alt Hacker NewsLow-spec/embedded/vintage devices. Mainly RISC-V, or old x86 hardware like a Pentium III with a Matrox Millennium AGP card or something.
For context: I'm sick and tired of modern hardware, modern GUIs and modern Internet... all of which keeps getting more and more complex, commercialised, controlled and demanding.
I miss the old days, when hardware resources were paltry, when you could mostly understand what went on in your hardware and OS, when developers coded in native languages, didn't rely on bloated toolkits and infinite dependencies and didn't take a user's system resources for granted and were able to make really cool programs in mere kilobytes, when the OS didn't impose arbitrary restrictions on you in the name of "security" and you were free to do whatever you wanted with it, and when the Internet wasn't controlled by mega corporations and there was no Javascript and browsers didn't need gigabytes of RAM and the web wasn't the bloated mess that it is today.... I really, really miss those days.
My dream is to either have a RISC-V box or a vintage PC, hook it up to a LoRa network like Meshcore or something, run an efficient 90s-style OS like QNX/Haiku/SerenityOS/KolibriOS, and run some old-school networking apps similar to IRC, BBS or even Web 1.0, all over LoRa... and rediscover the joy and magic of computers again, relive the spirit of the 90s whilst being able to communicate with others freely without corporations and governments getting in your way... that's my dream.
Sorry if I went off on a tangent, I just saw "QNX" in the headline and it got me all nostalgic and emotional.
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Fully support your dream -- and out of similar reason/sentiments I created GateMate PC (google for it) and GateMate S/359. I will return to these systems in autumn; it's a pure joy to work with them.
As for the video controller -- if during the next couple of days I have zero success with GK-208 initialization in U-Boot, I have a plan B. I will throw away that card completely and will buy DragonBoard (Xilinx Artix 7). I already have a video controller implementation for it.
Own video-controller + own OS + own bootloader on RISC-V. What could be better! :D
I share that dream, and surely it's not just us.
Raspberry Pi was a shot in that direction. But it's still a complex beast with 3D GPU, some embedded RTOS to get everything started, etc.
Personally I think software size should reflect the complexity of the task. And yes, a modern GUI does subpixel rendering of scalable fonts, decoding complex video codecs etc etc. But the bulk of today's massive software size is just pointless abstractions, inefficient 'frameworks' or eyecandy.
I HATE how modern & locked down the web is now, feels like we need to fork the internet. I want an internet that doesn't assume you're always online. I want an internet that is accessible and useful even even if you only connected a few times a day, or especially even if you were on a spacecraft a light-hour away.
Same here.
In the late 90s and early 2000s, I could not have imagined a scenario where an editor takes up 200+ MB! The entire Office 97 suite was well under 192MB closer to 130MB! Adobe Photoshop CS2 installed was under 370 MB.
Memory usage now is also insane.
Office 2000 would run on 32MB of RAM and run really well on 64MB! Now a single tab on Firefox or any other browser on a static website takes up well over 400MB.
A single tab showing Facebook on my laptop takes up about 390MB! Even Hackernews website takes up 36MB!
I too want to go back to the days when things were a lot simpler.