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Am I the only person who has a laptop that boots as soon as I push the power button and also the only person who remembers when doing an OS update was an entire

by memco 5y ago

Am I the only person who has a laptop that boots as soon as I push the power button and also the only person who remembers when doing an OS update was an entire days work and involved babysitting the whole process to swap out disks and make sure nothing broke? My wife recently threw her hands up and said “Five minutes?” When I told her how long her over the air software update would take on her phone. There are plenty of things that could be better about new systems and I would love nothing more than to see more optimization of our software and hardware, but let’s not look too long through those rose colored glasses. The past was painful too. Maybe we’re stuck playing whack-a-mole, but maybe things will get better.

Delk 5y ago
I haven't had hardware with a spinning disk in active use in years, so my experience might be coloured by the improved performance from SSDs and may thus be irrelevant to whether things are too slow with a HDD, but that's how I also see it. Even if you don't go so far back as to require swapping disks, dist-upgrading a desktop Ubuntu or Debian system still took several hours ~10 years ago. Booting the system (again Linux, because that's what I had) took at least a minute, probably more. My laptop that's not bleeding edge by any standard is not booting instantly to the desktop, but it's definitely faster than that. It is in some sense eye-opening to think that pure desktop latency might not have improved over the years. It makes you wonder if things could be much faster still, and being limited to old enough hardware might also change one's perspective. But to me, having a reasonably snappy desktop experience on a laptop from ~7 years ago without having to resort to lightweight desktop environments or older software is something that would have been outlandish for most of the history of PCs.

by memco 5y ago

Delk 5y ago

I haven't had hardware with a spinning disk in active use in years, so my experience might be coloured by the improved performance from SSDs and may thus be irrelevant to whether things are too slow with a HDD, but that's how I also see it. Even if you don't go so far back as to require swapping disks, dist-upgrading a desktop Ubuntu or Debian system still took several hours ~10 years ago. Booting the system (again Linux, because that's what I had) took at least a minute, probably more. My laptop that's not bleeding edge by any standard is not booting instantly to the desktop, but it's definitely faster than that. It is in some sense eye-opening to think that pure desktop latency might not have improved over the years. It makes you wonder if things could be much faster still, and being limited to old enough hardware might also change one's perspective. But to me, having a reasonably snappy desktop experience on a laptop from ~7 years ago without having to resort to lightweight desktop environments or older software is something that would have been outlandish for most of the history of PCs.