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by bitwize 337 days ago
Thankfully, NeWS has a successor: the browser and Electron. Before you giggle, recognize that in 1990 16 MiB was a HUGE amount of memory, and apps that needed that much to run felt even slower and more bloated than today's Electron apps. A workstation with that much memory would have cost $10,000 or so in 1980s dollars.

Can't wait for DonHopkins to magically appear and infodump about NeWS and his involvement therewith, copypasta-ing entire email threads and even a PostScript pie menu implementation.
1 comments
anthk 337 days ago
Yes... and no.

By the mid 90's there were tools (even fancy 'skins' to XT such as Xaw3D) and WM's which reduced the CPU usage a lot. Today Electron it's more bloated with every release.

If any, by 2025 Gnome would kill any GJS usage to parts of Mutter would be reimplemented in either Vala or Rust getting a big performance boost. BcacheFS would be a stable thing making EXT4 something to be legacied in years. Even the open release of JFS was incredible; a journaling FS being much better for old CPU's than EXT3...

Today we are seeing the opposite trend.

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bitwize 337 days ago
> By the mid 90's there were tools (even fancy 'skins' to XT such as Xaw3D) and WM's which reduced the CPU usage a lot. Today Electron it's more bloated with every release.

For X11, sure (but even then there were systems that ran circles around X11 in half a meg of RAM).

But not for NeWS.

link