The Linux experience is more advanced now than ever before, with the advent of even more advanced software that is getting better and better than the old software applications that Linux users were using in the very old days of Linux distributions like Slackware and Redhat Linux 6.2. There is a little bloat creeping into the software but this hopefully will be addressed in future releases. The OpenOffice.org office suite that I am using to type this up was very bloated and slow in early releases but the team have done an amazing job speeding up the application. A good tip on trimming the fat with OpenOffice.org is to disable the Sun Java VM, you really do not need this and with it disabled you will save some memory. I remember once using an old version of Ubuntu, you would uninstall OpenOffice.org and it would take a whole heap of Ubuntu packages with it. The trick was to uninstall it, install the vanilla *.deb packages and then re-install the Ubuntu packages, and you could have a leaner system. Having the OpenOffice.org packages tied into the Ubuntu desktop packages was a very dumb idea indeed. Thank god, if you have an old Pentium 4 lying around like I do, I just fixed up an old Pentium 4 and I have installed Ubuntu 10.10 on it, it will be a useful second computer with 1GiB of RAM and a 20GiB hard drive it is not the fastest machine around but it has not gotten any slower since it was made, the software is getting more & more bloated and feature packed, therefore requiring more and more of the poor machine.
That is why people throw out perfectly good Pentium 4 computers and get new ones to run the same software that just has a new version number and even more bloat than the earlier version number. Then there is the issue of the ribbon interface in Microsoft Office, I hated that when I first met it, I could not find a certain command easily at all, but I guess you get used to it after a while. Software bloat is the main driver behind Intel and AMD selling so many new chips, as well as the obvious gaming market, with new games requiring newer and faster Graphics Processing Units to render even more detailed graphics than ever before. Modern games running at 2560*1024 pixels resolution are a far cry from the 320*200 pixels resolution of the games I played in the 90`s. But how detailed can graphics get? Will we be playing games soon in 4K resolution on giant screens in the future or will the resolution get even higher? Currently, you can play games that are almost indistinguishable from looking out of your window at a similar scene, the only way that games could get even better is to have a holodeck with photo-realistic characters that you could interact with. Having a J.R.R Tolkien novel as a holodeck program would be an awesome way to spend your time, I could walk around Mordor and explore Cirith Ungol in person. Who would not want that? But a usable holodeck simulation as seen in the Star Trek The Next Generation television series is still a far away dream these days.
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