[linguae]

For desktop software and client-side Web applications, I wonder how much effort is made to test these products on a wide variety of configurations? Judging by how resource-intensive many applications are, it seems that many companies and teams are testing their products on high-end, top-of-the-line equipment and not on low-end configurations. What may perform acceptably on a brand new MacBook Pro (even an entry-level one with Apple's ARM chips and 16GB RAM is no slouch) may be sluggish on someone's four year old Chromebook bought on sale for $149. It's not just performance, but it's also factors such as screen resolution; there are still a large number of users on crappy 1366x768 displays, and these users are going to have a hard time using applications designed with higher-resolution displays in mind.

I'm not saying that all software must accommodate the low end, and I also believe there needs to be a reasonable cutoff (I don't expect software companies to support 20 year old PCs, even if they are still quite capable for non-Web tasks), but I have a feeling that there are unfortunately some companies and teams, even in the open source community, who ship based on their experiences working with high-end configurations, not taking low-end configurations into account.

For one of my side projects that I plan to release to the public once its complete, I have a "minimum viable computer," something in the class of a low-end Chromebook or a Raspberry Pi 4 with a limited amount of RAM (4GB max), that will be used to restrain myself, given that my daily driver is a high-end desktop.