Originally posted by MuPuF
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A good example is publishing business. My friend uses Inkscape, Scribus, LaTeX, and some other stuff. For example when he downloads a set of assets (e.g. 40 GB), most of the programs in the pipeline only use one core. Even generating thumbnails of images takes ages. Uses only one core.. What he does is, comes up with trivial workarounds: thumbnails - open multiple file managers and scroll down to a different part of the folder to start another generator, image format transformers - GNU parallel or GNU make, PDFs - generate multiple single page documents and combine with pdftk, slow image filters in inkscape/gimp - start multiple instances.
Transition to a multicore mindset in apps probably won't take long, but many projects are stubborn and refuse to convert. Currently, to an ordinary user, a 5 GHz single-core is faster than a 4.5 Ghz 1024-core with 100% perfect linear scalability. The apps just aren't there yet. Case in point: in Kdenlive, go to settings -> environment. Take a look at 'processing threads'. The description says '> 1 is experimental'. Geez..
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