totally agree that the logical future is a single powerful system for the house with thin clients and little baby machines for surf/browse/email/stream. most of what anyone is doing could work great on a $20 raspberry pi, but manufacturers have convinced everyone that every house needs like 3+ systems that can all do climate modeling or geospatial analysis.
if like 90% of the heavy traffic internet wasn't riddled with the latest UX complicating popups and malformed ad technology, most of the complaints of "my computer is slow" would probably vanish overnight.
It's so funny that nearly all processing headroom improvements since like the first Core 2 Duo have been eaten up by ads and shitty code from exploited programmers
I booted up a T60. That's right, from 2006, back when Lenovo had just bought ThinkPad from IBM, so it still has the IBM ThinkPad logo, anyways. It has a Core Duo, no no, not a Core 2 Duo, Core Duo the 32bit one. Put an SSD in it, put Debian with XFCE on it, and it runs very well. Emails, LibreOffice, Music, no problem. Besides both batteries being dead, it's good for a few more years.
A modern web page (with no hi-res images) can take >1GB RAM, when '90s web browsers typically took <1MB. Modern Adobe PDF reader takes >200MB, when some of the longest video games I've loved are <=10MB. Heck even a modern indie-made game with tons of gameplay is still sometimes <200MB.
The cause really is just shitty code and corner-cutting. Optimizing anything is rarely regarded as worth it nowadays, even if a small amount of work leads to 10x performance gains.
Unfortunately even the default Lemmy UI is pretty heavy. A clean load of this page and the comments transferred 1.92MB on the wire (6.61 decompressed). I blame Inferno. Not because Inferno is specifically bad, but because I have been convinced that anything that is React or React-like is bad.
On Diethex it's 204kB and 217kB respectively, and that's because the OP's image is 108kB.
Where they super begin to differ is that one Reddit tab is currently sitting at 400MB+ RAM usage, compared to Hexbear's 140, compared to Diethex's 20**.
** I think one thing that is hard to track about page memory usage is the web browser will over-allocate to speed up page navigation and then eventually reclaim when you have mostly settled where you are. So after a few minutes it's now:
DietHex: 20MB
Hexbear: 60MB
Reddit: 160-260MB
I would like to imagine there's a version of Loss in the alt timeline. Exact same art style and tone, dunked on equally as much to the point of immortal meme
This is literally my dream, except it would be Plan 9 instead of Linux also there would be no web browsers and no BBcode forums it would be something else running over 9P on the collective grid