Post #1799652

2026-04-12 01:41 UTC

Overall this was interesting, but ultimately disappointing. The G4 Hardware *still works*. Well. After 20 years. It has actual removable memory, so I could bump it to the hardware's 2GB RAM, replace the old drive, and keep using it for a long time, in principle. It's still actually more powerful than many recent Chromebooks. In fact was so much more powerful than the Pentium III (256MB RAM) I initially played StarCraft and Diablo II on that I barely knew what to do with it. Needless to say, I did plenty of research on the Internet back then; wrote, compiled, and tested tremendous amounts of software; wrote lots of word documents and made a few slide decks. Email. All the things we do now, without any issues at all. 5/n

Replies (1)

@csgordon@discuss.systems 2026-04-12 01:45

Some of this is reasonable economic forces and focusing limited human bandwidth. Nobody makes consumer PowerPC chips anymore, so of course new efforts are unlikely to target it (e.g., Rust). Fair enough. Similar factors come into play with 32-bit ARM application processors. But much of the software support *already exists*. The only thing breaking anything beyond games is the memory consumption of modern web browsers, and to a lesser extent office software. Why does opening a brand new browser instance, freshly installed, with no open tabs spike memory consumption by 2GB? I'm aware that there's more happening in today's web browsers than 20 years ago (I used to work on a JavaScript compiler). Also the switch to 64-bit adds some overhead vs the G4 (but my old *Opteron* was still blazing fast running Firefox under Solaris or Debian, with 4GB of RAM). Because Chrome is similarly bloated (or worse), everything built with Electron (VS Code, Obsidian, Zotero, countless other things) is also bloated. 6/n

Open ##1799653