I have almost 15 year old CPU with 2 GB RAM and Intel Core 2 Duo processor. It has Windows 7 installed. I recently opened it again and was amazed to see that it actually works and it is also very snappy by current standards.

My Core 2 Duo Merom laptop was sadly unbearably sluggish on Windows 7 with a mechanical drive even with indexing and background services disabled, even at browsing files and such (and merely laggy with a SSHD mechanical drive with flash cache), though I hear Penryn CPUs are faster (and perhaps desktops are faster than laptops). The computer performs much better on a non-JS-based Linux DE like MATE (as opposed to GNOME Shell and plasmashell), though taskbar window previews are black (probably it doesn't work on an anemic GMA 965). I swear Xfce on a 2-core Ivy Bridge laptop with iGPU and SATA SSD, feels just as fast as KDE on a 6-core Zen 3 desktop with non-Nvidia GPU, at file management, Konsole, Telegram/nheko chatting, and PDF reading, until you open a browser or Electron app or run a modern optimizing compiler.

Oddly, with Windows 7 on the Core 2 Duo, the taskbar would randomly stop updating (I think it stopped happening after moving the same hard drive into a newer laptop?), and I got no end of driver issues: the touchpad would stop responding on the lock screen or logged in after sleep-wake, and audio would randomly stop playing until I restarted audiodg.exe. As far as I can remember, none of these issues happen on my Ivy Bridge laptop, where I'm clinging for life onto Windows 7 (the last version with a soul) for as long as I can keep apps running... though I'm getting rather tired of Tailscale creating a new network adapter and asking for home/work/public on every reboot.

I had the same experience with a 900 Mhz Pentium III machine, and Windows XP SP3. It was lightning, blazing fast. It geniunely felt like the reactions for my mouse clicks were faster than I could finish the clicking motion.

This is why some people want to still use DOS and Win 3.1 because it is faster.

I run Win95 and Win2000Pro in a virtal machine with old software and it runs faster than the most recent versions.

I put Ubuntu on a Lenovo PC and it runs faster than Windows 10 did.

I switched to Linux Mint as my daily driver and I'm amazed by its overall performance.

There's still a couple quirks, but Windows 10 had its fair number of quirks too...

I had a experiences both with a very very old win95 box and an old linux 2.4 kali usb key.

The linux one was strange because my arch/systemd/ssd/i3 setup is lean, you get parallel boot, no heavy DE no bloat.. but everything felt lighter and faster on kali and I had a physical reaction saying "I don't miss anything from my current laptop, that old thing was closer to my needs".

Maybe a part of our brain that doesn't care about typography or visual effects much and prefer good old crude solid lag free tools.

I recently had the pleasure of installing OS9 on a classic 2001 iMac – the "lampshade" one, though I don't think that nickname does it justice!

I was, and am, blown away by how responsive it is. Plus, the UI sound effects add to the experience in a great way. You can HEAR when you've done something "in the computer." Just a bunch of clicks and boops. It's fantastic. Makes you think about what we've just... gotten used to.

Speaking of Windows: Microsoft PMs stupidity can never be matched by declining SW development efforts, even with better HW.

Here you cannot really blame the poor developer, when the PM demands to scan all Documents, not just some relevant sound recordings. It's so obviously insane, that only PM's get away with this. Of course the dev matched our PM here, with his insane directory iters, but alone the idea must be appreciated first.

PMs don't get to order devs around at Microsoft (or any sane organization). Devs can tell their PM counterparts to stuff it if they try to demand stuff. If you've worked at Microsoft, or met someone who has, you'd know this.