Comment 2T39 Re: Back To The Mainframe?

Story

Friday Distro: SliTaz Linux

Preview

Back To The Mainframe? (Score: 0)

by Anonymous Coward on 2014-10-04 00:28 (#2T2Y)

You paint a very appealing picture, Zafe. But.... With that light and underfeatured a system, relying so much on external services, might one/you be better served by a fixed appliance/terminal? No chance of corruption, everything in Da Cloud, etc. All the real action happens on your and other remote servers.

'Cause it sounds like that's what a superlight distro is accomplishing anyway, only with the vagaries and vulnerabilities of normal PC hardware.

Re: Back To The Mainframe? (Score: 1)

by zafiro17@pipedot.org on 2014-10-04 19:28 (#2T39)

Maybe - but imagine an internet kiosk that boots from a read-only flash card, and runs from memory. You get a clean system with every boot, and if that gets you a reasonably good-looking desktop and an up-to-date version of Firefox, you've met the needs of 90% of your clients. Imagine a kiosk in a hotel lobby, for example.

Imagine a call center or database entry place where you can re-purpose some dirt-cheap, low-spec hardware. That's useful.

For me, on a more philosophical level, this is also interesting because it shows it can be done. The world would be a different place if developers were forced to be miserly with resources and think carefully about their constraints. Give everyone a new macbook with 5G of RAM and a top-speed hard drive, and you get akonadi/nepomuk (barf).

Junk Status

Not marked as junk