[the_cramer]

You'd think that the progression in computer technology brings you faster apps that need less ressources. But instead we tend to waste them in ever growing tech stacks. Browsers are nearly OSes now, apps are running in a container, emulating a browser. All in the name of platform independence.

I wonder what a system with native bare metal apps would look like today and how far you can push down the hardware requirements while still having a snappy experience in - let's say - a basic office job (mails, sheets, documents, browsing)

But "You bought too little RAM to read mails" is simply hilarious. Yes, the user can install mail clients, but not everybody is tech savvy enough for that.

[hannob]

> I wonder what a system with native bare metal apps would look like today and how far you can push down the hardware requirements while still having a snappy experience in - let's say - a basic office job (mails, sheets, documents, browsing)

I mean it's not that you can't have that. Get a Linux desktop with one of the less bloated desktop environments like lxqt or xfce, there's still a variety of e-mail applications available, libreoffice does the basic office application tasks.

It's more or less what I'm doing. Not saying it's perfect, there's certainly a lot that could be improved (without sacrificing performance), e.g. by better integration of the various parts. But you absolutely can have a basic Desktop system with great performance on modern hardware.

The situation where you end up still having to deal with the sluggishness of modern software is when you want to interact with the tools the world out there uses. Often that means "yet another slow electron app".

[1vuio0pswjnm7]

"You'd think that the progression in computer technology brings you faster apps that need less ressources."

And yet you would be wrong. Because after Microsoft we could no longer trust software develepers, another option is to _not change_ the software when upgrading the hardware, thereby enjoying the benefits of the new hardware. For example, I run software written in the "distant" past on today's hardware, e.g., using NetBSD as the OS. I do not use containers. I do not use graphics. It's "native bare metal". IMHO, it's far better than today's "apps". Faster and more resilient. I can fully separate code from data. IMO, I get more of the benefits of the new hardware due to relatively _less resource consumption_, even though the older software rarely can make use of every new hardware feature.

Early next year Google says it is not going to let people use HTML mode (no Javascript) in Gmail anymore. This is still easily accessed by changing "/u/0/u/" in the URL to "/u/0/h/".

Previously, Google tried to prevent people from using unpopular browsers to access Gmail. As a text-only browser user I needed a workaround. With help from a localhost forward proxy I am still able to use a text-only browser.

Whether this new change will absolutely stop people from avoiding Javascript remains to be seen.

[dontlaugh]

Switching to native apps gets you close. Apple Mail uses far less memory than Gmail, for example.

[palmfacehn]

WordPerfect 6.2 for DOS has a cult following.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24411333