There's definitely an aspect of elite luxury status associated with being part of the latest-and-greatest crew.

My cousin talks about Cyberpunk 2077, and how he got a $1000+ graphics card just to play it. He talked about it beforehand. He talked about it during. He talked about it afterwards. "Afterwards", as in, "I don't play Cyberpunk any more so I sold the graphics card".

He shakes his head. "It was a total travesty, really bad, just a buggy mess", he complains.

But parallels can be found in the retro world. While some eke out their retro existence on a modest stash of gear, other regulars post their latest and greatest elite retro acquisition weekly if-not-more. They talk blithely about their range of Voodoo cards, their actual stacks of sound cards, their multiple revisions of Rare Hardware Device X. "I'll have to dig out my old spare GUS sometime if I can be bothered!", in a room half full of people slavering over the mere idea of ever having a single one.

Philosophical question: are the reams of expensive silicon sitting unused due to excess worse because they're in a 3080Ti? or because they're distributed across 50 retro cards sitting in your closet? Perhaps they are just two different flavours of the same thing...

songo wrote on 2022-03-25, 05:07:

Seriously, I cannot understand why average Joe should replace his PC more frequent that once in a decade.

I find the issue isn't typically hardware, but rather software, particularly APIs and OS support.

If new software (i.e. games) use some new API only supported by a newer GPU and OS, then that can potentially lead to rabbit hole resulting in a wholesale computer upgrade (MB, CPU, RAM).

For me I find this occurs probably closer to once every 5 years. Although I have upgraded my GPU 3 times in the past 6 years, but that was mainly for VR.

Shreddoc wrote on 2022-03-25, 20:45:

My cousin talks about Cyberpunk 2077, and how he got a $1000+ graphics card just to play it. He talked about it beforehand. He talked about it during. He talked about it afterwards. "Afterwards", as in, "I don't play Cyberpunk any more so I sold the graphics card".

really ? i play on 100€ Card ( GF 1060 ) and it plays well on FullHD

matze79 wrote on 2022-03-25, 21:01:

Shreddoc wrote on 2022-03-25, 20:45:

My cousin talks about Cyberpunk 2077, and how he got a $1000+ graphics card just to play it. He talked about it beforehand. He talked about it during. He talked about it afterwards. "Afterwards", as in, "I don't play Cyberpunk any more so I sold the graphics card".

really ? i play on 100€ Card ( GF 1060 ) and it plays well on FullHD

The point isn't that he needed that card. It's that he associates the whole notion of "best possible gaming" with all the latest and greatest specs. The latest super billion Hertz display with latest marketing buzz words. Highest possible res. Latest hype release. Etc.

And that method does give the best of certain types of experience, relating to the cutting-edge of the technical push. But it's just part of the age-old argument of style vs substance.

Haha i have much better Experience, because i still have Money in my Pocket!

Yeah of course you can have 4K 120Hz Gaming with RTX Effects.
Best possible Graphics does not mean most Fun.

I prefer a great Story, a deep Immersion of a great Tale.
Great Graphics may help with that but, its not all about it.

Shreddoc wrote on 2022-03-25, 21:07:

The latest super billion Hertz display with latest marketing buzz words. Highest possible res.

In fairness, higher refresh rates, higher resolution, and ultrawide screens can have a material impact on the gaming experience.

I much prefer certain games like FPSs (even older ones) on a modern display particularly if they can be run in ultra-wide modes.

Shreddoc wrote on 2022-03-25, 20:45:

There's definitely an aspect of elite luxury status associated with being part of the latest-and-greatest crew.

Old Charlie may have given some pretty shitty advice based on rather crackpot theories of historical determinism, but some of his observatations of the status quo that he based those theories on were rather keen:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodity_fetishism

Shreddoc wrote on 2022-03-25, 20:45:

But parallels can be found in the retro world. While some eke out their retro existence on a modest stash of gear, other regulars post their latest and greatest elite retro acquisition weekly if-not-more. They talk blithely about their range of Voodoo cards, their actual stacks of sound cards, their multiple revisions of Rare Hardware Device X. "I'll have to dig out my old spare GUS sometime if I can be bothered!", in a room half full of people slavering over the mere idea of ever having a single one.

It's called hoarding and it's a mainstay of human culture ever since Joseph had those dreams in Egypt. At least. Everyone does it to the extend of his ability and the grade of the neurosis.
I try not to contemplate what some spend on Voodoo cards but I sure have one too many sound cards and I got a really good deal on that MT-32.

Shreddoc wrote on 2022-03-25, 20:45:

Philosophical question: are the reams of expensive silicon sitting unused due to excess worse because they're in a 3080Ti? or because they're distributed across 50 retro cards sitting in your closet? Perhaps they are just two different flavours of the same thing...

Philosophically, no difference whatesoever.
Concerning the continued existence of human civilisation as we know it: Big difference. We could stop buying new high tech clutter right now and we'd have enough to play games until well after the last coal plant has been closed down. I'd probably even feel obliged to recycle most of my heap for all the rare minerals in there - had I any evidence that it won't just end up in some African landfill.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9GorqroigqM

Shponglefan wrote on 2022-03-25, 20:54:

I find the issue isn't typically hardware, but rather software, particularly APIs and OS support. […]
Show full quote

songo wrote on 2022-03-25, 05:07:

Seriously, I cannot understand why average Joe should replace his PC more frequent that once in a decade.

I find the issue isn't typically hardware, but rather software, particularly APIs and OS support.

If new software (i.e. games) use some new API only supported by a newer GPU and OS, then that can potentially lead to rabbit hole resulting in a wholesale computer upgrade (MB, CPU, RAM).

For me I find this occurs probably closer to once every 5 years. Although I have upgraded my GPU 3 times in the past 6 years, but that was mainly for VR.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but you're simply not "the average Joe". He and the average Jane even more so play "angry birds" on their telephone. If they still own a desktop, it's to print out birthday invites for the kids, look at cat content or play solitair. 😉

Cuttoon wrote on 2022-03-25, 21:37:

It's called hoarding and it's a mainstay of human culture ever since Joseph had those dreams in Egypt. At least. Everyone does it to the extend of his ability and the grade of the neurosis.
I try not to contemplate what some spend on Voodoo cards but I sure have one too many sound cards and I got a really good deal on that MT-32.

Human culture? I say Life. A squirrel, cheek pouches already packed with nuts, decides it would be good to squeeze one more in.

Shreddoc wrote on 2022-03-25, 20:45:

Philosophical question: are the reams of expensive silicon sitting unused due to excess worse because they're in a 3080Ti? or because they're distributed across 50 retro cards sitting in your closet? Perhaps they are just two different flavours of the same thing...

Cuttoon wrote on 2022-03-25, 21:37:

Concerning the continued existence of human civilisation as we know it: Big difference. We could stop buying new high tech clutter right now and we'd have enough to play games until well after the last coal plant has been closed down. I'd probably even feel obliged to recycle most of my heap for all the rare minerals in there - had I any evidence that it won't just end up in some African landfill.

What if a new device comes out that replaces 10x your old gear, at 1/10 of the power draw for the remainder of your life? (not a hypothetical question - this is happening e.g. MiSTer)

Or: has anybody really calculated the net environmental comparison of "running an original real 486 for a year's worth of retro gaming" vs "running DOSbox on a Raspberry Pi for that year"?

There are so many What Ifs, that trying to give a simplified, unified grand theory of How Best To Purchase Computers Over Your Lifetime is a bit of an impossible errand imo. A fun discussion, but we can't cover all in one sentence or post. Because we are discussing the entire field of economics here. It's "quite complicated". 😀

Shponglefan wrote on 2022-03-25, 21:28:

Shreddoc wrote on 2022-03-25, 21:07:

The latest super billion Hertz display with latest marketing buzz words. Highest possible res.

In fairness, higher refresh rates, higher resolution, and ultrawide screens can have a material impact on the gaming experience.

So too say the elite of the retro crew, who "absolutely know" that "the best games" can only be fully enjoyed on a very limited, rare line-up of the very best 240p 15Khz 4:3 CRT monitors, and could technically talk your ass off all day about why.

When I 1st read this thread I thought OMG I got a ton to write a post about but I was at work and wasnt going to try to do that on my cell and then when I got home and grabbed a beer I just decided:

luckybob wrote on 2022-03-25, 07:57:

https://www.vogons.org/thumbs/17073_b9d65e7d72e05b1cb7bdb133df49a3ca/297.jpg […]
Show full quote

(If this was any other forum this thread would be filled with "OK Boomer" comments)

Welcome to the consumer machine. Soon you won't even be able to buy hardware, you'll just pay a monthly fee to use it for a while.

I'll be in my cabin in the woods using my Apple IIe if anyone needs me.

ThenZero wrote on 2022-03-26, 00:08:

Welcome to the consumer machine. Soon you won't even be able to buy hardware, you'll just pay a monthly fee to use it for a while.

I'll be in my cabin in the woods using my Apple IIe if anyone needs me.

Kind of like Wall-E in his dump truck playing pong for free while all the Buy-N-Large services sat idle & unwanted.

ThenZero wrote on 2022-03-26, 00:08:

Welcome to the consumer machine. Soon you won't even be able to buy hardware, you'll just pay a monthly fee to use it for a while.

I'll be in my cabin in the woods using my Apple IIe if anyone needs me.

A couple of Raspberry Pi boards, a few spare monitors and accessories along with some solar panels, dynamos, a few VRMs and some spare polymer capacitors (and other parts) in a storage cabinet/chest that doubles as a Faraday cage should have you mostly covered .

P.S. Don't forget to mirror some repos or you will be SOL when the apocalypse comes . 😉

P.S.2 Plan for food too. Skeletons don't make great computer users .

Apologies, not an actual skeleton, his name is misleading.

Shponglefan wrote on 2022-03-25, 20:54:

I find the issue isn't typically hardware, but rather software, particularly APIs and OS support. […]
Show full quote

songo wrote on 2022-03-25, 05:07:

Seriously, I cannot understand why average Joe should replace his PC more frequent that once in a decade.

I find the issue isn't typically hardware, but rather software, particularly APIs and OS support.

If new software (i.e. games) use some new API only supported by a newer GPU and OS, then that can potentially lead to rabbit hole resulting in a wholesale computer upgrade (MB, CPU, RAM).

For me I find this occurs probably closer to once every 5 years. Although I have upgraded my GPU 3 times in the past 6 years, but that was mainly for VR.

Worse still is software needing newer versions of SSE instructions to run though not actually using the instructions for any real benefit ..like anything based on chromium. (Which at this point is a phenomenal amount of software, even stuff you wouldn't think would use Chromium)

Only way to get the new SSE instructions is to upgrade the CPU which itself usually requires a new Motherboard and Ram.

*thats right Steam I'm looking at you.

Cuttoon wrote on 2022-03-25, 11:31:

Personally, anecdotal: As an Ubuntu user since, IIRC, 8.04, I tend to get rather annoyed by the preachyness of Windows users. I […]
Show full quote

Personally, anecdotal:
As an Ubuntu user since, IIRC, 8.04, I tend to get rather annoyed by the preachyness of Windows users. I can't even buy a Playboy magazine without dozens of headlines screaming at me things like "the new Windows xx and why it's awesome" "how to optimize Windows beyond a steaming shitpile" or "how do you make your shrink understand your nighmares about that insufficient swap partition".
Can't these people just use their strange bloatware in peace, without constant proselytizing?

I don't think I could reproduce a single unix shell command without mistake right away.
(Maybe 'll' but not sure what is does.)
But since roughly 2007, or since XP SP3 ultimately annoyed the shit out of me, I download a boot CD or thumbdrive, hook up the DSL cable and install a free OS with a modern GUI and that's it.
Browser, E-Mail, Office and multimedia tools, right out of the box. Rock stable, secure, fast and not a single EULA box to check.
Yet to find a random printer that won't work right away or screen with the wrong resolution.

I guess Windows is for nerds who need certain videogames on a machine made for work and communication or who can't do without some strange one-platform tools of their particular circle jerk.

Last time mommy's windows refused to acknoledge the duplex option of an HP laserjet 2xxx (read: THE most common printer on earth) despite 200 MB of dedicated driver package from some convoluted clusterfuck of a website - well, fixing that was a near-death experience. I'm getting to old for that shit.

The Irony of telling Windows users to use their OS quietly to then turn around and tell us why Linux is better ?

I think perhaps you should take your own advice here, Linux is no different than Windows, both are a means to and end and nothing more, each has its advantages and disadvantages smart users understand this and use each where best suited, crazy users carry on as if the other OS is the devil and somehow the cause of all evils.

They are tools, thats it.

What I find funny is the hypocrisy of that Linux "Don't copy Windows" mantra. When Vista's infamous launch came around with much mockery, guess what KDE4 did?

Meanwhile it's 2022 and there's nothing still close to Win9X's interface in terms of accessibility, robustness (even with XFCE) - Just cosmetic bootleg themes with misleading articles like they've finally solved the usability. There's still much to learn and the allergens of design are still there. There's a couple of WMs that try to be 9x hard but end up being deprecated hard and still feel like ducttaped loose scripts.

also the "two chromes" problem with browser choices. Seamonkey? Waterfox Classic? Not on ARM!

I'm not sure how Linux and Windows even came into this thread. The original post is about a Pentium 200 being enough for the tasks it was designed to do. Neither modern Windows or Linux will run (or run well, in the case of Linux, it will maybe boot...) on such hardware, as a result of both platform's severe bloat, particularly in the GUI department, but also background programs.

Basic office utilities should not require a multi-dozen-billion-instruction-per-second CPU to run (looking at Libreoffice and Office equally, LO is a bit lighter but not tremendously so), OSes should not suddenly decide that perfectly good hardware that's about 5 years old should be cut off from support (looking at Win11), OSes shouldn't require OpenGL acceleration for their GUIs, which do almost nothing but draw flat colorful rectangles anyway (looking at any number of Linux DEs)

At some point the level of bloat at the OS level is surely going to have to be re-examined, it's getting somewhat out of control. Multiple gigabytes of RAM shouldn't be in use at idle, even with background programs running, unless it's maybe as a disk cache. It's a severe and continuing ridiculous waste of computing resources. GNOME introduced a new feature recently that adds triple-buffering so it can take your GPU out of idle if it can't keep up with rendering the GUI! It almost sounds like satire but it's true. I'm sure Windows has had that trick for years though, considering my memories of PCs barfing at the load of Aero.

Almost all the hardware progress that has been made in the past ~20 years has been completely negated by the absolute crumminess of the software we run, whether it's developed behind closed doors (MS) or in the open (Linux). A PC from 2002 would have no issue doing almost anything we do today. It may struggle a little bit with the more advanced video codecs and high resolutions but soften it up with a little hardware acceleration and it would be no big deal. Discord, Steam, Facebook, Twitter, VOGONS, Snapchat, Instagram, whatever, would work fine if they weren't all piles of Javascript and Chrome now, layers of interpretation and JITs on top of layers of interpretation and JITs. Almost nothing any of us do has a meaningful benefit from the obscene computing power available to use today (well, maybe not us in particular, emulation and virtual machines are pretty heavy).

Dan Gookin said in one of his editions of PCs for Dummies from I think ~1999, about PC upgrades, something along the lines of "Consider carefully if your PC really needs an upgrade for what you're doing - A faster computer won't make you write documents any faster if you're already limited by your typing speed, and it won't make your grammar or spellcheck any better."

Only hardware upgrades that have really made a big difference to anything: flash storage and faster (and faster and faster) internet speeds. And cellular data and computer-phones being made possible by the continuing march of miniaturization, I guess.

mt32-pi is Linux. As is Ubuntu. One's a streamlined minimal build. One's a bloated heavy thing. There is no single "bloat factor" of Linux.

Having said that, I agree that mainstream-targeted OS (Windows, Mac, Ubuntu, ..) bloat is a thing. But don't get me started about how the commodification of programming skills due to the opening up of the computing market downgraded the quality of the entire scene's work. I might just get a little annoyed about how the good, careful work we did back then evolved into the generic no-care coder factory of today. A little annoyed.

debian, xubuntu in particular, has been my primary os for well over a decade now. i think i went 4 or 5 years there without a single windows physical machine in the house and i run 6 desktop/servers, 1 or 2 laptops and raspPIs at home. i ran windows VMs across all the vmware, virtualbox and kvm hypervisors for a good while, but eventually wine took over all the workload for anything windows related, even gaming. i'd consider docker first before going back to anything as bulky and semi-portable as a VM.

well, windows has crept back into my household as i now have a total of 3 physical windows boxes (i even switched from nfs to smb on my router file shares). this was made possible because all the reasons i left windows in the first place have been nullified by the advancement of hardware and open-source development.

i have no doubt windows is as bloated as it ever was, but now i dont really know or really care. hardware and storage is sooo damn fast now that when i install windows 10, i don't even bother to perform a single post-install optimization or lift a finger other than to click next, next, next thru the install. i don't see the point in learning it all again when it just works fast enough now.

Jo22 wrote on 2022-03-25, 12:14:

spiroyster wrote on 2022-03-25, 10:48:

Jo22 wrote on 2022-03-25, 10:14:

People should be required to pass a basic test to be able to purchase a new PC.
Just like there are car driving licenses, ham radio license, ship radio licenses, licenses for cooks, taxi drivers etc etc.

Should you know how to write to be able to buy a pen? Should you know how to fix a nuclear power station to be able to use the electricity it generates?

Should you know how a certain program is written in order to be able to use it (this would certinaly make my life easier as users would be able to fix their own problems and I can spend more time writing new features, rather than swatting bugs 😉)?

Heh. 😁 Let me put it this way :
People without digital competence are like pedestrians walking on the highway.. On the wrong side.

A person who doesn't know how to write is unlikely to damage a pen (other than dropping its tip to a hard ground). A person who doesn't know how to fix a nuclear power station is extremely unlikely to damage a power station.

However, a person who doesn't know basic computing can hamper, damage, or terminate others' access to computers or networks. I've witnessed two examples/incidents with my own eyes.

First one was in my last job when a new employee brought her virus-infested (not just infected, but INFESTED) laptop and plugged it onto the office LAN, triggering alarms in multiple computers in the office. Turned out her laptop had no antivirus software installed after the preinstalled trial version expired, not to mention her sloppy cybersecurity skills (or lack thereof). I burned a CD and performed an offline scanning for her laptop and found HUNDREDS of infected files.

The second one was in my apartment complex where tenants of the entire building couldn't connect online, but the ISP shows connection outside the apartment was functioning, so they sent a field engineer to check cables between the cable modem (provided by the ISP) and switches (provided by the landlord). Turned out a new tenant plugged the WAN cable to the LAN socket of his/her own router, paralyzing the Internet access of the entire building.