Currently open on my machine:
- Safari
- Firefox (streaming audio)
- A program converting a 500 page PDF to 500 300dpi PNGs
- A bash script extracting PDFs from a municipal web site.
- A program downloading my video viewing for the week and converting it to a format better suited for my iPad
- iTunes serving audio and video to TVs in two different rooms
- An FTP program doing weekly backups
- A mail client
- A VPN client
- A spreadsheet
- An IDE (Coda2)
And if I were to look at my wife's laptop, I can guarantee that she's running more than just a web browser, and she's not technically inclined.
People have been pushing browser-only machines since the days of Novell's "thin client" strategy in the 90's. Netbooks were a fad. Consumption-only gained a small amount of traction recently with Chromebooks, but even the non-technical people in my office are dumping their Chromebooks for real laptops these days because they realize they have needs beyond Google's ecosystem.
Maybe we'll get there some day. But for now, if you want a laptop computer, you have to have an actual laptop computer.
This is one of my pet peeves. Netbooks were great as a small disposable internet console. They weren't just for consumption - the keyboard meant you could use them to compose text. The problem was that people bought them when they wanted a super cheap laptop, and so netbook manufacturers kept making the screens bigger and the processors faster until they stopped being netbooks and turned into crappy cheap laptops.
The new wave of tablets with keyboard covers are basically what netbooks were, but for a good decade there we lost the idea of a small cheap internet console which could be used to compose text.
Which like Android afterwards, kind of proved the point of what happens when OEMs get to ship their own distributions.
I've got a Samsung NC10[1] running Haiku beautifully. It's a 32-bit machine with just 2Gb of RAM and it's never run so smartly. I'm very impressed by Haiku's stability and consistency. The extended attributes on files are an eye-opener. Your mail client is a settings window, a compose window and a file manager. Just add the attributes you need for email to the list view.
Otherwise they wouldn't need to pivot it into a general laptop OS.
- Safari
A lot of people run web browsers.
- Firefox (streaming audio)
A lot of people stream audio.
- A program converting a 500 page PDF to 500 300dpi PNGs
That's a weird one, sure.
- A bash script extracting PDFs from a municipal web site.
Also weird, but "average people" need to do some kind of automation once in a blue moon, so let's not discount that.
- A program downloading my video viewing for the week and converting it to a format better suited for my iPad
The conversion is unusual, but people download videos to their iPad.
- iTunes serving audio and video to TVs in two different rooms
A little niche, but "media server" is still a thing.
- An FTP program doing weekly backups
Backups are a thing. A thing more people should be doing, but definitely a thing.
- A mail client
Not niche at all.
- A VPN client
Not niche if your office requires a VPN. A lot do.
- A spreadsheet
Definitely not niche.
- An IDE (Coda2)
Sorta niche-y, but think of it as "text editor" and it's less so: it could be a word processor, or Scrivener.
Somehow, responsiveness with Windows 10 on my i7-8650U laptop is total garbage, so yes, I think it still does.
Then I tried Windows 7, and I could not believe the difference. We're talking 5-10x faster. Everything just responds instantly. Too bad they're ending support in a year.
Because for better or worse that's not what technology has been designing for.
Many programs nowadays are designed for the tradeoffs of SSDs rather than spinning media.
It always matters; I don't want to waste my life away in front of someone's irresponsive, laggy, slow software.
And I am not kidding in the least when I say that. Regarding more modern operating systems, BeOS was so nice to use. Here was an OS that had UI/single-user needs baked in to it from the beginning, and it was a breath of fresh air. I'd liken it to the experience I had switching from a 60Hz monitor to a 164Hz one- I didn't really think about it much at the time, other than I wanted a gsync-capable display, and one was one sale. But the smoothness of the scrolling, mouse use, etc was so much more pleasant. And yet I never would have complained about the 60Hz screen until shown the alternative.
Venturing in to personal opinion, I'd also say BeOS was developed at the inflection point between engineering running the show, UI be damned, and where we are now, with designers running the show, actual capability be damned. It was a good mix.
As a C=128D owner, I hear you loud and clear. It's a slap to the contemporary programmers' faces that a 1 MHz MOS 6510 based system was more responsive than multicore GHz, hardware accelerated systems we have now.
I find it very noticeable, not least as in terms of those basics we seem to be stepping backwards for responsiveness.
Loading software should be quicker, but no one cares about space and size any more, especially as more and more becomes a front for a browser. Even native software is faintly disappointing. You load a game in seconds from the lightning fast SSD then it takes 2 min to load the save as that's bigger than some OS's. :)
You can't build a responsive browser on top of an unresponsive OS.
I’m definitely not a normal user, but I’m running emacs, st, tmux, stumpwm, dunst, gocode, cupsd, sbcl, redshift — oh yes, and Firefox too. Honestly, I’d love to be able to get rid of my browser, because then I could run emacs in a terminal and get rid of X entirely.
How many threads are they running?
I'm running three apps right now: VSCode, Slack, and a web browser. Given that VSCode and Slack are basically other browsers, how much does OS responsiveness matter? Has the responsiveness battle just moved to the browser?
How much are people really running other than a web browser on a desktop/laptop now-a-days? When I evaluate an OS today, I'm going to care about how good its trackpad drivers are, whether I'm likely to have wifi issues, whether it can run the *nix tools I need to do my work, maybe whether I like the way it switches between windows/apps, and whether there are modern browsers to run on it. Responsiveness was a big deal back when I was running a Pentium II and BeOS had amazing demos (and I presume real-world usage) with uninterrupted video while multi-tasking and just buttery-smooth context switching in an era where you'd have your system lock-up. Heck, it was many years before OS X got past the beach ball of death happening constantly.
However, today, it's my browser that locks up; it's my browser that I want to be able to smoothly scroll through a web page.
I really want Haiku to succeed, but it feels like we might have moved beyond the OS for so much that the OS can't have the same impact it once had. On the one hand, the web has made it so that alternative OSs don't need a boat load of software to be usable. On the other hand, because the browser is now the OS, the usefulness of an alternative OS is lower.