6 ms·

That computers are just slower to interact with now is such a truism that we hardly remark upon it any more. It seems utterly insane that in the early 90's I co

That computers are just slower to interact with now is such a truism that we hardly remark upon it any more. It seems utterly insane that in the early 90's I could just run Windows 3.1 on a bit of kit that in all likelihood wouldn't even power a toaster today, and the experience was, well, frictionless. I don't recall ever thinking "wtf is this thing doing?", whereas today, by contrast, if I have the audacity to be afk for long enough for my Windows 10 box to go sleep I know I am in for an infuriating waste of minutes' worth of disk thrashing before the bloody thing even deigns to reacknowledge my existence.

WrtCdEvrydy 6y ago
I call this 'Outsourcing the cost of development to the user'... Getting knowledgeable people costs money so we build more abstractions that lower the cost of development and pass the costs of development from the company to the user in the form of requiring more hardware to do the same thing. How come I need 16Gb of RAM these days when 8Gb did it yesterday? How come my phone needs 4Gb of RAM while my 2012 tablet had 1Gb? Sure the hardware is cheaper but we're still not using the hardware to it's fullest.
- karatestomp 6y ago
  My 256MB RAM, 900Mhz Duron machine (single core, naturally) in ~2002 (IIRC?) could do just about everything my modern one can. We even had video chat! It was just much lower res. The limiting factor in online stuff was, by far, connection speed, not the power of my hardware. That was about the point where the hardware was fast enough and had enough memory that I could multitask in a modern way without hitting problems like popping/stuttering audio or bad swap issues. Aside from legitimate increases in memory use for higher-res media, most everything since then, from my perspective, has been pure bloat. Why does 16x that memory and two cores at double the clock feel insufficient for extremely similar workloads and software feature-sets? Fucking bloat is why. Largely, but far from solely, web-tech infesting everything. Before that, my 64MB RAM 100mhz Pentium could usually have a couple things open before it'd hit swap too badly. I'm talking like Word and a web browser, not calc and notepad. None of the equivalent programs to those can even open all on their own in a footprint smaller than 64MB these days, let alone with other programs and the OS in the same space. Hell, how many operating systems fit in that with a GUI as capable and usable as, say, Win98se (let alone something really incredible on the performance front, like BeOS)?
  - aclsid 6y ago
    I agree with the main sentiment, but I have made my peace with it. Mainly Java and Electron based apps because they do provide us with a nice thing that was impossible years before unless you wanted to become a digital hermit: Linux on the desktop. I can now use simplenote, discord, slack, the jetbrains dev suite, visual studio code, and this is without including separate developments like Steam, which has made it effortless to switch between Windows, Linux and Mac. That being said, I still consider Mac OS the superior OS (this call home issue from the article aside), mostly because the font rendering still works better after all these years, Windows and Mac still have better quality software available for them, and Mac still does not have the forced updates as Windows does. Also I have noticed that in Ubuntu, some electron apps like Simplenote, the copy and paste of text is funky at times, like not even letting me select stuff.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- coliveira 6y ago
  The reason is very simple: developers don't want to develop anymore, they just want to offload real programming to third party libraries, where what used to take 100 lines of code to accomplish will take 10K or more (because, obviously, the library will do the most general version of what it wants to do). All this is considered "good development practices", which means that programs will inflate to take whatever memory is available and run slower for as long as we continue to use the same practices.
  - astronautjones 6y ago
    and is absolutely encouraged by google and amazon, as delivering that bloat makes them money
- valuearb 6y ago
  What’s the point of cheaper disk and ram, and faster systems if not for supporting higher level abstractions?
  - jcelerier 6y ago
    is this a serious question ?
  - npongratz 6y ago
    To watch more, higher-def cat videos faster. No need to get lost in the weeds of higher level abstractions to do that.
andai 6y ago
Are you on a hard disk drive? I have bestowed upon myself the unique misfortune of running Windows 10 on a spinny disk.
- bscphil 6y ago
  This has quietly become a pretty serious issue. Most software developers have simply stopped caring about systems with traditional HDDs. This is even true on Linux - I found out a while back that all the KDE developers are using SSDs, which is why they weren't fixing issues where startup time is affected by disk latency. I eventually gave in and bought a 250 GB SSD for my old laptop, there was simply no other option.
blyry 6y ago
I switched to a linux desktop full time last week because of this exact problem. VPN w/ windows would flake out on me all the time, and I got sooo tired of just...waiting. Remember when windows search worked? Like, you could press the windows key, type what you were looking for and find it? Quickly? Being able to turn the computer on, type in my password and have it be just..ready is so incredibly refreshing. Having a terminal with 0 latency, where copy/paste is sane? Worth a zillion dollars to me right now. Currently playing with opensuse tumbleweed, i'll probably get frustrated by something and move to arch, so I can fix that something and also be frustrated by a hundred other things.
- fetbaffe 6y ago
  Rumors on the internets have spoken positively about Opensuse Leap & Tumbleweed, any truth to that?
  - ChuckNorris89 6y ago
    Another vote from me for tumbleweed.
  - blyry 6y ago
    I don't have a ton of experience with other options, but 2 weeks in and tumbleweed has been pretty plug and play! 0 issues getting my netcore/python/golang/docker dev stack up. I get a weird popping noise in my usb dac at the login screen but that's the only issue I've had so far. Teams screen sharing even works perfectly! I chose it over Ubuntu 20 because I knew I wanted kde and it seems like a first class citizen in tumbleweed, while still being vaguely stable. Not-quite-bleeding edge! I ran freebsd/kde for fun back in the halycon days of lamp stack and gnome never felt...right to me when I would test drive Ubuntu desktop.
    - fetbaffe 6y ago
      Good to know. Personally I think that Ubuntu has gone downhill. I preferred unity over gnome. On a fresh install of Ubuntu, gnome is confusing with it's split with two taskbars that has some overlap in functionality.
karatestomp 6y ago
I remember being able to watch network traffic and if you (or some other actual person on you network) weren't doing anything nothing would be there. Yes even if you had a few webpages open but weren't clicking anything. Now your machine's "idle" and you capture on your network interface and it scrolls at hyperspeed.
- dvfjsdhgfv 6y ago
  This is upsetting for me, too. And for a few others. But actually very few people care because they just don't see it. The people who designed it this way take care that users at large have no idea what is going on.
  - saagarjha 6y ago
    It's really very sad, because users have no idea what is going on and there is no incentive for bad programs to improve (actually, there is generally incentive in the opposite direction, because it's work to write well-behaving apps). Users just know that they need to keep buying new computers and that their battery life is worse, but they can't figure out why so they point fingers at everyone but who they should actually be blaming.
    - karatestomp 6y ago
      Remember when shitty user-hostile spying wasn't a library you included that assured you in its readme it was "made with [heart] in California"? Ah, the days when only criminals and bigcos casually engaged in shady crap.
      - saagarjha 6y ago
        That's a somewhat unrelated discussion, but yes, I am not very happy with the current state of software where people think they are entitled to out-out analytics information coming off my machine.
      - dvfjsdhgfv 6y ago
npongratz 6y ago
> It seems utterly insane that in the early 90's I could just run Windows 3.1 on a bit of kit that in all likelihood wouldn't even power a toaster today, and the experience was, well, frictionless. I don't recall ever thinking "wtf is this thing doing?" ... I generally agree, but I sometimes ran Windows 3.0 on a 386SX-16 in the early 90s, and often wondered why it ran so slow on my admittedly underpowered but supported system. At some point I read (perhaps in Compute! or BYTE) that Windows made something like 20 or 30 syscalls to draw one line of a window's border. That seemed exceptionally inefficient to me, so I stopped using Windows. I generally worked in DOS, but if I wanted a GUI, Geoworks provided an experience at least ten times better (subjectively) -- smooth UI, ability to multitask, a surprisingly good word processor and other well-designed software included.
zeroimpl 6y ago
I recall windows 95/98 being pretty slow to boot. I also recall being warned by teachers not to move the mouse while things were booting as that would allegedly slow things down further. These days the only real time I wonder "wtf is this thing doing" is when I'm waiting about 5-10 seconds for my mac to wake up from sleep.
- shanemhansen 6y ago
  Surprisingly, wiggling the mouse actually speeds up some windows operations. https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/11533/why-did-moving-the-mouse-cursor-cause-windows-95-to-run-more-quickly https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/11533/why...
- TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
  Win 95 and its descendants had legendary poor boot times. Things finally improved with XP, but W3.1x and W95 were anything but fast - unless you were playing Solitaire.
  - WillPostForFood 6y ago
    Here is a Pentium 200Mhz starting Win95, only about 20 seconds from "Starting Windows 95" to the login screen. 40 seconds including the full powerup/BIOS sequence. Not too bad. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PwRR7-P-8fc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PwRR7-P-8fc
Domenic_S 6y ago
> Windows 10 box to go sleep I know I am in for an infuriating waste of minutes' worth of disk thrashing before the bloody thing even deigns to reacknowledge my existence. Yeah, what the heck is this? I use a win10 box solely for gaming, and every single time I wake from sleep, Antimalware Executable keeps my machine from doing anything for several minutes. It's infuriating.
- aclsid 6y ago
  Just get a proper antivirus and it will probably disable the built-in security suite for you
  - saagarjha 6y ago
    While making your computer even worse?
    - andai 6y ago
      For many years, I had a very nice experience with NOD32. By far the best antivirus I have used in terms of UI and resources. Well, admittedly not that high of a bar.. but they really seem to care about efficiency and and elegance. Considering the built in one is pretty slow (and gives useless notifications), I expect it would be an improvement.
- Spooky23 6y ago
  Silly user. The computer exists to update itself. Whatever trivial task you want to do is a secondary concern.
  - saagarjha 6y ago
    You joke, but there is a surprising amount of software that does not have its user as the primary thing it cares about.
rhizome 6y ago
And now that "the web is the internet" even more than ever, developers and designers are giving us spinners/loading indicators ALL THE TIME. At least in my tabs they are. The web is much, much, much slower than it used to be.

WrtCdEvrydy 6y ago

I call this 'Outsourcing the cost of development to the user'... Getting knowledgeable people costs money so we build more abstractions that lower the cost of development and pass the costs of development from the company to the user in the form of requiring more hardware to do the same thing. How come I need 16Gb of RAM these days when 8Gb did it yesterday? How come my phone needs 4Gb of RAM while my 2012 tablet had 1Gb? Sure the hardware is cheaper but we're still not using the hardware to it's fullest.

karatestomp 6y ago
My 256MB RAM, 900Mhz Duron machine (single core, naturally) in ~2002 (IIRC?) could do just about everything my modern one can. We even had video chat! It was just much lower res. The limiting factor in online stuff was, by far, connection speed, not the power of my hardware. That was about the point where the hardware was fast enough and had enough memory that I could multitask in a modern way without hitting problems like popping/stuttering audio or bad swap issues. Aside from legitimate increases in memory use for higher-res media, most everything since then, from my perspective, has been pure bloat. Why does 16x that memory and two cores at double the clock feel insufficient for extremely similar workloads and software feature-sets? Fucking bloat is why. Largely, but far from solely, web-tech infesting everything. Before that, my 64MB RAM 100mhz Pentium could usually have a couple things open before it'd hit swap too badly. I'm talking like Word and a web browser, not calc and notepad. None of the equivalent programs to those can even open all on their own in a footprint smaller than 64MB these days, let alone with other programs and the OS in the same space. Hell, how many operating systems fit in that with a GUI as capable and usable as, say, Win98se (let alone something really incredible on the performance front, like BeOS)?
- aclsid 6y ago
  I agree with the main sentiment, but I have made my peace with it. Mainly Java and Electron based apps because they do provide us with a nice thing that was impossible years before unless you wanted to become a digital hermit: Linux on the desktop. I can now use simplenote, discord, slack, the jetbrains dev suite, visual studio code, and this is without including separate developments like Steam, which has made it effortless to switch between Windows, Linux and Mac. That being said, I still consider Mac OS the superior OS (this call home issue from the article aside), mostly because the font rendering still works better after all these years, Windows and Mac still have better quality software available for them, and Mac still does not have the forced updates as Windows does. Also I have noticed that in Ubuntu, some electron apps like Simplenote, the copy and paste of text is funky at times, like not even letting me select stuff.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
coliveira 6y ago
The reason is very simple: developers don't want to develop anymore, they just want to offload real programming to third party libraries, where what used to take 100 lines of code to accomplish will take 10K or more (because, obviously, the library will do the most general version of what it wants to do). All this is considered "good development practices", which means that programs will inflate to take whatever memory is available and run slower for as long as we continue to use the same practices.
- astronautjones 6y ago
  and is absolutely encouraged by google and amazon, as delivering that bloat makes them money
valuearb 6y ago
What’s the point of cheaper disk and ram, and faster systems if not for supporting higher level abstractions?
- jcelerier 6y ago
  is this a serious question ?
- npongratz 6y ago
  To watch more, higher-def cat videos faster. No need to get lost in the weeds of higher level abstractions to do that.

andai 6y ago

Are you on a hard disk drive? I have bestowed upon myself the unique misfortune of running Windows 10 on a spinny disk.

bscphil 6y ago
This has quietly become a pretty serious issue. Most software developers have simply stopped caring about systems with traditional HDDs. This is even true on Linux - I found out a while back that all the KDE developers are using SSDs, which is why they weren't fixing issues where startup time is affected by disk latency. I eventually gave in and bought a 250 GB SSD for my old laptop, there was simply no other option.

blyry 6y ago

I switched to a linux desktop full time last week because of this exact problem. VPN w/ windows would flake out on me all the time, and I got sooo tired of just...waiting. Remember when windows search worked? Like, you could press the windows key, type what you were looking for and find it? Quickly? Being able to turn the computer on, type in my password and have it be just..ready is so incredibly refreshing. Having a terminal with 0 latency, where copy/paste is sane? Worth a zillion dollars to me right now. Currently playing with opensuse tumbleweed, i'll probably get frustrated by something and move to arch, so I can fix that something and also be frustrated by a hundred other things.

fetbaffe 6y ago
Rumors on the internets have spoken positively about Opensuse Leap & Tumbleweed, any truth to that?
- ChuckNorris89 6y ago
  Another vote from me for tumbleweed.
- blyry 6y ago
  I don't have a ton of experience with other options, but 2 weeks in and tumbleweed has been pretty plug and play! 0 issues getting my netcore/python/golang/docker dev stack up. I get a weird popping noise in my usb dac at the login screen but that's the only issue I've had so far. Teams screen sharing even works perfectly! I chose it over Ubuntu 20 because I knew I wanted kde and it seems like a first class citizen in tumbleweed, while still being vaguely stable. Not-quite-bleeding edge! I ran freebsd/kde for fun back in the halycon days of lamp stack and gnome never felt...right to me when I would test drive Ubuntu desktop.
  - fetbaffe 6y ago
    Good to know. Personally I think that Ubuntu has gone downhill. I preferred unity over gnome. On a fresh install of Ubuntu, gnome is confusing with it's split with two taskbars that has some overlap in functionality.

karatestomp 6y ago

I remember being able to watch network traffic and if you (or some other actual person on you network) weren't doing anything nothing would be there. Yes even if you had a few webpages open but weren't clicking anything. Now your machine's "idle" and you capture on your network interface and it scrolls at hyperspeed.

dvfjsdhgfv 6y ago
This is upsetting for me, too. And for a few others. But actually very few people care because they just don't see it. The people who designed it this way take care that users at large have no idea what is going on.
- saagarjha 6y ago
  It's really very sad, because users have no idea what is going on and there is no incentive for bad programs to improve (actually, there is generally incentive in the opposite direction, because it's work to write well-behaving apps). Users just know that they need to keep buying new computers and that their battery life is worse, but they can't figure out why so they point fingers at everyone but who they should actually be blaming.
  - karatestomp 6y ago
    Remember when shitty user-hostile spying wasn't a library you included that assured you in its readme it was "made with [heart] in California"? Ah, the days when only criminals and bigcos casually engaged in shady crap.
    - saagarjha 6y ago
      That's a somewhat unrelated discussion, but yes, I am not very happy with the current state of software where people think they are entitled to out-out analytics information coming off my machine.
    - dvfjsdhgfv 6y ago

npongratz 6y ago

> It seems utterly insane that in the early 90's I could just run Windows 3.1 on a bit of kit that in all likelihood wouldn't even power a toaster today, and the experience was, well, frictionless. I don't recall ever thinking "wtf is this thing doing?" ... I generally agree, but I sometimes ran Windows 3.0 on a 386SX-16 in the early 90s, and often wondered why it ran so slow on my admittedly underpowered but supported system. At some point I read (perhaps in Compute! or BYTE) that Windows made something like 20 or 30 syscalls to draw one line of a window's border. That seemed exceptionally inefficient to me, so I stopped using Windows. I generally worked in DOS, but if I wanted a GUI, Geoworks provided an experience at least ten times better (subjectively) -- smooth UI, ability to multitask, a surprisingly good word processor and other well-designed software included.

zeroimpl 6y ago

I recall windows 95/98 being pretty slow to boot. I also recall being warned by teachers not to move the mouse while things were booting as that would allegedly slow things down further. These days the only real time I wonder "wtf is this thing doing" is when I'm waiting about 5-10 seconds for my mac to wake up from sleep.

shanemhansen 6y ago
Surprisingly, wiggling the mouse actually speeds up some windows operations. https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/11533/why-did-moving-the-mouse-cursor-cause-windows-95-to-run-more-quickly https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/11533/why...
TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
Win 95 and its descendants had legendary poor boot times. Things finally improved with XP, but W3.1x and W95 were anything but fast - unless you were playing Solitaire.
- WillPostForFood 6y ago
  Here is a Pentium 200Mhz starting Win95, only about 20 seconds from "Starting Windows 95" to the login screen. 40 seconds including the full powerup/BIOS sequence. Not too bad. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PwRR7-P-8fc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PwRR7-P-8fc

Domenic_S 6y ago

> Windows 10 box to go sleep I know I am in for an infuriating waste of minutes' worth of disk thrashing before the bloody thing even deigns to reacknowledge my existence. Yeah, what the heck is this? I use a win10 box solely for gaming, and every single time I wake from sleep, Antimalware Executable keeps my machine from doing anything for several minutes. It's infuriating.

aclsid 6y ago
Just get a proper antivirus and it will probably disable the built-in security suite for you
- saagarjha 6y ago
  While making your computer even worse?
  - andai 6y ago
    For many years, I had a very nice experience with NOD32. By far the best antivirus I have used in terms of UI and resources. Well, admittedly not that high of a bar.. but they really seem to care about efficiency and and elegance. Considering the built in one is pretty slow (and gives useless notifications), I expect it would be an improvement.
Spooky23 6y ago
Silly user. The computer exists to update itself. Whatever trivial task you want to do is a secondary concern.
- saagarjha 6y ago
  You joke, but there is a surprising amount of software that does not have its user as the primary thing it cares about.

rhizome 6y ago

And now that "the web is the internet" even more than ever, developers and designers are giving us spinners/loading indicators ALL THE TIME. At least in my tabs they are. The web is much, much, much slower than it used to be.