That 10+ year old "legacy" hardware was practically a supercomputer not long before that, and there aren't many things we do with computers now that we didn't back then.

Sadly, developers and publishers have collectively decided that efficiency no longer matters, since they can instead pressure users into short hardware upgrade cycles, forever. They reduce their own costs by skimping on design and optimization time, and pass those costs on to everyone else. The transferred expense is immeasurable, as it includes money, time, wasted power, wasted materials, pollution, and is multiplied by however many users they have.

I live booted just to see the slideshow that was windows 10 on 2GB of ram, and Debian ran really smooth.

Yep. It warms my heart a little whenever I hear from someone discovering what a difference efficient software makes. Thanks for the story.

Linux is so lean, it will run on practically anything. Windows, on the other hand, became an increasingly bloated sack of crap post-XP when they attempted to solve "DLL Hell" by keeping multiple versions of the same driver. The installation size went from 5 GB in XP to around 20 GB on 7, now I think a Windows 10 or 11 I install requires around 150 GB for the recovery partition, system partition, and other garbage.

It always amazes/disgusts me that on a fresh install of Windows 10 there's like 50-75 services running and like 6-8 GB of RAM already in use.

it kinda blows my mind that this new of a game, granted its writ-in JavaScript and uses so little ram and runs on grandmas pacemaker. it kinda leaves me wondering what happened to the gaming industry? It went from excellent games that sipped ram to storage queued for a 200G update (im looking at you COD war zone).

I mean, there are a range of titles spanning the lightweight to the heavyweight. It's not as if all games are heavyweight today.

MINDUSTRY LETS GOOOOOOOOO

A friend of mine runs Arch on a GTX 660 Ti

Still runs very smoothly and his only bottleneck is his veeery old HDD