I think the existence of SSDs are why modern OSs are borderline unusable on HDDs. It is kind of ridiculous how much passive IO there is, and how ridiculously long it takes to launch or open things.

You're probably right. Applications definitely are a lot more lax on resource consumption.

I've sat down and enumerated the things I do daily on my computer versus what I did back in ~2000. Besides streaming (youtube, netflix and spotify basically), its pretty uncommon that I do anything that I couldn't or didn't do back then. The performance of these things, now, seems about the same anecdotally. Maybe it was a little slower then, but not so much slower compared to the hardware performance difference. It makes me sad.

Also, as I said in other comments, I once developed hobby projects on a netbook. I of course ran a minimal system and didn't run resource hogs like slack. I'm currently using a cheap laptop running a minimal system (but unfortunately I do need to use slack, chrome, docker for work). They run fine.

I think developers or companies have decided that developer time is more important than performance and resource use of their products, punting the cost of that onto their customers. If my work didn't require it, I would definitely switch to more resource conscious tools and I'd be a bit happier. Oh well.

I would agree, and I hate that attitude in developers. Technology is a force multiplier, when you write something slow you're multiplying that slowness and all the time it wastes across the lives of your entire user base over the lifetime of the product.

I think browsers is what regressed the most.

I used to be able to open 3 Twitch streams in 720/1080p back in 2010 on a dual core Athlon X2 5000.

These days, if I open 2 HD streams in Firefox on a 4.2 Ghz quad-core 4670k, the system essentially freezes - the browser becomes unusable and both streams lag. Thank god for streamlink that lets you bypass the browser interface and view the streams in VLC or MPV.

Not to mention Electron-based apps using 600-800MB for a chat program with some light jpeg usage.

Developers' blatant disregard the the use of user's system resources is insane. It seems that regardless of hardware improvements, the modern developer only targets "acceptable" levels of performance, leaving power users frustrated.

Ubuntu seems fine on my older laptops, but Windows 10 is a different animal. I had an otherwise fast laptop that was almost unusable because Windows was always thrashing the slow spinning HDD. It could take 10 minutes or more after waking up from a sleep before the HDD light turned off (and even then off means a constant flicker). Apparently it's related to telemetry data Windows was constantly collecting for some reason. I eventually replaced the HDD with a SSD and the difference is night and day.

I'll admit that Windows is a bigger offender in this regard, but Linux Desktop has become quite bloated too.

I had a really old laptop with a 2.4Ghz C2D and 2GB of RAM plus a 4600RPM (I think) 60GB HDD that I had to switch to Cinnamon, but after that it worked alright. Could even keep a few tabs open in Firefox. It really only had trouble when it ran out of memory and started swapping.

It doesn't seem as easy to switch Windows to a lighter desktop environment.

Actually it kind of is, you just go to an older version of Windows. A surprisingly large amount of software will still work, or at the very least have alternatives that do. XP is really really snappy on modern hardware.

Granted, using XP today is not recommended for other reasons.

Can you even activate a copy of XP these days?

It's a trade off. Your OS had to play all kinds of games to manage those 150 or so IOPS you had. When you have 10,000 to a million IOPS you can drastically simplify the operating system.