Dictating to everyone what they want and need in order to replace old with new (better serving the corporations, not users)
"As I type this, my music played eats up 293 MB of RAM, Falkon uses 196 MB, and by contrast X-Chat (an old IRC client) takes up no more than 10 MB."This is apparently considered 'normal' now. Programmers and OS assemblers aren't expected to take into consideration people who use older hardware. Or have slower/expensive/bandwidth-capped connections (and reject so-called 'telemetry'). The same is true for Web developers. Should a single browser tab ever require more than 100 MB of RAM? Why do some take up more than a gigabyte? This in insane and this kind of insanity is now presumed normal because "everybody else is doing it" and "get a new PC already!"
One might jokingly point out that what we have here is "broken windows"; the software makers ensure things get more and more bloated over time to help drive hardware sales; hardware companies, reciprocating for this bloat, add a bunch of undesirable anti-features, such as slowing down clocks, preventing boot using keys (that the computer owner does not have and does not control), and leaving many defects in tact, ensuring planned obsolescence. Cheap components (diodes for instance) and dependence on soldered in components like hardware clocks can "seal the deal..."
The sad thing is, GNU/Linux companies have played along and have voluntarily mimicked many of these really bad things. From keeping things minimal (see yesterday's video, "Unix Philosophy Is More Than Just A Simple Slogan") we've moved to so-called 'UX' (User eXperience) or "user-friendly" -- codename for stripping away useful features, replacing them with bloated but "modern" substitutes that nobody ever asked for.
"Yesterday Phoronix reported that "Intel Platform Monitoring Telemetry Appears Destined For Linux 5.10". Oh, cool, spying inside the kernel. What's in it for the user? Absolutely nothing."What will future generations with so-called 'phones' that have 16 gigabytes on RAM on them (not storage, RAM) think when they learn people could get work done just fine with just 2 gigabytes of RAM -- on multi-head desktops and laptops? Are we getting better technically or just getting better at driving (forced) sales? Whose agenda is served here? Certainly not users'. Remember that at the Linux Foundation not many people even use Linux. They use Windows, macOS and iOS (never with Linux in them). They're all about money, not users (or users' experience), not people but corporations. Intel does not make money from making good products but from shipping as many products as possible. Yesterday Phoronix reported that "Intel Platform Monitoring Telemetry Appears Destined For Linux 5.10". Oh, cool, spying inside the kernel. What's in it for the user? Absolutely nothing. See the comments too. There's a performance toll, obviously. In terms of human rights, "latest" often means worst. ⬆