Is it slow? I mean, Linux itself. Yes, the kernel is bigger these days. But once it's up and running it should be handling system calls as fast as about 20 y

Is it slow? I mean, Linux itself. Yes, the kernel is bigger these days. But once it's up and running it should be handling system calls as fast as about 20 years ago. Often faster. So, I'm not sure core things are slower. But libraries have gotten bigger. Much bigger. Open up a web browser and you load several hundred megabytes of libraries. You got Unicode, and data for your vector fonts, and code for special tweaks on rendering everything from Taiwanese vs. Mainland Chinese character forms to obsolete Russian diacritics, libraries for parsing image, audio and video codecs, libraries for 3D rendering, and Javascript and WASM dynamic translation, and parsers for 30 years of crufty non-standard web standards. Oh, and of course everything over the network is encrypted now. So it's a mix of asking more from the machine - 4K displays involve a lot of pixel-pushing. And associated code size to do those things. Which makes it slower to load, and everything becomes very miserable when you run out of RAM. Now if you configure a kernel with not much more than the features you would have had in the '90s, use lightweight libraries, stick to the command line, and give it enough RAM? Modern UNIXes actually are still quite snappy on even the most pitiful hardware. I have an old Mac with a 68030 running at 16 MHz. I put NetBSD on it a few years ago, just as a lark. For poking around the file system and using vi, it might as well have been my modern desktop for user response times. (It even runs X11 tolerably... as long as you stick to twm and xterm.) Of course much of it really is just bloat. Editors should probably not be implemented in Electron.