People often bitch about software being slow and they have every reason to. Modern hardware has plenty of CPU and GPU cycles to spare, so why the fuck is it so slow? The software I have to use that's slow as molasses is Office, Opera and Firefox.
The first thing I observe is that these pieces of crapware do things I never asked them to do, I don't want them to do, things I don't need them to do, things I don't want them to do, things that nobody anywhere either wants nor needs them to do. Let's look at some examples.
Opera keeps all 30 pages I have in tabs immediately renderable. Did I ever ask it to do that? Like fuck I did. Most of those tabs are things I haven't looked at in days. One of them I hadn't looked at in 3 weeks.
Inevitably those 30 tabs will grow to 120 tabs, which will have Opera thrashing for no good fucking reason and then I'll save them all as a new session (rendering them unusable) and start from scratch.
If there were a better way to organize tabs than multiple windows (which are difficult to use and unhelpful) then I would use them. Not that moving the tabs to another window would help since Opera insists like some kind of fucking moronic retard to keep those tabs immediately renderable too!
Who the fuck decided it was a good idea to keep every bit of cruft a web user left opened immediately renderable? What kind of fucking retard at Opera decided on this dys"functionality"? I never wanted this feature, I never asked for it, I don't need it, NOBODY needs it. Nobody on the fucking planet needs it!
Nevermind that it is dysfunctional and fucking harmful, nobody needs this.
The same goes for Firefox and Office. I only open Office to read RTF files. Do I fucking need all this "functionality" that takes 30 seconds to load? For fuck's sake, does any Office user need it?! I would dearly love to know whether more than 10% of core Office users need to regularly change between 50 different fonts. I use one font, ONE, Sylfaen, that's it!
It seems to me if software did ONLY what every one of the core users needs (instead of what's expected by the programmer's peers and tradition, or what the programmer thinks might be nice, or what users say they want or ask for, or what some user wants, or what non-core users need) then so much crap falls away in the code, so many "features" go away, that there's plenty of computing power for what's actually needed.
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7 comments:
I remember there being a program similar to Notepad called Wordpad that could read rich text files. I think that's more lightweight than Office.
Doesn't work in Linux. And gedit doesn't read them.
I still use Wordpad on Windows. It's sophisticated enough to support pictures as well as rich text, and small enough to boot in less than one second. Very handy in this age of 100-font-containing, automated-graph-drawing, self-updating-table-of-contents-indexing gigaeditors.
Googling, I found a person with similar requirements who eventually resolved his problem. Somebody else used wordpad through wine.
Big list of rich text editors here.
You know what, TGGP? It's obvious to me that THE WHOLE POINT of this blog post completely passed you by.
This blog post isn't about how Linux is shit (even though it is) or that I'm suffering from it (even though I am), the whole point of it is that software IN GENERAL is bloated with functions that SHOULDN'T EXIST. And that this bloat has side-effects of making software slow, inefficient, vastly less usable, and brittle!
I will thank you if I no longer have to deal with your total fucking cluelessness on this or any other blog posts of mine.
Given the imperfections of software generally, I can't of course hand you that OS. But among the complaints you had was using Office for RTF, and I figured an improvement on that would be better than nothing. You replied to my initial mention of Wordpad by saying it wouldn't work on Linux, not that it would take 5 minutes. If someone takes the time to blog some complaints about a piece of software, I assume they are willing to spend 5 minutes replacing it.
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