Love to see upgrades with a negative net size lmao. Software should get more optimized with time, not more bloated. Oop, just got the gnome console popup notification saying that my install command finished running, sweet – it took as long as making this post

    • haui@lemmy.giftedmc.comEnglish
      55·
      8 days ago

      Exactly. Same here. The fact that „linux“ isnt a product that has to have the shiny new thing after every update and has no deadlines to hold and no manager to keep happy makes it a fundamentally different thing which actually is very much in line with efficiency ideas, the idea of progress and evolution as a whole. At least thats how I view it.

  • kryptonidas@lemmings.worldEnglish
    731·
    8 days ago

    Back in the day there was a Mac OS update (Snow Leopard) that took gigabytes off. They dropped support for PowerPC CPUs. So the compiled binaries basically got slashed in half.

    The goals of Snow Leopard were improved performance, greater efficiency and the reduction of its overall memory footprint, unlike previous versions of Mac OS X which focused more on new features. Apple famously marketed Snow Leopard as having “zero new features”.[13] Its name signified its goal to be a refinement of the previous OS X version, Leopard.

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_OS_X_Snow_Leopard

    • boonhet@lemm.eeEnglish
      22·
      8 days ago

      Might happen again one day if they decide to drop x86 support. Which they likely will.

        • boonhet@lemm.eeEnglish
          14·
          7 days ago

          Well they haven’t made a single x86 machine in what, 4 or 5 years?

          The 2024 version of MacOS doesn’t support anything older than 2017 and for most models it’s more like 2018-2020

          I’d say in 2-3 years they’ll drop support for all x86 machines, at which point first party binaries can stop shipping with x86 code. Then eventually, several years later, they’ll drop support for x86 emulation via Rosetta 2, so that’s another thing they can drop from the OS. And once xcode stops giving you those fat dual-arch binaries, other software will also take a bit less space.

          • Estebiu@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
            1·
            5 days ago

            Oh i though you were talking about discontinuing x86 in general, even for non-apple devices. Yeah I agree, x86 macbook have maybe another 4-5 years max

        • Irelephant@lemm.eeEnglish
          6·
          7 days ago

          idk, apple is very trigger-happy when it comes to discontinuing things (outside of the iphones, strangely.) i think by 2030 we will be long gone from apple x86 machines.

      • Cenzorrll@lemmy.worldEnglish
        6·
        7 days ago

        As an avid apple disliker, they really got a lot of things right with 10.x, with snow leopard hitting it out of the park. Everything from them around that era was slick. If I wasn’t a poor college kid running a 5 year old eBay Thinkpad I would have been sucked into their oppressive ecosystem in a heartbeat.

        • Duamerthrax@lemmy.worldEnglish
          1·
          7 days ago

          There’s a different timeline where the board also brought back Wozniak, OS X has linux under the hood and all third party software was cross compatible.

          I wouldn’t imagine iTunes on Ubuntu, but think if all that annoying office software that keeps workplace from switching to linux was suddenly available?

  • Rooty@lemmy.worldEnglish
    59·
    8 days ago

    OS is bloat, if you’re not shifting CPU registers by hand are you even a Linux user?

    spoiler

    No, because Linux is a kernel/OS, and OS is bloat

  • Acoustic@lemm.eeEnglish
    23·
    8 days ago

    I’m not a programmer by any means, but I’m guessing, they are just removing old redundant features and code, but I could be very wrong here.

    • lime!@feddit.nuEnglish
      24·
      8 days ago

      a new version of a program can also move to a different set of dependencies that is shared with another program, so you don’t need to keep both around.

      • patatahooligan@lemmy.worldEnglish
        13·
        7 days ago

        This wouldn’t appear like this when upgrading the system with pacman. pacman does not automatically remove orphaned dependencies during upgrades. You have to query for them and remove them explicitly as a separate operation afterwards. So in the OP what we’re seeing is the new versions of packages themselves getting smaller.

    • Lung@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      1·
      7 days ago

      I remember one internship in college, I realized that after 4 months of work, the result was 15k lines less code than when I started. I figured out new ways to structure the system so it was much easier to write and maintain, while actually adding features. That felt great

      And yeah, there are many ways for it to happen. Ex. someone was shipping the tests with the code and decided to stop, debug symbols being removed, inlined dependencies being externalized, maybe a new version of a UI toolkit has extra icons built in

      Efficiency can gently creep in. What blows my mind is that this is averaged out across so many packages at once. And sure, sometimes it goes up too, but nothing like Windows/OSX. It’s really cool that you can make a Linux that will fit into ~any space you want, whereas the min requirements for Win11 include 64gb of hd

  • boonhet@lemm.eeEnglish
    18·
    7 days ago

    Decided to try this out on Tumbleweed. I last updated yesterday. Today I have 4 packages to upgrade and doing so will drop ruby 3.3. Looks like I also have Ruby 3.4 installed so likely I had a package depending on 3.3 and another on 3.4 and now the 3.3 has moved to 3.4. I regained a whopping 30 MB disk space!