If there is one thing that irritates me about modern day computing then it is that it is in many ways slower (in spite of having 100 times the clock speed of a

If there is one thing that irritates me about modern day computing then it is that it is in many ways slower (in spite of having 100 times the clock speed of a machine from the early 90's) than the box I had on my desk back then This irritates me as well, but blaming it on the kernel strikes me as absurd. Blame it on all the layers of abstraction and general lack of caring in applications instead. It's true that there are cases where the Linux scheduler gets in the way of a good desktop experience, but desktop latency is too high even when the scheduler isn't a bottleneck. And if anything, good scheduling gets harder in a microkernel, not easier, because you have less insight into what is going on at a system level. (Ultimately, the distinction simply shouldn't matter though -- not for desktop experiences, that is.)