rant

Got a new work laptop: 13th Gen Intel Core i7 with 10 cores, 32 GB RAM, SSD.

Also, Windows 11 Enterprise.

That machine is incredibly slow — to boot, to open apps, to do anything really.

Over the last 30 years we’ve progressed CPU clock rate, RAM latency, and SSD performance to insane levels. We all have computers that are multiple times more performant than a Cray of yore.

And yet the awful pile of steaming bloatware that is Windows and friends renders even modern mid-range machines aggravating to use, and not better than the user experience from the past three decades.

It feels like the headroom provided by leaps in hardware is being completely canceled by a lazy lack of optimization of the tech-debt-ridden software stack

/rant

𝚆𝙾𝚁𝙺𝙸𝙽𝙶 𝙾𝙽: @vision 👁️ ✦  ensdata.net ✦ pugson.net/rfe ✦ 𝙿𝚄𝙶.𝙴𝚃𝙷 ✦ 𝙿𝚁𝙴𝚅: @rainbow 🌈 

For my PhD, I custom-built a rig for myself with a top-of-the-line AMD Ryzen, liquid cooling, and 128 GB RAM. I installed Linux on it and it crunches through large data sets like butter (I use R which is highly RAM-dependent due to data vectorization). It’s awesome

Linux has only become a better choice over the years, but mostly by its competition getting worse lmao

69 $degen