What is "low spec" for you?

[D. Michael McIntyre]

On Thursday 13 December 2007, Cory K. wrote:
> I often recommend at least 1GB of RAM and a 1.5-2Ghz processor. Sounds
> reasonable to me and a rather low requirement when you think about what
> some apps need.

I definitely wouldn't go lower, and I prefer to see at least 2 GHz and 2 GB of 
RAM as a more realistic "satisfying minimum."  Whether more GHz or more GB 
would be the most helpful depends on what you're doing.

> But, I have personally been told that saying "get better hardware" to
> someone wanting to run Ardour on a PII 667Mhz  and 128MB RAM (rough
> example) is pushing the "Vista" mentality. There's a big difference.

Me too.  I'm the entire problem with everything, and it's all my fault.

> As I see it people need to be realistic about the task they are trying
> to undertake and realize that apps themselves often require alot of
> horsepower.

There is a mixture of people having unrealistic expectations, and our being 
less efficient at certain things than our well-funded competition (which also 
has up to 20 years of development time on us to boot.)  There is some truth 
to assertions that such and such on Windows could do more with less.  It 
really is true in some cases, but look at the odds stacked against our 
achieving even this much.  Couple that with the fact that my personal agenda 
doesn't involve trying to make Rosegarden or anything else perform well in a 
challenging environment.  It's hard enough to get the damn thing to work in a 
forgiving environment, and I don't expect computers are going to get slower 
or more expensive as time passes, so there's just no good motivation to keep 
looking backwards.

Having thought about this at some length, Cory, I've realized that I don't 
really have a problem with people who try to get this stuff to work on an old 
computer anyway.  Especially not people living in, say, Argentina.  What I 
have the biggest problem with is the classic newbie who comes along and 
starts bitching about bad performance on the PII-400 he dug out of the closet 
to try Linux on, to see if it was worth the effort before he tries anything 
on his real computer that's way better than mine.

I've long since been at the point where I lost all sympathy for people like 
that, and I don't even bother to encourage them further anymore.
-- 
D. Michael McIntyre