It's just the price of progress. When I started playing with Linux, a full fledged Linux desktop with web browser and all ran very happily on a machine with 16 megabytes of RAM. At the time, there were distributions that fit on a floppy disk.
Both are more or less impossible now, but I don't think we should think of 100mb of "background state" as bloated. The fact that your can get a lot of useful stuff done on Linux in under 512mb in 2026 while Windows and Mac need multiple GB just to get out of bed is pretty awesome.
So... what's the progress exactly? Everything is bloated now and looks way less cool!
Lots of this is more aggressive caching and pre-allocation. Also, most Linux apps, both gui and console, are C and C++. They're basically almost as fast as they can get.