I'm writing this on an AMD Phenom II, running Debian and StumpWM, that's over 10 years old. I've upgraded the hard drive to an SSD, and the memory from 8 Gb to 16 Gb (4 Gb DIMMs were very expensive when I first built it) and it's as fast as can be.
My work computer is much newer, has twice as much memory and a newer Intel processor, and I really can't tell the difference except for CPU bound tasks that run for a long time, like compiling large projects.
Fellow X220 user here... a solution for this exact problem where the system runs out of memory and then you sit there staring and waiting until it churns around long enough until it can do stuff again is to run earlyoom[0].
It will kill off the firefox process (or whichever is the main memory hog) early, which is also annoying but less so than having to wait minutes until you can use your computer again.
Anyway, while every version[0] of Windows I have used has become inescapably crudded up and slower over time, on Linux, even the old laptop, the only thing that got slower over time was the web browser. Which has mostly to do with webpages becoming heavier.
[0] Actually win95 cause I can't remember if this also happened on win 3.11 and the like.
I am a first year CS student. when I got my first laptop recently, I got crazy and installed debian (had some prior experience with command line), it didn't work very well for laptop. All DEs except enlightenment (yeah i even tried it) had lots of display related glitches due to cheap hardware.
Then I moved on and installed fedora. Nothing to tweak from CLI. Just changed few settings from GUI and peace of mind even on relatively obscure hardware.
It has been vastly simplified and worth it for anyone in IT / CS related fields.
2 GiB total is not a lot
This is one of the things that made me ditch Windows when it came out, but I was pretty sure they would have fixed it now. Now I'm convinced Windows 10 is part of an authoritarian experiment in getting populations to gradually submit to a worse quality of life.
Privately it was so easy to ditch. (Still have it on dual-boot, rarely use it and so every 2-3 times it needs to update for long minutes while I wait. Meanwhile Mint updates the kernel during operation while I barely notice at all.)
I have a top of the line Intel processor that’s less than 2 years old (launched, not bought). 970 Evo Pro that’s the one of the fastest drives around. 32 GB RAM (don’t remember the speed but it was and is supposed to be super fast).
Explorer takes a second or two to launch. The ducking start menu takes a moment and sometimes causes the entire OS to lock up for a second.
The twitter rant is spot on.
There’s so much of supposed value add BS that the core usage scenarios go to shit.
And this is coming from a Product Manager. :-)
Anyway the referencing problem is painful. I feel it often. Google maps or Apple Maps. Try to plan a vacation and Mark interesting places on it to identify the best location to stay. Yup gotta use that memory. Well isn’t that one of the rules of UX design, don’t make me think?
Regarding OSes: storage has gotten so much faster and CPUs haven’t, that storage drivers and file systems are now the bottleneck. We need less layers of abstraction to compensate. The old model of IO is super slow is no longer accurate.