OT: Longevity of DVD-R and CD-R / 2-Media Hedge

[Wai-Sun Chia]

On Wed, 16 Mar 2005 18:17:20 -0500, Scott Stevens <chenmel at earthlink.net> wrote:

> These days the bloat seems to have crept into the 'alternatives to
> Microsoft' in depressing ways that make it harder all the time to blame
> Microsoft.  Office 2000 runs much smoother (and in a nominally usable
> fashion) on my old 486 laptop than the 'OpenOffice' alternative.  The
> new 'Free' desktops bring old hardware to it's knees.  I suspect it's
> all the C++ and suboptimal 'modern coding techniques' which foist off a
> LOT of the work to the hardware.  I just can't feel honest anymore
> subscribing to a 'blame Microsoft' attitude.

Well, yes and no.
Yes KDE and GNOME both are bloated. If you ever had the misfortune to
run them on a P100, you'll know what I mean.

If you're on a 486 lower system, you still can install Slack or
Debian. Strip off X and all the libs completely and run in console
mode.

For paperwork, you can use troff (hey! it's ontopic), or Latex
(ontopic too!) or sgmltools (I think ontopic but not sure).

FWIW, I used to prepare papers and reports using DECdocument
(precursor to SGML) on a uVaxII/GFX. And it didn't felt slow at all.
Surely trying to open a document via OpenOffice on a P100 will be
slower...

/wai-sun