Is OS X considered lightweight?

[TheGermanEngie]

Hi LTT - 

 

A good friend of mine lent me their Macbook circa 2008 with a Core 2 Duo and 2GB RAM. It's running El Capitan and throughout opening regular programs and surfing the webs it feels pretty snappy considering it's a decade old. Is Mac OS X known for their low system requirements or is it just extremely optimized? (I want to get an idea since I want to set up an OS X VM but I don't really know how much of a resource hog it is compared to other OS's)

[manikyath]

my asus T101HA is pretty snappy too, and thats not really something considered anywhere near poerful..

 

its not about the OS, its about not stacking an endless pile of startup programs and bloat onto it.

[NoRomanBatmansAllowed]

Super optimized. Apple knows what hardware their systems are running on, and they know it'll only run on those approved pieces.

 

Since there's only a few CPUs, GPUs, mobos etc OSX devs can optimize really well.

[manikyath]

2 minutes ago, NoRomanBatmansAllowed said:

Super optimized. Apple knows what hardware their systems are running on, and they know it'll only run on those approved pieces.

 

Since there's only a few CPUs, GPUs, mobos etc OSX devs can optimize really well.

that, and there's not really a way to just have stuff clog up the system on startup. thats what caused the endless pile of "windows (vista) versus macbook" videos in 2007-2010.

[TheGlenlivet]

6 minutes ago, manikyath said:

that, and there's not really a way to just have stuff clog up the system on startup. thats what caused the endless pile of "windows (vista) versus macbook" videos in 2007-2010.

Yeah, Vista was a great example of what not to do when it comes to OS optimization.

[manikyath]

2 minutes ago, TheGlenlivet said:

Yeah, Vista was a great example of what not to do when it comes to OS optimization.

eh.. vista wasnt *too* bad, it was also the era of the endless startup programs

 

you *can* actually make windows vista quite snappy, it was just very specificly not popular to do so.

[Sauron]

No, it's fairly ram hungry in general. With that said, with 2gb of ram you can do more than you'd think - most linux distributions run just fine with half as much memory or even less. As for the VM, it's not worth the effort, trust me - you need a custom vmware patch just to get it to boot and when it does boot it's a sluggish and unstable mess, and when I tried it I gave it 4 cores and 6gb of ram with the virtual disk on an ssd.

10 minutes ago, NoRomanBatmansAllowed said:

Super optimized. Apple knows what hardware their systems are running on, and they know it'll only run on those approved pieces.

 

Since there's only a few CPUs, GPUs, mobos etc OSX devs can optimize really well.

"Optimization" is not a synonim of "miracle". There's only so much performance you can squeeze out of a certain set of hardware, regardless of what Apple would have you believe. It's just a matter of not choking the system with unnecessary services and gadgets, something microsoft seems to have finally learned (at least in part) with windows 10.

[TheGlenlivet]

Just now, manikyath said:

eh.. vista wasnt *too* bad, it was also the era of the endless startup programs

 

you *can* actually make windows vista quite snappy, it was just very specificly not popular to do so.

I don't think hardware at the time was ready for it either.  Never have so many systems had their RAM upgraded so fast...

[Sauron]

1 minute ago, manikyath said:

eh.. vista wasnt *too* bad, it was also the era of the endless startup programs

 

you *can* actually make windows vista quite snappy, it was just very specificly not popular to do so.

...and also it was a buggy mess

[manikyath]

Just now, Sauron said:

...and also it was a buggy mess

windows vista was the only OS ever to be smoother with universalthemepatcher than without.

 

also, a bluescreen a day keeps the productivity away