Recently I got to operate a Windows 11 machine. It was a ThinkPad T14 produced in 2020, with 16 gigabytes of RAM, a relatively recent Intel Core i5, and a 512-gigabyte PCIe SSD. This is much more powerful than one of my usual computers, a ThinkPad X220i.
When I opened taskmgr I was met with about 200 processes1. Opening
a new window in explorer, the file manager, takes about 5 seconds to
respond, and an additional 5 seconds in a blank window. Windows updates have
taken more than 20 gigabytes of valuable disk space in C:\.
Compiling an average 20-page LaTeX document with pdfLaTeX takes 40 seconds.
Compare that to a 2013 Dell Latitude E6440, with 4 gigabytes of RAM, an Intel Core i5 from 2013, and a 1 terabyte SATA SSD. That Dell runs smoothly with the same Firefox/LyX/pdfLaTeX workflow, even with the most heavy-weight desktop environment available, GNOME 45 on Fedora Workstation. Compiling the same LaTeX document with pdfLaTeX takes 8 seconds.
A 2013 laptop is able to outperform one from 2020 in almost every aspect other than video decoding. Except that, of course, the hardware isn’t at fault. It’s the endless amounts of bloat and inefficiency in software.
The mentality of the vast majority of computer users seem to be “it is imperative that I switch to a new device every two or three years”. But it’s not like these users switch to a massively more resource-hungry workflow every two or three years: most of them browse the web, write documents2, and watch videos online. That is not a heavy-weight workflow. My claim is that it is ridiculous to require these people to switch to a new computer every two or three years.
According to the United Nations Institute for Training and Research, “A record 62 million tonnes (Mt) of e-waste was produced in 2022, Up 82% from 2010; On track to rise another 32%, to 82 million tonnes, in 2030; Billions of dollars worth of strategically-valuable resources squandered, dumped; Just 1% of rare earth element demand is met by e-waste recycling.”
Of course people are going to purchase new devices and let their old ones go to waste, if they are unable to use their workflow due to terrible programming practices and planned obsolescence.
See also
- https://libreplanet.org/wiki/Free_Software_and_the_Environment
- https://www.sfscon.it/talks/combatting-e-wastes-environmental-harm-with-free-software/
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Apparently those are complete processes rather than threads. I’m not familiar with Windows environments though. ↩︎
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As much as I prefer Free Software, writing documents with ordinary document editors is somewhere we really haven’t caught on. LibreOffice is, even in my opinion, significantly more buggy than Microsoft Office; OnlyOffice Desktop Editors still performs horribly (and still has trouble running on Wayland). While many of us might dislike word processors, it is a critical part of a lot of ordinary users’ workflows, and it is often not a solution to “simply use LaTeX with LyX”. This is a critical area that needs improvement if we are ever to compete with Windows.
This is not entirely the fault of the Free Software community (I’m using “fault” in a very loose sense here). Office Open XML is notoriously difficult to implement correctly (the initial specification is more than 6000 pages long, and Microsoft is using various undocumented extensions), and we still lack a lot of fonts common in documents produced by Microsoft Office (though the development of more metrically-compatible and similar-looking fonts will help). ↩︎