A lot has changed since and a lot has become more comfortable. It slower, more complicated, much more annoying. But you do have the power to simply stop using whatever you dislike[1].
So: don't buy from google. Build you own cloud. If you don't like the application or if it's instable (atom), use something stable (vim?). It _will_ be uncomfortable, but it's there.
[1] I'm well aware the cost of, for example, refusing to use Facebook, but you still can refuse to use it, whereas life without WeChat in Asia is becoming near impossible.
EDIT: Sorry for possible misunderstandings, I mixed up 3 different topics in a way too short answer. My point is: there are alternatives, there are choices. You don't like the user interface of something, protest: use something else. There _are_ options, but they are not the most visible, not the most comfortable choices, and many of them will involve setting services up for yourself.
LibreOffice is slow. On a ~2010 business-class Dell laptop that still is in perfectly good physical condition, running Debian 9, with a handful of tabs in Firefox and a mosh running:
adamantoise:~ geofft$ time libreoffice --terminate_after_init
real 0m8.103s
user 0m1.696s
sys 0m0.520s
Libreoffice is monolithically designed, as shouldn't be representative of the generic performance of modern software.
The reason is that StarOffice was envisioned as desktop environment, therefore, all the components of the suite are loaded on the first startup.
$ libreoffice --writer &
$ time libreoffice --calc --terminate_after_init
real 0m0.104s
user 0m0.016s
sys 0m0.008s
I think the article is very misguided; the problem is in the expectation that anything should be faster, even in contexts that are implicitly slower (networks, i.e. internet), or with features that will inevitably slow down the experience (e.g. browser plugins).
Using as reference the slowest software - Libreoffice, Atom, Firefox - is nothing else than cherry-picking.
In this perspective, a sibling article is correct - if you want faster alternatives, you have them.
EDIT: not startup time, who cares about startup time? When you load a few hundred pages doc, or a massive excel.
re 2: I only wanted to give examples, but you're right, my wording is off.
I wanted to say there are fast and good interfaces: there's vim for the terminal, there's Rainloop for webmail, miniflux for RSS reading - these are all keyboard-oriented ones, all working decently and as fast as they can. In case of web-connected ones, the speed of going back and forth is certainly an issue.
Local - as in not making connections on the network - in my opinion, will always have a speed advantage though.
Slow compared to decent standards of what a word processor needs. For reference, WordPad perceptually opens instantly for me, and has felt like it opened instantly since Windows 95, I'm pretty sure. I am saying that both LibreOffice and Google Docs are examples of software that take way too long to do simple things because they're busy doing complicated things that I don't actually care for. (And arguably this isn't really their fault per se, they're both designed to compete with / follow the expectations set by Microsoft Office of what an office suite is, and those expectations are that all the complicated things are available).
> Local - as in not making connections on the network - in my opinion, will always have a speed advantage though.
Depends what you're doing with the network. I do just about all of my work in the terminal with a mosh connection to a cheap server a couple hundred miles away, and I never feel perceptual slowness from my machine not being local, unless I am literally in the subway or in an elevator. And I actually gain a lot of perceptual speed because I can close my laptop and switch to my phone instantly and see the exact screen where I was.
If you're streaming binaries from the network or trying to pump animations on a 2048-by-1536 true-color retina display, yes, remote is going to be slow. Half the tweetstorm's point is that you shouldn't be designing software to need that in the first place.
And you can use pandoc to get the best of both worlds.
LibreOffice on even midsized spreadsheets is quite slow. Slower than opening it Google Docs in fact, which borders on shameful.
It was an example - the slowness (to me) is present for the entire interface. It was just easy to demonstrate. (Also in both LO and Google Docs I can type plain text into an existing document just fine.... I'm curious what you find slower in Google Docs than LO.)
My point is that this rant is not, as far as I can tell, a "local software good, cloud software bad" rant. There are reasons to believe that, e.g. debuggability and computing freedom, but UI speed is not one of them.
I can't speak for the poster above yours, but I would be serious. In my experience, on the startup time, google docs way out performs open office. It's open in single digit seconds, open office is 10s+
I still prefer offline software, but the bloat can be awful. At least web tech is designed with web browsing latency expectation. I find most desktop software these days has a much larger start and use latency by far.
Do you not like owning a car/tractor/printer running proprietary software that you're not permitted to modify? I guess you should have bought a 20 year old version and upgraded it yourself.
Do you want a choice of food that you trust won't make you sick? Then you probably should have worked for that lettuce from planting to harvest, not just complained about safety standards.
Total independence from the actions of others isn't impossible, but no one posting comments online is practicing it. And if "working for it" can include learning to use solutions other people have built, then it can also include writing this article on what's change and what's missing.
If you live in a society, talking about your preferences isn't an alternative to working for them, it's part of that work.
That's the survivor bias. There's plenty of things that you can no longer install and the things you can still install, it's mostly because there's someone that maintains their API and whatnot (thus, the company hasn't gone out of business or haven't decided not to maintains it). Look at games, GOG has an R&D department to make sure you can run the games on their platform.
I'm pretty sure there's a ton of people here that can talk about some old computer or VM that they have to keep up because of old legacy stuff.
> I mean, there is perceptible lag in character entry that never used to happen. Sure, my computer used to freeze inexplicably, but Atom crashes often enough that I don't consider that a win, and text has a noticeable delay before it appears on the screen when using Atom. Text entry is something I can implement flawlessly on a microcontroller and the majority of applications I use on a daily basis get it wrong.
Who forced you to use Atom? That's your decision to use something still heavily in development using some new technologies (not meant to be faster or more stable, just easier to develop into). It's like buying a bicycle and complaining it doesn't go as fast as the car you had before.
Now, if there WAS a company paying for all that maintenance it would be Microsoft, with their almost religious commitment to backwards compatibility.
Isn't it the same? Someone that directly update the app to newer API or someone that update an API to make sure the older apps are still running is pretty much the same at the end. Someone has to do that work.
There's someone that pay for it, whether it's nerds by their time, or Microsoft by their backward compatibility support.
Even for Microsoft, at the end of the day, you pay that price through your next Windows license, and still, they may decide not to keep supporting some of it (16 bits programs are no longer supported over 64 bits for example).
It's not different from a subscription model, except that instead of paying a fortune to support most things (which may not include what you actually need), you pay only to keep support over the product you actually use and need.
I'm not saying subscription models or cloud application are amazing, but being able to keep running your old apps is not the norm and is mostly made possible because there's someone that pay for it for you. At least in a subscription model, that relation is pretty direct, you pay for the software to keep working, unlike hoping that Windows invest into that old techs to make sure they keep running.
Only for the cloud cohort. Not all of us drink the kool-aid! Try living in a computing environment where the technology-rug isn't pulled out from under you every three months.
Both Windows and Linux have not had core changes to their API. The fundamentals of application programming haven't changed in decades. Why shouldn't we allow old apps to run?
> you pay only to keep support over the product you actually use and need.
And you pay it over and over again. Until you don't need it (which might be because they removed some feature you were relying on, with no recourse).
> but being able to keep running your old apps is not the norm
Losing access to my old apps isn't the norm, unless I choose to let go of control over my own computer's software.
The most immediately notable part was the typing, which felt completely instantaneous. I haven't found out exactly why, but the switch from serial to USB keyboard interfaces (and the lag therein) as well as the various windowing pipeline "improvements" over the years seem to be in the mix.
Takeaway: today’s keyboards are slow. Even gaming keyboards marketed as fast are slow. There’s more latency just in today’s keyboards than the entire end-to-end latency in an Apple II system from 1977.
But then you have to use an STLink to upload programs.
My life improved considerably when I switched from Sublime to vim, Excel to VisiData, Word to LaTeX (though, I am unsure if LaTeX is completely OSS), etc. I invested the time in learning the language of the tool, but it pays off in droves.
Don't get me wrong: I use OSS wherever possible, contribute where I can, and love the freedom to tinker with the software's innards. But UI just isn't OSS' strong suit. Mainstream Linux desktops are no faster than MacOS, and quality as perceived by end users is far lower.
Some of that is due to missing hardware support, and some of it is a result of the OSS' "bazaar model" of development simply not being as good a fit for UIs as it is for CLI applications. But in any case, the forces at play in the market are the same for OSS and proprietary software.
The TeX sources are widely available and (infamously) well documented. The LaTeX macros are merely widely available. I forget what licence they're under, though.
What makes you unsure they're open source?
Well, shrink-wrapped software only needed to be purchased once to have something, and it was amenable to piracy. It also didn't let companies collect, expropriate, and sell off your private data. Hell, once upon a time, people even wanted to take EULA provisions to court as illegitimate, since you couldn't use a product you'd already paid for if you didn't "agree" to a post-purchase "contract".
Something had to be done to make profits sustainable!
Actually, in this case, it was technological advancement coupled with those companies' desire to make profits that 'ruined pretty much everything'. Marketing had nothing to do with it.
In fact, do us a favour and re-read your post, then tell us what parts were ruined by marketing?
My experience is that everything is slower than when I first started using computers as a child in the 90's, and it does it worse. You don't own anything anymore, upgrades routinely take away features, and nothing interfaces with anything else.
There are a lot of reasons why building an app on a web framework makes sense, but the fact that I routinely lose access to applications I've paid for because the company has gone out of business or stopped supporting them drives me insane. I can still install Excel 97 if I want to, but I have 0 confidence that anything I've bought from Google will work a year from now.
I mean, there is perceptible lag in character entry that never used to happen. Sure, my computer used to freeze inexplicably, but Atom crashes often enough that I don't consider that a win, and text has a noticeable delay before it appears on the screen when using Atom. Text entry is something I can implement flawlessly on a microcontroller and the majority of applications I use on a daily basis get it wrong.