On Wed, 10/7/2026 5:30 AM, Bob wrote:
Roger Blake <rogblake@iname.invalid> writes:
On 2026-10-06, Johann 'Myrkraverk' Oskarsson <johann@myrkraverk.invalid> wrote:
On 10/4/2026 5:06 PM, Nomen Nescio wrote:
Copilot is a useless piece of shit.
And so is Debian, but we can only deal with one thing at a time.
All major operating systems are pieces of shit in one way or
another, but some are shittier than others.
I wonder what the definition of "piece of shit" is in the context
of operating systems?
Customers word it this way:
"I'll know it when I see it"
Anything that "gets in a customers road" makes it shitty.
Customers don't care about architectural niceties and "blame assignment", they just want your shitty OS to work.
Frictional things would be "failure to boot", "Start Menu does not work", "Display Control panel does not work or is functionally inaccessible".
The latter one being, when you can enter settings, but the Apply
button is off the screen :-) They actually fixed that in Linux,
by holding down a modifier key and using left-mouse, you can
grab the panel by its surface and scoot it up the screen until
the Apply button can finally be accessed. Nobody has the notion
of actually measuring what is displayed and configuring it so
the stuff is visible.
Just the general complexity of OSes, there are "too many processes
running, for the amount of work". It's like a jobs fair for software
people, preserved in plastic.
https://xkcd.com/2347/
A "basic" OS should fit in 350MB, but they don't always come
close to that, and they can guzzle quite a bit of resources to support
"the latest whim". Various schemes that could be paged in from storage,
being an example (the design could rely upon the System Read Cache for performance of fetching the materials, if the materials are actually
being frequently accessed). Even MMAP could be used. The memory layout
of the fleet is the same everywhere, where only the "top 1% of power
users" actually need those touted materials to be "static/resident". Via
lazy evaluation, the resources don't need to be statically defined,
and can be pulled in, as that 1% power user uses their Thor Hammer.
It's like having Firefox in the Start folder. Is that really really necessary ? Do we need twenty copies of MSEdge or twenty copies of Chromium
and seven copies of Firefox process, just to open the fucking screen ?
Don't get me started.
When I'm sitting here telling people they need a 6 core processor
minimum, that runs at 5GHz, for a "good time", something is very wrong.
You will remember we used to get more-snappy response, with a lot
less processor, in the past.
Paul
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