Re: [PLUG] Linux friendly tablet?

[Rich Freeman <r-plug@thefreemanclan.net>]

On Sat, Jul 7, 2012 at 10:31 PM, Walt Mankowski <waltman@pobox.com> wrote:
> This is a benefit of the design of iOS, where there's only ever one
> app in the foreground and it takes up the entire screen.  If an app
> does a good job of saving its state when it's suspended and restoring
> it when it becomes active, it gives the illusion of multitasking even
> if it was completely removed from memory.  I'm sure that 99% of iOS
> users have no idea this is going on and just let the system handle
> it.  In practice it works really well.

I suspect that there is a balance somewhere in-between.  I'm not sure
I'd call single-tasking a great feature either.

I don't mind having multiple apps running at once - I do it all the
time on any desktop OS.  The issues I have is that I can't control
what keeps running in the background, and apps use way too much RAM in
general (which is probably the result of using Java for everything).
My phone has 512MB of RAM - I can run Windows XP, Libreoffice, and
Firefox in 512MB of RAM, to say nothing of linux+xfce.  The issue
isn't that the OS multi-tasks - the issue is that everything is using
WAY too much RAM across the board and that dinky little CPU is too
distracted by who-knows-what running some kind of sync service in the
background for the 2x/month I run the app.

I understand that Google wants platform-neutral bytecode for the apps,
and that makes sense on a diverse platform.  However, why can't they
at least run all the preinstalled stuff native?  And why is it that
Java uses so much RAM anyway - I can understand some overhead for JIT
but it just seems like anytime I've ever used Java it gobbles down
RAM.

I guess my frustration with Android is that it could be so much better
if they just put a little more attention into some of these issues...

Rich
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