I'm guessing the browser is some massive part of the install you've got there?
But of course, these alone pull in gtk 3.0, mesa and friends. Admittedly, a lot of these software components would also be used for other programs.
Indeed, interesting. At least the x86 arch bar doesn't keep growing significantly for no reason, it'd be interesting to know what "other" is, though. Well out of curiosity I checked the kernel I set up for my Thinkpad (Kaby Lake with iGPU) and it weights in at 14 mb with an almost identical initramfs. It'd be interesting to see how big both kernels would be without the drivers compiled in but I'm too lazy to do it right now. Of course you can't really compare the drivers for modern GPUs with the generic VESA framebuffer drivers for old cards. All that hardware does "a bit" more and it'd be an unfair comparison.
That line between microcontroller and proper computer is so blurry at this point, at least performance wise, Microcontrollers still being Harvard Architecture machines usually. Then again I've seen people emulate x86 PCs running DOS/Win 3.0 and giving output via VGA .. you rationally do understand but still it just kinda boggles the mind sometimes. (The mcu in that video costs $5-$10, btw., depends where you buy it)
Ah yes, the old pull on the molex until it suddenly gives way and you slam your hand directly into some sharp case corner and now there's blood everywhere.
What, you didn't like moving jumpers around on a board for hours trying to get your sound card and video card not to shit all over each other? What are you, gay?
They were surprisingly sharp. And it wasn't thumbscrews and side panels, it was phillips screws and yanking off the whole thing like a sharp sheet metal foreskin that goes "broing!" when it gets released from the clips. Then putting that shit back again...
I had a special mother with more PCI slots than any other model and I used all of them, that was fun.
. I have now forgotten all of that of course but it was an exciting time and even if was painful there is reason to look fondly back at things like that. So much was suddenly happening so fast and I'm always a bit impressed that I don't have to deal with that stuff anymore. They solved it.
It still wouldn't fit on a diskette if you actually wanted it to do anything useful, modern x86 is complex as hell with nearly 40 years of legacy. Dropping the old bits hasn't made it cleaner, especially the need to talk to the modern ACPI, APICs, and managing page tables. Walking through the PCI hierarchy and config space was straight forward in comparison.
Some highlights from the configuration
It doesn't have any filesystems enabled, not even initramfs
Have you set up homebrew on your 3DS? Instead of the bank, you could use PKSM to transfer your Pokemon. It's not the same, but it does the job.
From the point of view of a user or as a programmer? If you'd like to make your life more difficult as a programmer to compensate, try switching out your IDE to Wordpad - comic sans, center aligned. Python is especially fun in that mode.
They don't care if you're law illiterate, they just know they can fuck you over whether or not you know it's illegal and you don't have the money to fight it, and you're further hamstrung by the fact they can just force you into rigged arbitration through arbitrators they basically own in all but name.
