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Maybe the RAM shortage will make software less bloated? (feddit.org)
submitted 8 months ago by to c/showerthoughts@lemmy.world
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Windows 11 often requires new hardware. But that will be extremely pricey or have very little RAM for a while.

I dont believe that a single competent person works at Micro$oft anymore, but maybe maybe this could lead them to make a less shitty OS?

And garbage software like Adobe Creative Cloud too?

They obviously dont care about users, but the pain could become too big.

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[–] 103 points 8 months ago* (4 children)

It's not just garbage software. So many programs are just electron apps which is about the most inefficient way of making them. If we could start actually making programs again instead of just shipping a webpage and a browser bundled together you'd see resource usage plummet.

In the gaming space even before the RAM shortage I've seen more developers begin doing optimization work again thanks to the prevalence of steam deck and such so the precedent is there and I'm hopeful other developers do start considering lower end hardware.

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  • [–] 13 points 8 months ago (2 children)

    Probably a super unpopular take, but the Switch and Switch 2 have done more for game optimization than the Steam Deck has by sheer volume of consoles sold than the Steam Deck ever could. I agree the Steam Deck pushed things further but the catalyst is the Switch/2

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  • [–] 10 points 8 months ago (2 children)

    I take it the Switch/S2 has many non-Nintendo games shared with other consoles? Hard to search through 4,000 titles on Wikipedia to find them at random, but I did see they had one Assassin's Creed (Odyssey) at the game's launch. I never really had Nintendo systems and just associate them with exclusive Nintendo games.

    I'm choosing to believe the Steam Machine will do more of the same for PC games. Maybe it won't force optimization at launch, but I hope it maintains itself as a benchmark for builds and provides demand for optimization to a certain spec.

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  • [–] 6 points 8 months ago

    I try to follow the gaming space and I didn't really see anyone talk about optimization until the Steam deck grew. I do wish more companies were open about their development process so we actually had some data. The switch/switch 2 very well could have pushed it, but I think with those consoles people just accept that they might not get all the full modern AAA games, they're getting Pokemon and Mario and such. Where as the steam deck they want everything in their steam library. I dunno

    I have no real data, just what I've seen people discussing.

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  • [–] 5 points 8 months ago

    I only own one Nintendo game on my Switch. I'm not going to sit here and pretend most of my games run great on it though. Slay the Spire and Stardew run well. But I've had quite a few crashes with Civilization and some hangs with Hades or Hollow Knight too

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  • [–] 3 points 8 months ago

    So the developers of PC games like Claire Obscure: Expedition 33, which doesn't have a Switch version of any kinda, spent time, effort and money to optimize specifically for the Steam Deck... because of the Switch's market share? Cmon now bud, that's a straight up ridiculous take.

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  • [–] 10 points 8 months ago (1 child)

    Web apps are a godsend and probably the most important innovation to help move people off of Windows.

    I would prefer improvements to web apps and electron/webview2 if I had to pick.

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  • [–] 15 points 8 months ago (1 child)

    If those web apps were using the same shared electron backend then they could be "a godsend". But each of those web apps uses it's own electron backend.

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  • [–] 0 points 8 months ago (2 children)

    Idk, I don't think the issue is election apps using 100mb instead of 10mb. The kind of apps that you write as html/js are almost always inherently low demand, so even 10x-ing their resources doesn't really cause a problem, since you're not typically doing other things at the same time.

    The issue is the kind of apps that require huge system resources inherently (like graphically intensive games or research tools), or services that run in the background (because you'll have a lot of them running at the same time).

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  • [–] 10 points 8 months ago (1 child)

    You're off by a large margin. I'll use two well documented examples.

    Whatsapp native used about 300mb with large chats. Cpu usage stayed relatively low and constant. Yes it wasn't great but that's a separate issue. The new webview2 version hits over a gig and spikes the cpu more than some of my games.

    Discord starts at 1gb memory usage and exceeds 4gb during normal use. That's straight from the developers. It's so bad they have started rolling out an experimental update that makes the app restart itself when it hits 4gb.

    These are just two electron apps meant just for chatting mostly. That's up to 5Gb with just those two apps. Electron and webview2 both spin up full node.js servers and multiple JavaScript heaps plus whatever gpu threads they run, and are exceedingly bad at releasing resources. That's exactly why they are the problem. Yes the actual JavaScript bundles discord and Whatsapp use are probably relatively small, but you get full chromium browsers and all of their memory usage issues stacked on top.

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  • [–] -1 points 8 months ago (1 child)

    Right
    But those are only problems because they use the resources in the background. When the foreground app uses a lot of resources it's not a problem because you only have one foreground app at a time (I know, not really, but kinda). Most apps don't need to run in the background.

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  • [–] 9 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 child)

    Yes, thats the problem? I'm confused what you're not getting here. Those programs are made to constantly run. Many people need both for various reasons. Add a main program like Photoshop and then you don't have enough RAM. People don't load discord, check a message, close it, load Whatsapp, check it, close it, then load Photoshop.

    The RAM usage doesn't suddenly stop because you alt+tab to a different program.

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