5 ms·

As someone who likes responsiveness, I've always wanted BeOS to take off. However, at this time, does OS responsiveness matter? I'm running three apps right n

by mdasen 8y ago

As someone who likes responsiveness, I've always wanted BeOS to take off. However, at this time, does OS responsiveness matter? I'm running three apps right now: VSCode, Slack, and a web browser. Given that VSCode and Slack are basically other browsers, how much does OS responsiveness matter? Has the responsiveness battle just moved to the browser? How much are people really running other than a web browser on a desktop/laptop now-a-days? When I evaluate an OS today, I'm going to care about how good its trackpad drivers are, whether I'm likely to have wifi issues, whether it can run the *nix tools I need to do my work, maybe whether I like the way it switches between windows/apps, and whether there are modern browsers to run on it. Responsiveness was a big deal back when I was running a Pentium II and BeOS had amazing demos (and I presume real-world usage) with uninterrupted video while multi-tasking and just buttery-smooth context switching in an era where you'd have your system lock-up. Heck, it was many years before OS X got past the beach ball of death happening constantly. However, today, it's my browser that locks up; it's my browser that I want to be able to smoothly scroll through a web page. I really want Haiku to succeed, but it feels like we might have moved beyond the OS for so much that the OS can't have the same impact it once had. On the one hand, the web has made it so that alternative OSs don't need a boat load of software to be usable. On the other hand, because the browser is now the OS, the usefulness of an alternative OS is lower.

Annatar 8y ago
"However, at this time, does OS responsiveness matter?" It always matters; I don't want to waste my life away in front of someone's irresponsive, laggy, slow software.
- garmaine 8y ago
  You’re missing the point. With concurrency handled in user code and (I’d add) reduced latency from SSD storage, do you even want the OS to be excessively preemptive? Doing so has large drawbacks in terms of cache performance, and the difference is no longer noticeable.
  - Annatar 8y ago
    I'm not missing the point. I want lightning fast response from software to my actions. If there is one thing I cannot stand, it's when the input loop loses events, which happens very often on Windows and my Linux powered TV. I want to throw them both out of the window, it drives me insane.
    - Baeocystin 8y ago
      I miss the instant-on, straight-to-REPL, ~1 second reset features of my old Commodore 128. And I am not kidding in the least when I say that. Regarding more modern operating systems, BeOS was so nice to use. Here was an OS that had UI/single-user needs baked in to it from the beginning, and it was a breath of fresh air. I'd liken it to the experience I had switching from a 60Hz monitor to a 164Hz one- I didn't really think about it much at the time, other than I wanted a gsync-capable display, and one was one sale. But the smoothness of the scrolling, mouse use, etc was so much more pleasant. And yet I never would have complained about the 60Hz screen until shown the alternative. Venturing in to personal opinion, I'd also say BeOS was developed at the inflection point between engineering running the show, UI be damned, and where we are now, with designers running the show, actual capability be damned. It was a good mix.
      - Annatar 8y ago
        "I miss the instant-on, straight-to-REPL, ~1 second reset features of my old Commodore 128." As a C=128D owner, I hear you loud and clear. It's a slap to the contemporary programmers' faces that a 1 MHz MOS 6510 based system was more responsive than multicore GHz, hardware accelerated systems we have now.
  - NeedMoreTea 8y ago
    The one thing that has not changed over the 20 years since BeOS was around is waiting for the computer to respond. We still wait, except now we're often waiting on network rather than OS latency for that button to indent, or do something. I find it very noticeable, not least as in terms of those basics we seem to be stepping backwards for responsiveness. Loading software should be quicker, but no one cares about space and size any more, especially as more and more becomes a front for a browser. Even native software is faintly disappointing. You load a game in seconds from the lightning fast SSD then it takes 2 min to load the save as that's bigger than some OS's. :)
- ianai 8y ago
  Also, lagginess quickly turns into chaotic behavior. I’ll never forgive outlook for deleting dozens of folders during one of its spasms.
reaperducer 8y ago
How much are people really running other than a web browser on a desktop/laptop now-a-days? Currently open on my machine: - Safari - Firefox (streaming audio) - A program converting a 500 page PDF to 500 300dpi PNGs - A bash script extracting PDFs from a municipal web site. - A program downloading my video viewing for the week and converting it to a format better suited for my iPad - iTunes serving audio and video to TVs in two different rooms - An FTP program doing weekly backups - A mail client - A VPN client - A spreadsheet - An IDE (Coda2) And if I were to look at my wife's laptop, I can guarantee that she's running more than just a web browser, and she's not technically inclined. People have been pushing browser-only machines since the days of Novell's "thin client" strategy in the 90's. Netbooks were a fad. Consumption-only gained a small amount of traction recently with Chromebooks, but even the non-technical people in my office are dumping their Chromebooks for real laptops these days because they realize they have needs beyond Google's ecosystem. Maybe we'll get there some day. But for now, if you want a laptop computer, you have to have an actual laptop computer.
- taneq 8y ago
  > Netbooks were a fad. This is one of my pet peeves. Netbooks were great as a small disposable internet console. They weren't just for consumption - the keyboard meant you could use them to compose text. The problem was that people bought them when they wanted a super cheap laptop, and so netbook manufacturers kept making the screens bigger and the processors faster until they stopped being netbooks and turned into crappy cheap laptops. The new wave of tablets with keyboard covers are basically what netbooks were, but for a good decade there we lost the idea of a small cheap internet console which could be used to compose text.
  - pjmlp 8y ago
    The OEM specific Linux distributions did not help as well. Which like Android afterwards, kind of proved the point of what happens when OEMs get to ship their own distributions.
- bklaasen 8y ago
  > Netbooks were a fad I've got a Samsung NC10[1] running Haiku beautifully. It's a 32-bit machine with just 2Gb of RAM and it's never run so smartly. I'm very impressed by Haiku's stability and consistency. The extended attributes on files are an eye-opener. Your mail client is a settings window, a compose window and a file manager. Just add the attributes you need for email to the list view. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samsung_NC10 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samsung_NC10
rayiner 8y ago
> However, at this time, does OS responsiveness matter? Somehow, responsiveness with Windows 10 on my i7-8650U laptop is total garbage, so yes, I think it still does.
- andai 8y ago
  It's been 3 years since W10 came out. I recently tested W10 in a VM to see how it's matured. It was unusably slow. Things would take seconds to appear, sometimes dozens of seconds. Then I tried Windows 7, and I could not believe the difference. We're talking 5-10x faster. Everything just responds instantly. Too bad they're ending support in a year.
- jmartrican 8y ago
  Are you using an SSD? Been using W10 for years across multiple hardware. All with SSD drives though. Never had issues with responsiveness.
  - avhon1 8y ago
    People keep bringing this up, but I really don't think I, or anybody, should need an SSD in order to have a fast-acting computer. Spinning rust, RAM, and CPU clocks are faster now than twenty years ago, CPUs have vastly more cache, we have more CPUs, and our compilers and prefetch algorithms are smarter than ever. Why, then, are the same basic tasks not any faster, and sometimes slower? Why is the answer to use even faster technology?
    - paulddraper 8y ago
      I hear you, but why can't humans go farther from the Earth than they did in the 1970s? Because for better or worse that's not what technology has been designing for. Many programs nowadays are designed for the tradeoffs of SSDs rather than spinning media.
    - jmartrican 8y ago
      I agree but what I have noticed from doing some troubleshooting is that applications now-a-days (or rather always) use up more hardware as time goes by. For example, I verified with perfmon that my IDE accessed over 50,000 files when i clicked on 'Open' and the directory tree popped up. It accessed every file in my Documents and other standard folders. Browsers also use up a lot of disk IO. Just by getting an SSD you speed up your web browsing.
ori_b 8y ago
> I'm running three apps right now: VSCode, Slack, and a web browser. Given that VSCode and Slack are basically other browsers, how much does OS responsiveness matter? Has the responsiveness battle just moved to the browser? How many threads are they running?
taneq 8y ago
> Given that VSCode and Slack are basically other browsers, how much does OS responsiveness matter? Has the responsiveness battle just moved to the browser? You can't build a responsive browser on top of an unresponsive OS.
rauhl 8y ago
> How much are people really running other than a web browser on a desktop/laptop now-a-days? I’m definitely not a normal user, but I’m running emacs, st, tmux, stumpwm, dunst, gocode, cupsd, sbcl, redshift — oh yes, and Firefox too. Honestly, I’d love to be able to get rid of my browser, because then I could run emacs in a terminal and get rid of X entirely.
- lloeki 8y ago
  The browser could render itself to fb0 or something... no window manager/compositor, just fullscreen on its own VT.

by mdasen 8y ago

Annatar 8y ago

"However, at this time, does OS responsiveness matter?" It always matters; I don't want to waste my life away in front of someone's irresponsive, laggy, slow software.

garmaine 8y ago
You’re missing the point. With concurrency handled in user code and (I’d add) reduced latency from SSD storage, do you even want the OS to be excessively preemptive? Doing so has large drawbacks in terms of cache performance, and the difference is no longer noticeable.
- Annatar 8y ago
  I'm not missing the point. I want lightning fast response from software to my actions. If there is one thing I cannot stand, it's when the input loop loses events, which happens very often on Windows and my Linux powered TV. I want to throw them both out of the window, it drives me insane.
  - Baeocystin 8y ago
    I miss the instant-on, straight-to-REPL, ~1 second reset features of my old Commodore 128. And I am not kidding in the least when I say that. Regarding more modern operating systems, BeOS was so nice to use. Here was an OS that had UI/single-user needs baked in to it from the beginning, and it was a breath of fresh air. I'd liken it to the experience I had switching from a 60Hz monitor to a 164Hz one- I didn't really think about it much at the time, other than I wanted a gsync-capable display, and one was one sale. But the smoothness of the scrolling, mouse use, etc was so much more pleasant. And yet I never would have complained about the 60Hz screen until shown the alternative. Venturing in to personal opinion, I'd also say BeOS was developed at the inflection point between engineering running the show, UI be damned, and where we are now, with designers running the show, actual capability be damned. It was a good mix.
    - Annatar 8y ago
      "I miss the instant-on, straight-to-REPL, ~1 second reset features of my old Commodore 128." As a C=128D owner, I hear you loud and clear. It's a slap to the contemporary programmers' faces that a 1 MHz MOS 6510 based system was more responsive than multicore GHz, hardware accelerated systems we have now.
- NeedMoreTea 8y ago
  The one thing that has not changed over the 20 years since BeOS was around is waiting for the computer to respond. We still wait, except now we're often waiting on network rather than OS latency for that button to indent, or do something. I find it very noticeable, not least as in terms of those basics we seem to be stepping backwards for responsiveness. Loading software should be quicker, but no one cares about space and size any more, especially as more and more becomes a front for a browser. Even native software is faintly disappointing. You load a game in seconds from the lightning fast SSD then it takes 2 min to load the save as that's bigger than some OS's. :)
ianai 8y ago
Also, lagginess quickly turns into chaotic behavior. I’ll never forgive outlook for deleting dozens of folders during one of its spasms.

reaperducer 8y ago

How much are people really running other than a web browser on a desktop/laptop now-a-days? Currently open on my machine: - Safari - Firefox (streaming audio) - A program converting a 500 page PDF to 500 300dpi PNGs - A bash script extracting PDFs from a municipal web site. - A program downloading my video viewing for the week and converting it to a format better suited for my iPad - iTunes serving audio and video to TVs in two different rooms - An FTP program doing weekly backups - A mail client - A VPN client - A spreadsheet - An IDE (Coda2) And if I were to look at my wife's laptop, I can guarantee that she's running more than just a web browser, and she's not technically inclined. People have been pushing browser-only machines since the days of Novell's "thin client" strategy in the 90's. Netbooks were a fad. Consumption-only gained a small amount of traction recently with Chromebooks, but even the non-technical people in my office are dumping their Chromebooks for real laptops these days because they realize they have needs beyond Google's ecosystem. Maybe we'll get there some day. But for now, if you want a laptop computer, you have to have an actual laptop computer.

taneq 8y ago
> Netbooks were a fad. This is one of my pet peeves. Netbooks were great as a small disposable internet console. They weren't just for consumption - the keyboard meant you could use them to compose text. The problem was that people bought them when they wanted a super cheap laptop, and so netbook manufacturers kept making the screens bigger and the processors faster until they stopped being netbooks and turned into crappy cheap laptops. The new wave of tablets with keyboard covers are basically what netbooks were, but for a good decade there we lost the idea of a small cheap internet console which could be used to compose text.
- pjmlp 8y ago
  The OEM specific Linux distributions did not help as well. Which like Android afterwards, kind of proved the point of what happens when OEMs get to ship their own distributions.
bklaasen 8y ago
> Netbooks were a fad I've got a Samsung NC10[1] running Haiku beautifully. It's a 32-bit machine with just 2Gb of RAM and it's never run so smartly. I'm very impressed by Haiku's stability and consistency. The extended attributes on files are an eye-opener. Your mail client is a settings window, a compose window and a file manager. Just add the attributes you need for email to the list view. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samsung_NC10 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samsung_NC10

rayiner 8y ago

> However, at this time, does OS responsiveness matter? Somehow, responsiveness with Windows 10 on my i7-8650U laptop is total garbage, so yes, I think it still does.

andai 8y ago
It's been 3 years since W10 came out. I recently tested W10 in a VM to see how it's matured. It was unusably slow. Things would take seconds to appear, sometimes dozens of seconds. Then I tried Windows 7, and I could not believe the difference. We're talking 5-10x faster. Everything just responds instantly. Too bad they're ending support in a year.
jmartrican 8y ago
Are you using an SSD? Been using W10 for years across multiple hardware. All with SSD drives though. Never had issues with responsiveness.
- avhon1 8y ago
  People keep bringing this up, but I really don't think I, or anybody, should need an SSD in order to have a fast-acting computer. Spinning rust, RAM, and CPU clocks are faster now than twenty years ago, CPUs have vastly more cache, we have more CPUs, and our compilers and prefetch algorithms are smarter than ever. Why, then, are the same basic tasks not any faster, and sometimes slower? Why is the answer to use even faster technology?
  - paulddraper 8y ago
    I hear you, but why can't humans go farther from the Earth than they did in the 1970s? Because for better or worse that's not what technology has been designing for. Many programs nowadays are designed for the tradeoffs of SSDs rather than spinning media.
  - jmartrican 8y ago
    I agree but what I have noticed from doing some troubleshooting is that applications now-a-days (or rather always) use up more hardware as time goes by. For example, I verified with perfmon that my IDE accessed over 50,000 files when i clicked on 'Open' and the directory tree popped up. It accessed every file in my Documents and other standard folders. Browsers also use up a lot of disk IO. Just by getting an SSD you speed up your web browsing.

ori_b 8y ago

> I'm running three apps right now: VSCode, Slack, and a web browser. Given that VSCode and Slack are basically other browsers, how much does OS responsiveness matter? Has the responsiveness battle just moved to the browser? How many threads are they running?

taneq 8y ago

> Given that VSCode and Slack are basically other browsers, how much does OS responsiveness matter? Has the responsiveness battle just moved to the browser? You can't build a responsive browser on top of an unresponsive OS.

rauhl 8y ago

> How much are people really running other than a web browser on a desktop/laptop now-a-days? I’m definitely not a normal user, but I’m running emacs, st, tmux, stumpwm, dunst, gocode, cupsd, sbcl, redshift — oh yes, and Firefox too. Honestly, I’d love to be able to get rid of my browser, because then I could run emacs in a terminal and get rid of X entirely.

lloeki 8y ago
The browser could render itself to fb0 or something... no window manager/compositor, just fullscreen on its own VT.