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maccardyesterday at 8:23 AM2 repliesview on HN

> But really, imagine how much power these things have and if you could actually run a free (as in freedom, in the GNU sense) OS on them and really get access to all that power in a handheld device. Only if.

Skipping the "handheld" bit of this just for a second. You can run an (almost entirely) open stack on your hardware, and do so on an i9/9800X3D with 256GB RAM, 5080, and MultiTB of NVMe storage.

But it doesn't realy matter for 95% of users, because the hardware is already way faster than they need and the bottlenecks are on the server side and on shitty software architecture. I have an i9 with 128GB RAM for work, and Excel still takes 30+ seconds to load, Teams manages to grind the entire thing to a halt on startup, slack uses enough memory to power a spaceship... Running those apps on my desktop is pretty much the same experience as running them on my 10 year old macbook.


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chihuahuayesterday at 8:56 PM

Something seems to be funny with your computer's setup. On my feeble i5 laptop with 16GB, Excel starts in about 3 seconds to the point where I can start doing stuff.

If it's a corporate device, it's usually some anti-virus abomination (or other security-related software) that steals 90% of the resources.

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dylan604yesterday at 6:40 PM

> slack uses enough memory to power a spaceship...

Which spaceship though? Not sure spaceship is the model you're looking for, as all of the ones I'm familiar have had a very locked down limited amount of memory. Apollo had something like 4Kb of memory. The space shuttle had 1MB.

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