Windows 2000 (Server) was the best windows operating system ever made by far.
I haven't used desktop Linux recently but my expectation would be that e.g. gnome is a little better, but still not great compared to what we had 20 years ago.
So there's just something broadly bloated about modern software. And sure, by and large people don't notice because modern hardware is so damn fast, but we're also forcing users to buy hardware that is much faster than what they should need.
GP points out that faster CPUs allow us to do things that weren't possible in the old days, like real-time video transcoding, and I agree that's great. But if you just need to check your damn email, you should be able to save a great deal of money to buy a machine that's laughably underpowered by "modern" standards, and still check your email at the speed of light.
What is all this software doing? I guess we're e.g. rendering at higher resolutions than we used to, but isn't the GPU supposed to take care of that?
Once Windows 8.0 came out, everything went to shit. It takes several seconds to open anything now.
I recently fired up a Windows 7 VM to interface with some old hardware, and was shocked that everything within the VM opening instantly, exactly how I remembered it.
P.S. The lag is still present on my m1 mac in macOS compared with Windows 7 + SSD. It's a lot better on my Manjaro Linux desktop with KDE, but not quite as instantaneous as Windows 7 was.
NEVER FORGET Wirth's Law:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth's_law
> Wirth's law is an adage on computer performance which states that software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware is becoming faster.
My main suspicion is that OS have some kind of agreement with hardware vendors under the excuse of "it's new innovation which requires more CPU power". It's a hand in hand system where you need new software for the new hardware AND VICE VERSA.
It is veeeery hard to prove it, but it's similar to house appliances using designs and parts that wear out easily. Capitalism and growth DICTATES that it must sell, so it's impossible for a company to survive if it produces durable stuff. It's economically impossible to compete.
It's how the whole industry works (part manufacturing, etc), so it's not possible for a company to go against it. Capitalism cannot allow it.
It's pretty funny how a pair of crappy videos I recorded in 5 minutes have gone viral and landed here. I obviously did not expect that this would happen and is why I didn't give a second thought to the comparison. There are many wrong things in there (including inaccuracies, as some have reported), and Twitter really doesn't give room to nuance. (Plus my notifications are now unusable so I can't even reply where necessary.)
I don't want to defend the "computers of 20 years ago" because they sucked in many aspects. Things have indeed gotten better in many ways: faster I/O, better graphics and insanely fast networks are a few of them, which have allowed many new types of apps to surface. Better languages and the pervasiveness of virtual machines have also allowed for new types of development and deployment environments, which can make things safer. Faster CPUs do enable things we couldn't do, like on-the-fly video transcoding and the like. The existence of GPUs gives us graphics animations for free. And the list goes on.
BUT. That still doesn't mean everything is better. UIs have generally gotten slower as you can see. There is visible lag even in fast computers: I noticed it on a ~2021 Z4 workstation I had at work, I noticed it on an i7 Surface Laptop 3 I had, and I still notice it on the Mac Pro I'm running Windows 11 on (my primary machine). It's mind-blowing to me that we need super-fast multi-core systems and GBs of RAM to approach, but not reach, the responsiveness we used to have in native desktop apps before. And this is really my pet peeve and what prompted the tweets.
Other random thoughts:
* Some massive wins we got in the past, like the switch from HDDs to SSDs, have been eaten away and now SSDs are a requirement.
* Lag is less visible on macOS and Linux desktops as they still feature mostly-native apps (unscientific claim as well).
* The Surface Go 2 isn't a very performant machine indeed, but note it ships with Windows 11 and the lag exists out of the box, so that makes it enough to qualify as a fair comparison.
* Yes, I had opened the apps in both computers before running the video, so they were all cached in memory (which puts the newer system in a worse light?).
* One specific thing that illustrates the problem is Notepad: the app was recently "rewritten" (can't recall exactly what the changes were). It used to open instantaneously on the Go 2, but not any more.
I might come back to extend the list of random thoughts. A proper follow-up blog post would be nice, but I'm not going to have time to write one right away.