Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit | sqircles's commentslogin

I have long held a bias of KDE being the clunky and slow option from trial in the ~early-oughts. Within the past month or so I installed it to give it a spin and haven't switched back to XFCE since. It strikes a good balance of customization / speed / taste / and just working out of the box. Thanks KDE team!

If you are someone that mostly likes the Windows 7/10 experience, KDE out of the box is basically that. It's more customizable. It's (IMO) less clunky and less burdened by legacy components. But it really just feels like windows used to feel like.

But also just fast and low memory. You can run KDE on ancient hardware. If you have something like 512MB of ram, you can do KDE just fine.


>If you have something like 512MB of ram, you can do KDE just fine

The past is a foreign land. Minimum memory requirement for Windows 95 was something like 4MB. I ran OS/2 on 8MB of memory (with a Cyrix 40Mhz 486 clone).


At least part of this is going to be the resolutions at play. In windows 95 era you were dealing with 640x480 resolutions. Maybe 1024x768. Modern displays are doing a lot more than that. 1920x1080 at a minimum.

Beyond that, in windows 95 in the extreme you could be looking at only 16 colors. 256 colors was also not uncommon. 16bit colors became common in the windows 98 era.


1024x768 was super common place. 800x600 next in line. I would say that 640x480 was uncommon for Windows 95. I had been running 24-bit graphics with Windows 3.1. No way that 16 bit color only became popular with Windows98. Even SVGA 1027x768x8 was limited to 256 distinct color on the screen at a time, but the palette was dynamic, and the lookup table was into 18-bit RGB space.

I must be doing something wrong. On my old i5 6200u Laptop with 8 gigs of RAM fedora kde takes ages to boot and system operation is definitely more sluggish than Windows 10 used to be.

Are you using an SSD? That does make a pretty big difference.

Also, make sure you are setup to use proprietary firmware. IDK if fedora does that by default. For my laptop I was running without it for a bit and things were definitely a bit sluggish. I had to add some modprobe settings for the i915 (intel video card) driver.

For your CPU it'd look something like this

    # /etc/modprobe.d/i915.conf
    options i915 enable_guc=2 enable_fbc=1
(might be guc=3)

You'll need to make sure you have the linux-firmware package installed.

(Some googling suggest fedora isn't doing this for you).

Here's an arch wiki entry about it with a bunch of extra diagnostics commands.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Intel_graphics

Here's a gist that also covers fedora

https://gist.github.com/Brainiarc7/aa43570f512906e882ad6cdd8...


> But also just fast and low memory.

In my experience it's fast and low memory right up until you go to edit a panel or add a widget. The editor runs like molasses on my desktop.


Sounds quite normal, honestly. Programming is in a dark place right now relative to how I used to enjoy it. I haven't touched a personal project in many months. You did something for four decades and whatever mystery may have been left there is probably gone with AI.

Try identifying what made it feel like a "passion." Was it problem solving and discovering new things on your own by piecing things together? Then yeah, AI probably has something to do with that in regard to software development - but there are many other avenues you can take to fulfill that whether it be unrelated hobbies or charity work, etc.


>Try identifying what made it feel like a "passion." Was it problem solving and discovering new things on your own by piecing things together? Then yeah, AI probably has something to do with that in regard to software development - but there are many other avenues you can take to fulfill that whether it be unrelated hobbies or charity work, etc.

If you had a passion for coding, then unrelated hobbies or charity work wont fulfill it.

And if you have no job or a shit job or a shit coding job because of AI, no much means or morale for hobbies and charity either...


Does the idea of submitting one's self to using something like this not terrify anyone else? The more true the effectiveness of these products become, the more they have the possibility to do the inverse on accident (or potentially on purpose), no?


I think it should. Our system is closed-loop and we monitor the real-time change in brain-wave activity. The process is very precise, and must be (80ms window for a 50ms pulse).

When we first started, many in the sleep community were against using these techniques. A significant number of the studies look specifically at safety, and often people report to these as "null results" when in fact what was being examined was the potential negative impact.

One example is the study on metabolic function [1], which showed no result in healthy men. It did not harm their metabolic function, though it also didn't improve it (though I'm not sure how you would measure improvement in healthy metabolic function).

For our company, there are many modalities and capabilities we are building for the future, we began with auditory stimulation and this one in particular due to the low-risk and volume of research.

[1] https://doi.org/10.1016/j.psyneuen.2018.08.028


The billing footguns are a major pain point for anyone that doesn't have the capital to just dump faith paired with a credit card into. This of course is not limited to AWS...


> Psychological addition [...] no different to people munching pills every weekend at a rave or drinking enough to be tipsy (or wasted, if that's your thing)

I can assure you pills and alcohol are much more than a psychological addiction.


> How many SMEs out there are depending on Sara's knowledge of the USB memory stick and how to use it?

I think at least in part, that is the point: orgs are missing the part of the equation where the institutional and organizational knowledge is critical. Sure, the code to accomplish parts B and C can be re-duct-taped together in a month or so by off-shore, or maybe an agent... but part A, its plumbing, and why it does what it does the way it does it due to historical failures and the knowledge behind that is probably what keeps it going.

Those things are learned starting at the ground level by bumping into them in the trenches.


Odd, our Enterprise side has been jacking up for a few days now on PRs.


My biggest road blocks seem to be knocked down with a nice walk / good nights rest, a la "rubber duck debugging." Essentially, stepping away and being able to put a fresh set of "eyes" on the problem with a different perspective, albeit it's just you resetting your own perspective.


It seems to be more that they're using "security" as a reason for going closed source, so this is just sticking with the story.


Fair point.


> You shouldn't have shoved trash down people's throats a few months ago then?

:s/You/MS

While I agree the widespread "race to market" with crap probably does and should hurt the success of these "AI-enabled apps," that particular area probably was not this individuals decision.


It was this person's decision to mention their senior role at MS then dump marketing drivel into our heads. It's not his hand but he still eats with it.


Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: