9 ms·

I wish we move back to the days when most software was like utorrent, notepad++, etc. The standard response to this statement is "but today's software does so m

I wish we move back to the days when most software was like utorrent, notepad++, etc. The standard response to this statement is "but today's software does so much more" - to which I don't agree. As someone who has been using computers since 1994 - including machines which did not have a hard drive - modern software is very very frustrating to use in every way I can think of.

zuhsetaqi 5y ago
Can you give a few examples? I’m not using computers that long and don’t know in which way modern software is so frustrating.
- arsome 5y ago
  Everything is now a bloated Electron app where all the features have been deleted. Try comparing Spotify to Amarok/Foobar/Clementine. Even Firefox seems to just keep stripping out useful functionality for power users for some bizarre reason, no more full themes, limited extension APIs, poor UI customization and less advanced features like "view image", it's like they're trying to alienate their most dedicated fanbase in an attempt to steal some marketshare back from Chrome. Microsoft Teams runs so poorly on my work laptop that it's barely usable and lacks simple features like Push-to-Talk.
  - Jonnax 5y ago
    Spotify is a music streaming service. These other apps are for curating your own audio files. Also what does "bloated election app" mean? Because it seems like it's just a meme at this point. I'm using the desktop app right now. It's using 160mb of ram and it's very responsive. Teams is just a bad application. A lot of shitty "enterprise" software is written in Java. If I started saying Java = Bad software. I'm sure many people would disagree.
    - HideousKojima 5y ago
      Winamp 5.0 worked on a 400 mhz Pentium II with 64 MB of memory (total) and was crazy responsive, while also being capable of much more than the modern Spotify app
      - qq4 5y ago
        I remember using and liking Winamp, but I didn't use it for anything other than playing music files. How was/is Winamp more capable than the Spotify app?
        chongli 5y ago
        Winamp has tons of really powerful plugins. You can use them to play all kinds of strange file formats. One I really like is SNESAmp [1], a plug-in for playing Super Nintendo game music. Another Winamp plug-in that’s incredibly useful is the disk-writer, included with the application. With it you can use any of the input plugins to transcode files to uncompressed WAV format. [1] http://alpha-ii.com/Download/Main.html#SNESamp http://alpha-ii.com/Download/Main.html#SNESamp
        qq4 5y ago
        Thanks for the reply, those features are pretty cool.
        stevenicr 5y ago
        The various visualization plugins were cool. Streamripper. Others can't remember atm. Good times hunting through the plugins and themes.
      - ghosty141 5y ago
        You are generalizing too much. Spotify has to cover way more than just playback etc., it's a streaming service, the client is only a small part. As a whole Spotify includes way more functionality than winamp, they have completely different goals though. Winamp is a player, Spotify is a service. Nobody would use Spotify as a pure music client, you can't really compare them.
  - Nerwesta 5y ago
    Damn Amarok is so good, the Windows app pale in comparison to this. I had a blast while I first installed my Kubuntu machine.
    - yoz-y 5y ago
      Amarok 1.4 was so good that I switched to linux for it, even bought a t-shirt. Amarok 2 was what made me leave. I've toyed a bit with quodlibet and clementine, but for me 1.4 was the peak music player.
      - Nerwesta 5y ago
        To be honest I wasn't on Linux yet during 1.4 ( had a quick look to Wikipedia ) So I guess I tried it for the first time when it was already in 2.0 The logo is so nice tho, no wonder buying a t-shirt look justified ahah
      - nix23 5y ago
        >Amarok It was so good that it was the first project i gave some money, then they killed the database connection...i was pretty angry at them, never used it since then.
  - izacus 5y ago
    Heck, most UI elements aren't even resizable. A standard feature of "obsolete old" UIs is now nowhere to be found as I wrestle trying to fit all the text into sidebars.
  - oblio 5y ago
    > where all the features have been deleted We're never going to go back to the old days. Back then desktop computing was 100% of end user computing and everyone assumed all users end up as power users. Now desktop computing is ~30% of end user computing and shrinking and we realize that most people have absolutely no desire to become power users. It's not that they can't, they don't want to (think other interests, anti-intellectualism, etc). Also mobile computing by its nature (being on the move, having to pay attention to real life, constrained hardware interfaces) requires simplified UIs.
    - BeFlatXIII 5y ago
      Then what software is there for us who do wish to be power users? If it gets eliminated through atrophy, that is yet another example of market failure.
      - canadianfella 5y ago
        What type of program do you have in mind?
      - oblio 5y ago
        Old software, software developed by passionate devs, software developed by small companies. And, yes, the market is shrinking and you can see the rust spots. Pidgin used to be a top-notch multi-messenger, now it's a ghost town. Just one example. I don't know what the end state is, but I can't imagine it's pretty, especially since fewer and fewer people will use desktops/laptops, both as absolute numbers and as percentages.
    - datavirtue 5y ago
      The future is clearly cross platform where you meet the customer where they are...mobile, desktop, web. Maybe the application morphs a bit by including or excluding features for various platforms but there is no way to proclaim that there is one platform you can focus on to the exclusion of others in a general sense. If I'm writing serious business software the web and desktop are king and quickly becoming synonymous given technologies like xamarin forms, ionic, and electron. I'm building an app in ionic using html/css/JavaScript (angular) that is primarily for desktop (electron) but will deploy to mobile and web, allowing me to meet people where and how they want to work.
  - ho_schi 5y ago
    Electron is Flash for the Desktop. https://josephg.com/blog/electron-is-flash-for-the-desktop/ https://josephg.com/blog/electron-is-flash-for-the-desktop/ While I don't appreciate most of Apples business strategies, I have to admit that Steve Jobs was right about banning Flash. It was eating the battery runtime of MacBooks. And Steve Jobs would have banned[1] Electron probably already years ago, because it is consuming so much memory. But especially so many big tech companies use Electron? The UI is non native, the JavaScript doesn't offer best performance, the binaries are big and the memory consumption is high. First, because some companies we're in need for a replacement of Flash[2]. Second, web developers are cheap. Third, it reduces time to market. Especially the big tech companies are "monopoly mode" - gather quicker more users than others and dominate. Who pays? You, at least three times: * Bad usability, slow execution and awkward UI * Hardware requirements. You have to buy more RAM. In case of most laptops with soldered RAM you have to buy new laptops. * Either they take or data or your license fees I don't claim that platform native developers will code more efficient but developers who can code in C, C++, Rust or even Python can provide you with fast, small and slick applications where you don't have to wait until some JS loads the textblock for some placeholder while your scrolling - their applications aren't even faster necessarily. Likely these developers keep their data locally, update this data when appropriate (keyboard, file or network) and don't launch an entire web-browser. I recommend providing a base foundation and using a native toolkit of the platform, either Gtk or Qt[3]. This is not a new recommendation, the issue is that the industry prefers to ignores well known, recommend practices. Now. Microsoft Teams? + Available on Linux + Quick and easy installation via Flatpak o You can spend a lot of money for integrations - Quoting is not possible on desktop - Slow startup - Fullscreen hidden instead of using "l" or "F11" keys - Notifications Management is a maze of options [1] Not fully correct. Electron is forbidden on iOS because it is a full blown webbrowser. Maybe also for less well meant reasons. [2] History repeats. They refuse to learn? [3] Actually Google did that. Chrome used on Linux Gtk, on MacOS it used Quartz and on Windows some layer to Win32. It was a fast and lean and the UI was native.
    - LandR 5y ago
      Tried teams on Linux. Its terrible, my machine runs solidly, hardly ever restart it. I open teams, 80% of the time it will start up then the machine starts running slow, teams ui goes unresponsive and then whole machine locks up and i need to power off at the powee button. Only ever happens if I open teams.
  - signal11 5y ago
    > Everything is now a bloated Electron app where all the features have been deleted Good cross-platform UI is hard, and web technology is seen as an "easy" way out because you can hire plenty of resources and yes -- it does seem silly to reinvent the wheel when HTML/CSS have implemented something already. Electron is basically the Java Applets/AWT/Swing of our time, because it lets teams prioritize features and delivery speed over great, performant, UX. And to be fair, for simple use cases, it's works well. But when you're at the level of MS Teams, I absolutely agree -- that app could be far better tuned. It actually runs much better inside a browser or in the native iOS app, which is a giant middle finger to Microsoft's platform ambitions -- it's like they're not even incentivizing people to take advantage of Windows. Deleting or not including features is a separate "thing" though, I feel. Gnome had it with Nautilus, for instance -- it's definitely not solely an Electron thing. It's the "designer knows best" mentality that fails to strike a good balance between simplicity and customizability, and not taking the time to understand what users want. Interestingly, Zoom (ignoring their various other issues) is a company that seems to do this well. They have a reasonably good UX to start with, but they don't shy away from offering more options and features if you so want. And they try to offer a decent native experience on Windows and iOS [I haven't tried them on macOS], as well as web, although of course the pure web experience could be far better. I think there's a lesson there for Microsoft, which got a good chunk of their lunch eaten by Zoom twice over (Skype and Teams, at least in video-conferencing -- Teams is of course quite successful in team collaboration) and also for browser-based Google Meet: ignoring good UX in favour of a lowest-common-denominator interface just creates space for competitors.
    - asddubs 5y ago
      if you miss the old nautilus, just install caja, the MATE fork of it from before they mucked it up. That's the nice thing about open source.
- pulse7 5y ago
  Back in 90s there was a well defined menubar with all functions. Today you don't know where the functions are hidden - they may be everywhere on the screen, hidden behind visible or even unvisible graphical elements... This may be frustrating...
  - conradfr 5y ago
    You're downvoted but kinda right. Case in point, I often use the F10 shortcut to use the old school menu on Firefox because I find it quicker and simpler than the other menu.
  - galangalalgol 5y ago
    Luckily they left all the keyboard combos the same. Even the ones that were navigating the menu bar. I never noticed the change, other than the slowdown...
  - radmuzom 5y ago
    Agreed. Joel Spolsky covered it in the article - https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2007/12/03/talk-at-yale-part-1-of-3/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2007/12/03/talk-at-yale-part-... Quote from the article - "The old testers at Microsoft checked lots of things: they checked if fonts were consistent and legible, they checked that the location of controls on dialog boxes was reasonable and neatly aligned, they checked whether the screen flickered when you did things, they looked at how the UI flowed, they considered how easy the software was to use, how consistent the wording was, they worried about performance, they checked the spelling and grammar of all the error messages, and they spent a lot of time making sure that the user interface was consistent from one part of the product to another, because a consistent user interface is easier to use than an inconsistent one.".
    - AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
      > a consistent user interface is easier to use than an inconsistent one I want this laser engraved on a big stick that is then used to beat every UX designer on the planet before they are allowed to touch anything.
    - 5y ago
- radmuzom 5y ago
  I can give you one to illustrate the point I am trying to make. When I first started working in 2005, we used to use Excel 2003. My first company gave me a modest desktop with 512MB RAM and old processor. Right clicking on a cell to format it, change font, etc. used to take few milliseconds at most and the window used to appear immediately after the click. Today I have a 16GB machine at work - doing the same operation takes 2-3 seconds to open the window on right click. Given that the reason I would right click has not changed at all over 16 years, I don't see why I should see a 100x degradation in performance using a machine which has 32 times more RAM (and I guess many more cores and processing speed).
  - chrisan 5y ago
    I'm sorry, but something is either up with your computer or the excel sheet you are currently using would be infinitely slower on that old 2005 machine. I've been using computers since Apple IIe and am much happier with things today than versions of the past. There are certainly hiccups along the way, but no way am I going to trade what I have today for what I used in 80s/90s.
    - galangalalgol 5y ago
      I've done side by side with excel98 and excel200x whenever they added the ribbon. The same spreadsheet was extensively slower both in the original format and after importing it to the new one. I wouldn't trade out either, because there is still good responsive software out there, but more resources let people get sloppy.
    - nebulous1 5y ago
      I still haven't got over the ribbon. That said I don't use MS office so I haven't spent time trying to get used to it, just when I'm helping somebody out
      - meibo 5y ago
        The ribbon was radical, but they've refined it into something that's genuinely nice to use. You can customize every section and it's very easy to pick up, I'm sure if you'd have to spend some time with office nowadays you'd agree. I'd take them over old-style nondescript toolbars by now.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
  https://twitter.com/tumult/status/1400957303407316993 https://twitter.com/tumult/status/1400957303407316993 We were able to have latency free interaction with basic controls in the 80s.
- AdrianB1 5y ago
  I am probably older than the OP, but computers that are 100 times faster today are having sometimes more lag than 30 years ago. I am thinking about Teams and Visual Studio Code that I use a lot, Teams is the first IM client where I start typing and multiple letters are lost until Teams starts to catch my input, while opening a small SQL script file in VS Code looks like a slideshow displaying the text first, then adding color coding and at the end highlighting errors - all in several seconds on modern Ryzen 5600X CPU with lots of RAM. A native app can probably do all this in a small fraction of the time.
globular-toast 5y ago
Most software is still like that on Linux/BSD. The glaring exception is web browsers, I suppose. But other than that, all the software I have installed does only one thing and doesn't try to own multiple aspects of my life.
contravariant 5y ago
When utorrent came out it was considered a major improvement over its bloated competitors. Bloated software has existed as far back as it reasonably could exist. Consider for example Niklaus Wirth's "A Plea for Lean Software" [1] written in 1995 (for a recent discussion on HN see [2]). [1]: https://people.inf.ethz.ch/wirth/Articles/LeanSoftware.pdf https://people.inf.ethz.ch/wirth/Articles/LeanSoftware.pdf [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24059704 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24059704
asddubs 5y ago
the trick is just to use fully open source software whenever possible. btw if anyone's looking for what uTorrent used to be, check out qbittorrent.

zuhsetaqi 5y ago

Can you give a few examples? I’m not using computers that long and don’t know in which way modern software is so frustrating.

arsome 5y ago
Everything is now a bloated Electron app where all the features have been deleted. Try comparing Spotify to Amarok/Foobar/Clementine. Even Firefox seems to just keep stripping out useful functionality for power users for some bizarre reason, no more full themes, limited extension APIs, poor UI customization and less advanced features like "view image", it's like they're trying to alienate their most dedicated fanbase in an attempt to steal some marketshare back from Chrome. Microsoft Teams runs so poorly on my work laptop that it's barely usable and lacks simple features like Push-to-Talk.
- Jonnax 5y ago
  Spotify is a music streaming service. These other apps are for curating your own audio files. Also what does "bloated election app" mean? Because it seems like it's just a meme at this point. I'm using the desktop app right now. It's using 160mb of ram and it's very responsive. Teams is just a bad application. A lot of shitty "enterprise" software is written in Java. If I started saying Java = Bad software. I'm sure many people would disagree.
  - HideousKojima 5y ago
    Winamp 5.0 worked on a 400 mhz Pentium II with 64 MB of memory (total) and was crazy responsive, while also being capable of much more than the modern Spotify app
    - qq4 5y ago
      I remember using and liking Winamp, but I didn't use it for anything other than playing music files. How was/is Winamp more capable than the Spotify app?
      - chongli 5y ago
        Winamp has tons of really powerful plugins. You can use them to play all kinds of strange file formats. One I really like is SNESAmp [1], a plug-in for playing Super Nintendo game music. Another Winamp plug-in that’s incredibly useful is the disk-writer, included with the application. With it you can use any of the input plugins to transcode files to uncompressed WAV format. [1] http://alpha-ii.com/Download/Main.html#SNESamp http://alpha-ii.com/Download/Main.html#SNESamp
        qq4 5y ago
        Thanks for the reply, those features are pretty cool.
      - stevenicr 5y ago
        The various visualization plugins were cool. Streamripper. Others can't remember atm. Good times hunting through the plugins and themes.
    - ghosty141 5y ago
      You are generalizing too much. Spotify has to cover way more than just playback etc., it's a streaming service, the client is only a small part. As a whole Spotify includes way more functionality than winamp, they have completely different goals though. Winamp is a player, Spotify is a service. Nobody would use Spotify as a pure music client, you can't really compare them.
- Nerwesta 5y ago
  Damn Amarok is so good, the Windows app pale in comparison to this. I had a blast while I first installed my Kubuntu machine.
  - yoz-y 5y ago
    Amarok 1.4 was so good that I switched to linux for it, even bought a t-shirt. Amarok 2 was what made me leave. I've toyed a bit with quodlibet and clementine, but for me 1.4 was the peak music player.
    - Nerwesta 5y ago
      To be honest I wasn't on Linux yet during 1.4 ( had a quick look to Wikipedia ) So I guess I tried it for the first time when it was already in 2.0 The logo is so nice tho, no wonder buying a t-shirt look justified ahah
    - nix23 5y ago
      >Amarok It was so good that it was the first project i gave some money, then they killed the database connection...i was pretty angry at them, never used it since then.
- izacus 5y ago
  Heck, most UI elements aren't even resizable. A standard feature of "obsolete old" UIs is now nowhere to be found as I wrestle trying to fit all the text into sidebars.
- oblio 5y ago
  > where all the features have been deleted We're never going to go back to the old days. Back then desktop computing was 100% of end user computing and everyone assumed all users end up as power users. Now desktop computing is ~30% of end user computing and shrinking and we realize that most people have absolutely no desire to become power users. It's not that they can't, they don't want to (think other interests, anti-intellectualism, etc). Also mobile computing by its nature (being on the move, having to pay attention to real life, constrained hardware interfaces) requires simplified UIs.
  - BeFlatXIII 5y ago
    Then what software is there for us who do wish to be power users? If it gets eliminated through atrophy, that is yet another example of market failure.
    - canadianfella 5y ago
      What type of program do you have in mind?
    - oblio 5y ago
      Old software, software developed by passionate devs, software developed by small companies. And, yes, the market is shrinking and you can see the rust spots. Pidgin used to be a top-notch multi-messenger, now it's a ghost town. Just one example. I don't know what the end state is, but I can't imagine it's pretty, especially since fewer and fewer people will use desktops/laptops, both as absolute numbers and as percentages.
  - datavirtue 5y ago
    The future is clearly cross platform where you meet the customer where they are...mobile, desktop, web. Maybe the application morphs a bit by including or excluding features for various platforms but there is no way to proclaim that there is one platform you can focus on to the exclusion of others in a general sense. If I'm writing serious business software the web and desktop are king and quickly becoming synonymous given technologies like xamarin forms, ionic, and electron. I'm building an app in ionic using html/css/JavaScript (angular) that is primarily for desktop (electron) but will deploy to mobile and web, allowing me to meet people where and how they want to work.
- ho_schi 5y ago
  Electron is Flash for the Desktop. https://josephg.com/blog/electron-is-flash-for-the-desktop/ https://josephg.com/blog/electron-is-flash-for-the-desktop/ While I don't appreciate most of Apples business strategies, I have to admit that Steve Jobs was right about banning Flash. It was eating the battery runtime of MacBooks. And Steve Jobs would have banned[1] Electron probably already years ago, because it is consuming so much memory. But especially so many big tech companies use Electron? The UI is non native, the JavaScript doesn't offer best performance, the binaries are big and the memory consumption is high. First, because some companies we're in need for a replacement of Flash[2]. Second, web developers are cheap. Third, it reduces time to market. Especially the big tech companies are "monopoly mode" - gather quicker more users than others and dominate. Who pays? You, at least three times: * Bad usability, slow execution and awkward UI * Hardware requirements. You have to buy more RAM. In case of most laptops with soldered RAM you have to buy new laptops. * Either they take or data or your license fees I don't claim that platform native developers will code more efficient but developers who can code in C, C++, Rust or even Python can provide you with fast, small and slick applications where you don't have to wait until some JS loads the textblock for some placeholder while your scrolling - their applications aren't even faster necessarily. Likely these developers keep their data locally, update this data when appropriate (keyboard, file or network) and don't launch an entire web-browser. I recommend providing a base foundation and using a native toolkit of the platform, either Gtk or Qt[3]. This is not a new recommendation, the issue is that the industry prefers to ignores well known, recommend practices. Now. Microsoft Teams? + Available on Linux + Quick and easy installation via Flatpak o You can spend a lot of money for integrations - Quoting is not possible on desktop - Slow startup - Fullscreen hidden instead of using "l" or "F11" keys - Notifications Management is a maze of options [1] Not fully correct. Electron is forbidden on iOS because it is a full blown webbrowser. Maybe also for less well meant reasons. [2] History repeats. They refuse to learn? [3] Actually Google did that. Chrome used on Linux Gtk, on MacOS it used Quartz and on Windows some layer to Win32. It was a fast and lean and the UI was native.
  - LandR 5y ago
    Tried teams on Linux. Its terrible, my machine runs solidly, hardly ever restart it. I open teams, 80% of the time it will start up then the machine starts running slow, teams ui goes unresponsive and then whole machine locks up and i need to power off at the powee button. Only ever happens if I open teams.
- signal11 5y ago
  > Everything is now a bloated Electron app where all the features have been deleted Good cross-platform UI is hard, and web technology is seen as an "easy" way out because you can hire plenty of resources and yes -- it does seem silly to reinvent the wheel when HTML/CSS have implemented something already. Electron is basically the Java Applets/AWT/Swing of our time, because it lets teams prioritize features and delivery speed over great, performant, UX. And to be fair, for simple use cases, it's works well. But when you're at the level of MS Teams, I absolutely agree -- that app could be far better tuned. It actually runs much better inside a browser or in the native iOS app, which is a giant middle finger to Microsoft's platform ambitions -- it's like they're not even incentivizing people to take advantage of Windows. Deleting or not including features is a separate "thing" though, I feel. Gnome had it with Nautilus, for instance -- it's definitely not solely an Electron thing. It's the "designer knows best" mentality that fails to strike a good balance between simplicity and customizability, and not taking the time to understand what users want. Interestingly, Zoom (ignoring their various other issues) is a company that seems to do this well. They have a reasonably good UX to start with, but they don't shy away from offering more options and features if you so want. And they try to offer a decent native experience on Windows and iOS [I haven't tried them on macOS], as well as web, although of course the pure web experience could be far better. I think there's a lesson there for Microsoft, which got a good chunk of their lunch eaten by Zoom twice over (Skype and Teams, at least in video-conferencing -- Teams is of course quite successful in team collaboration) and also for browser-based Google Meet: ignoring good UX in favour of a lowest-common-denominator interface just creates space for competitors.
  - asddubs 5y ago
    if you miss the old nautilus, just install caja, the MATE fork of it from before they mucked it up. That's the nice thing about open source.
pulse7 5y ago
Back in 90s there was a well defined menubar with all functions. Today you don't know where the functions are hidden - they may be everywhere on the screen, hidden behind visible or even unvisible graphical elements... This may be frustrating...
- conradfr 5y ago
  You're downvoted but kinda right. Case in point, I often use the F10 shortcut to use the old school menu on Firefox because I find it quicker and simpler than the other menu.
- galangalalgol 5y ago
  Luckily they left all the keyboard combos the same. Even the ones that were navigating the menu bar. I never noticed the change, other than the slowdown...
- radmuzom 5y ago
  Agreed. Joel Spolsky covered it in the article - https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2007/12/03/talk-at-yale-part-1-of-3/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2007/12/03/talk-at-yale-part-... Quote from the article - "The old testers at Microsoft checked lots of things: they checked if fonts were consistent and legible, they checked that the location of controls on dialog boxes was reasonable and neatly aligned, they checked whether the screen flickered when you did things, they looked at how the UI flowed, they considered how easy the software was to use, how consistent the wording was, they worried about performance, they checked the spelling and grammar of all the error messages, and they spent a lot of time making sure that the user interface was consistent from one part of the product to another, because a consistent user interface is easier to use than an inconsistent one.".
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
    > a consistent user interface is easier to use than an inconsistent one I want this laser engraved on a big stick that is then used to beat every UX designer on the planet before they are allowed to touch anything.
  - 5y ago
radmuzom 5y ago
I can give you one to illustrate the point I am trying to make. When I first started working in 2005, we used to use Excel 2003. My first company gave me a modest desktop with 512MB RAM and old processor. Right clicking on a cell to format it, change font, etc. used to take few milliseconds at most and the window used to appear immediately after the click. Today I have a 16GB machine at work - doing the same operation takes 2-3 seconds to open the window on right click. Given that the reason I would right click has not changed at all over 16 years, I don't see why I should see a 100x degradation in performance using a machine which has 32 times more RAM (and I guess many more cores and processing speed).
- chrisan 5y ago
  I'm sorry, but something is either up with your computer or the excel sheet you are currently using would be infinitely slower on that old 2005 machine. I've been using computers since Apple IIe and am much happier with things today than versions of the past. There are certainly hiccups along the way, but no way am I going to trade what I have today for what I used in 80s/90s.
  - galangalalgol 5y ago
    I've done side by side with excel98 and excel200x whenever they added the ribbon. The same spreadsheet was extensively slower both in the original format and after importing it to the new one. I wouldn't trade out either, because there is still good responsive software out there, but more resources let people get sloppy.
  - nebulous1 5y ago
    I still haven't got over the ribbon. That said I don't use MS office so I haven't spent time trying to get used to it, just when I'm helping somebody out
    - meibo 5y ago
      The ribbon was radical, but they've refined it into something that's genuinely nice to use. You can customize every section and it's very easy to pick up, I'm sure if you'd have to spend some time with office nowadays you'd agree. I'd take them over old-style nondescript toolbars by now.
AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
https://twitter.com/tumult/status/1400957303407316993 https://twitter.com/tumult/status/1400957303407316993 We were able to have latency free interaction with basic controls in the 80s.
AdrianB1 5y ago
I am probably older than the OP, but computers that are 100 times faster today are having sometimes more lag than 30 years ago. I am thinking about Teams and Visual Studio Code that I use a lot, Teams is the first IM client where I start typing and multiple letters are lost until Teams starts to catch my input, while opening a small SQL script file in VS Code looks like a slideshow displaying the text first, then adding color coding and at the end highlighting errors - all in several seconds on modern Ryzen 5600X CPU with lots of RAM. A native app can probably do all this in a small fraction of the time.

globular-toast 5y ago

Most software is still like that on Linux/BSD. The glaring exception is web browsers, I suppose. But other than that, all the software I have installed does only one thing and doesn't try to own multiple aspects of my life.

contravariant 5y ago

When utorrent came out it was considered a major improvement over its bloated competitors. Bloated software has existed as far back as it reasonably could exist. Consider for example Niklaus Wirth's "A Plea for Lean Software" [1] written in 1995 (for a recent discussion on HN see [2]). [1]: https://people.inf.ethz.ch/wirth/Articles/LeanSoftware.pdf https://people.inf.ethz.ch/wirth/Articles/LeanSoftware.pdf [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24059704 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24059704

asddubs 5y ago

the trick is just to use fully open source software whenever possible. btw if anyone's looking for what uTorrent used to be, check out qbittorrent.