OSes, platform toolchains, and apps need to prioritize UX (UI response time and time-to-first-window) to lessen the perception and the reality of waiting on apps doing unimportant activities rather than appearing and beginning interaction.
My wife had a “my computer is slow” issue the other day. Fans blowing like crazy, extremely hot, battery draining fast. Turns out, lsof was stuck on some corrupt preferences file. Killed the process and file and all was fine. Regular people lack the tools to diagnose the problem and just deal with it, restart or buy a new one. We really should make diagnosing easier.
No, seriously. Once the root cause is found, humanize the description of the problem and ask the user what they want to do about it.
I bet they would to reduce labor costs.
Desktop Reliability Engineering ;-)