# Journey into the Darkness

## Ch. 4: The Byte Plague

When I first started writing this story in 2017, Xubuntu was at version 18.04. It needs at least 512MB of RAM, but it recommends that you have at least 1GB. Seems like the RAM requirements have doubled since 2009 when it was intended for older machines with fewer resources.  Linux Mint was also known to be lighter on memory usage back then, but that's not true anymore. As of January 2023, it takes roughly 15GB for the default MATE installation according to the website, twice that of Xubuntu 18.04.  It doesn't say anything about RAM or CPU requirements, so it's probably safe to assume 4GB is the recommended minimum.

Remember that old XP machine that couldn't run Ubuntu?  It must have been version 7.04 at the latest, requiring 256MB RAM for a usable system and a few GBs of free space, probably a Pentium or similar CPU at a time when a single core was typical for desktops.  Well Ubuntu has grown quite large as of version 22.04 LTS, recommending a 2GHz dual-core CPU, 4GB RAM and 25GB of free space... I don't even know what to say to this, so we'll just move on.

Windows 10 recommends 20GB disk space, 4GB RAM and 1GHz CPU, which is in stark contrast to Windows XP Home or Professional edition.  The recommended specs were a Pentium or similar CPU clocked at 300MHz, 128MB RAM (though 256MB is more realistic) and 1.5GB of free space when not including the service packs. Aside from virtual desktops and a face lift, just what the hell does Windows 10 even offer in terms of functionality that XP didn't have? Something must be responsible for the increased requirements, because I KNOW it wouldn't be of any use on such old hardware.  Oh, but now it's "Windows 11", whatever that means.

It's not just the operating systems that demand so much memory and disk space. Actually, in most cases the OS alone uses less than 500MB of RAM, Windows or Linux.  I say "most" because the last time I installed Ubuntu (version 18.04), idle RAM usage after booting was just over 1GB with the default installation which once again, leaves me speechless.  Modern web browsers easily consume 1GB and spawn multiple processes with just one tab open.  I'm sure a good chunk of that stems from the web essentially being a whole software platform of its own now, but it seems like such a waste for viewing what is essentially supposed to be plain text and the occasional image, something I can easily achieve with w3m while using less than 20MB of RAM. The exact benefits of the modern browsing experience continue to elude me.

Speaking of which, let's do a little comparison.  The first six chapters of this story when combined will come out to ~45 kilobytes and contains over 8000 words of actual content.  If this were a modern web page it wouldn't fit on a 1.44MB floppy disk thanks to all the scripts and ads that get downloaded, and that's even ignoring the (often enormous) images.  During the summer of 2020 I went into a downward spiral of depression that led to writing three plain-text essays which when combined will add up to 13,742 words and 75KB. That's a lot of content that would have taken about 20 seconds to load on our old dial-up connection, and yet it STILL doesn't come close to the size of even a "simple" modern web page which may only contain ten percent as much written content, yet would take over 10 minutes to load on that same dial-up link. I've even found many sites that don't work without JavaScript, making them completely useless in browsers like w3m and lynx.  Medium.com is a prime example which I now avoid for 
this very reason.

Still worse are the "dynamic" pages that often misbehave on mobile devices. You know, those fancy-pants web pages where you scroll down and a block of text will scroll in from the side, background elements move around and it's all just so distracting it prompts one to scream inside as they wonder just what the ever loving f#!k was SO WRONG with plain-old HTML that necessitated the creation of such CPU, RAM and bandwidth-wasting eye-candy to display what amounts to nothing more than a few short sentences?

Things are not much better on mobile platforms either, and in fact it may be even worse.  The last phone I bought had 2GB RAM and 32GB internal storage, yet 9.8GB of that storage was taken up by Android 10, while only half the RAM is available for the apps I might run.  Somehow I find it hard to believe that a mobile OS that runs on ARM processors can take up so much space. Even many apps are surprisingly large downloads despite many service providers having relatively low data caps and throttled bandwidth when the cap is exceeded, yet another issue imposed by the web being fat.  Perhaps I'm biased because of my experience with PalmOS Garnet.

Prior to getting a laptop, I had a Palm TX which was used for more than two years for web browsing, email, word processing, playing music and videos, even running a graphing calculator program which put the TI-84 to shame.  I had it right up until some jack-wagon decided to use it without my permission and permanently drained the battery.  This was the flagship PDA made by Palm before they switched to making smartphones, and it went everywhere with me.  In terms of raw computing power it was a joke compared to even a modern low-end Android device, yet it did the same damn things any phone today can do.  There was even a full office suite and programs to write (and compile) C and C++ code, and probably other languages if I remember correctly. When the internal flash got full you could move some programs on the SD card, something Android used to do in the early days.  In many ways it was superior to later versions of Android and is something I deeply miss.

The Palm TX had the following specs:

* 128MB internal flash (100MB available to user)
* 32MB RAM
* 312 MHz Intel XScale PXA 270
* 3.9-inch 320x480 TFT touch display (with a stylus)
* 802.11b Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, IrDA
* 1250mAh battery
* SD card slot (supports up to 2GB)

Strangely, this is still listed new on Amazon for $170 as of January 2023, but it's been discontinued for many years...  Notice the battery size in the TX and compare it to most phones made in the last few years.  I'll bet dollars to donuts the overall runtime hasn't changed all that much between a Palm TX and a typical Android phone made ten years later, despite having batteries with two or three times the capacity and chip sets that are made with increasingly small transistors which helps to reduce their power consumption. The exception is my current ruggedized brick of a phone, the Oukitel WP5 which has a non-removable 8000mAh battery and will run for two days with nearly constant music playback throughout the day.  If the TX had this battery, it would probably run for over a week under theh same load.

But enough of all that, let's go back to 2016 for a bit.  I bought a used HP Z600 workstation in the hopes of finally playing Minecraft at more than 30fps.  The machine had a quad-core Xeon CPU and 12GB of RAM, but the GPU was some outdated model specifically made for workstations and was of no use for gaming.  Linux Mint was becoming harder to tolerate, so I decided to try installing Arch.  It was the first step towards what would later become a crusade against bloat.  It was also the second time I would manually install Linux from the command line, and it sucked.

Of course by then I'd learned enough about disk partitioning and boot loaders to not be concerned about ending up with a 40lb brick.  Confidence was high as I set out to try this "minimalist" Linux distribution...  Almost immediately, X was installed along with MATE and all the other GUI tools I'd known and used, so I'm really not sure what this was supposed to accomplish, besides claiming more bragging rights.  Up to this point, I was only vaguely aware of systemd, but I hadn't given it much thought since it wasn't something that concerned me as a casual user of the prepackaged GUI Linux experience.  Even on Arch it wasn't something that called for much attention after the initial set up.

That would soon change as this apparent disease would go on to infect Linux distributions left and right, causing all manner of discord and hoo-ha which even I couldn't help but notice.  With the observations of Mint misbehaving, Ubuntu becoming a pig and Windows taking bloody ages to install (is it frozen?  we'll know in about 18 hours...), my outlook on things began to take a radical turn.  I knew something was wrong, but I wasn't sure what to do about it.  The answer would come to me in the next year as I started getting rid of things in a move towards minimalism in general.

Oh and yes, Windows 10 did in fact take more than 18 solid hours to reinstall, as experienced when I tried restoring someone's work computer to save them from needlessly spending money on a new machine.  Just what the hell was it doing in all that time, anyway?  Honestly it wouldn't surprise me if the recovery tool was building Windows 10 from source, installing the OS, downloading the countless updates that came after the machinew was made, followed by installing them and restarting (repeatedly).  Based on the time it took and how many times it restarted, that is the only logical answer I can come up with.

=> index.gmi Index
=> 5.gmi Ch. 5: A T430 in the Void
=> ../../index.gmi Home