8 ms·

It feels so fast. Even in the browser. Modern OSes just feels so sluggish by comparison.

andai 5y ago
When I want to get work done quickly, I boot up Windows XP in a VM. It's just so damn snappy it's unbelievable. What Moore giveth, Gates taketh away...
- ilrwbwrkhv 5y ago
  I swear. What happened here? Like why do things feel sluggish than software over 20 years ago? I just can't wrap my mind around it. We have SSDs and infinite CPU and RAM now compared to those days, yet there is always this feeling the computer is doing something more than I asked for behind the scenes. Even on websites, you can feel when you click on a link, it is doing something more. It's a very uncomfortable feeling.
  - buildbot 5y ago
    It really is bad. Somehow I brought an 8 core desktop to its knees because a combination of heavy disk+network IO and using pycharm caused windows to just stop servicing pycharm at all, until I stopped the download. I had free memory, disk, and cpu time, I think interrupt processing was stalled or filled? But the hardware was idle.
  - naikrovek 5y ago
    > What happened here? three things, I think: 1) people saying (and believing) that CPU, RAM, and disk are fast enough and cheap enough to be effectively infinite, and no longer worthy of concern. put another way: developers feeling that their target platforms are no longer constrained. 2) many software developers simply stopped caring about performance and began implementing all kinds of things extremely naively. new developers do this continually for many years early in their careers. 3) JavaScript. the places this language is used today, where it should never, ever be used. excruciatingly slow language. and JavaScript is EVERYWHERE, even on extremely constrained platforms, doing work, when almost any other language would have been a better choice.
    - qudat 5y ago
      > 3) JavaScript. the places this language is used today, where it should never, ever be used. excruciatingly slow language. [citation needed] Slow, fast are relative terms. What are you comparing it against?
    - methyl 5y ago
      Javascript is one of the fastest dynamically typed languages. People use it instead of other languages because the productivity of dynamically typed languages is generally higher. I’d be interested in hearing what are those other languages that would be faster to run and not slower to program in.
      - eloisius 5y ago
        "Not slower to program in" is a cost savings to the business, but let's be honest about that being what it is. It's a cost savings for the business that results in a crummier product for customers. Just like trimming a single tomato from the salad on in-flight meals is a cost savings to Delta. Doesn't mean it's a "better" salad.
        methyl 5y ago
        It's a question of having it or not at all. Poor salad is better than no salad.
        eloisius 5y ago
        As far as I can tell, it's a question of having or not having whizbang bloated apps like Slack, but we had perfectly acceptable word processors, spreadsheets, 3D modeling tools, etc a long time ago. The current gen, JS-powered versions of those tools (Google Drive, Quip, Notion) all feel slower. Sure, there are fewer BSODs now so it probably evens out, but the extremely low latency UX of those tools back in the Windows 2000/XP days is lost.
        whywhywhywhy 5y ago
  - jedberg 5y ago
    You just don't remember 20 years ago. The modern OSs at the time were sluggish too, as they were pushing the limits of their hardware. Your computer today would be pretty quick if it only did what your computer of 20 years ago did and in only 1024x768. OSs today do a lot more than 20 years ago at about the same speed as 20 years ago. Now, we can debate if all the extras are necessary, but that seems like a different debate than speed.
    - eloisius 5y ago
      I think that’s what GP was saying. It feels like everything is doing way more behind the scenes, and it feels sluggish. I almost can’t type anything long in Slack because the key input latency is so awful. What is it doing? Firing off a cascade of JS event hooks that pre-query reaction gifs, fetching away status for every user I might have mentioned, or what? Slack is obviously a pathological example, but it illustrates what’s feeling more and more common in modern GUI applications.
      - markdog12 5y ago
        https://twitter.com/programmer_just/status/1253098759266893827 https://twitter.com/programmer_just/status/12530987592668938...
      - whywhywhywhy 5y ago
        >What is it doing? Firing off a cascade of JS event hooks that pre-query reaction gifs, fetching away status for every user I might have mentioned, or what? Probably not sluggish for any of that, just that some incompetent dev didn’t want to deal with the built in input control or the inconsistency between OSes so they rolled their own and coded it badly. Number of times I’ve had to deal with devs doing things like deciding we must create a custom color picker only for them to code it and it glitches if you drag your mouse off the edge of the color wheel. Or coding their own text controls that break OS spellcheck or autocomplete and have input delay for some reason. Just isn’t that much talent about up to the task of building inputs yet all the low talents rush to roll their own for the smallest reasons.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - tentacleuno 5y ago
    > Even on websites, you can feel when you click on a link, it is doing something more. It's a very uncomfortable feeling. I know what you mean! Some websites make link clicks take a little longer. I'm not sure if it's due to tracking...
  - flomo 5y ago
    > Even on websites, you can feel when you click on a link, it is doing something more It is, analytics hooks which require network round trips. Otherwise disagree and this is false memories and/or very superficial observation of "snappiness".
  - edwcross 5y ago
    We transitioned from a "high-trust society" (where software, Internet, etc, did not need to take into account so many security considerations, protect itself from enemies everywhere) into a "low-trust society" (encryption everywhere, hardware mitigations for Spectre-kind attacks, Javascript-based tracking, etc). The overhead is similar to the one people face in third-world countries: you pay once for the government (taxes), then again for basic services (private education, private security, private health, private transportation), and you still end up in a worse situation than in a (high-trust) first-world country. I tried using a Core 2 Duo laptop recently, but the simple fact that HTTPS is mandatory nowadays, and Core 2 doesn't have AES-NI, makes the laptop spin its fan much more than it should, even if I try to use an old Linux/Windows.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - skocznymroczny 5y ago
    Most apps connect to the internet for 'updates' 'content synchronization'. Every time you open a new tab in your app there's some spinning wheel you have to wait for.
- slig 5y ago
  What kind of work can you do on a WinXP VM? I can imagine working on Word or Excel on that OS.
rado 5y ago
Teams on an insanely fast M1 Max is slower than this.
- ilrwbwrkhv 5y ago
  I know!!! I am on an M1 pro myself and a lot of modern apps feel more sluggish than this.
- lynguist 5y ago
  You can use Teams as a Microsoft Edge web app. It runs natively and is very fast.
  - rado 5y ago
    Kind of. I have audio/video permissions issues in the browser. Trying to use the app as much as possible on iPad Pro, it's fine there.
nyanpasu64 5y ago
It's striking how quickly all the apps load and respond to user input. Nonetheless this in-browser version suffers from layers of abstraction; the mouse cursor feels noticeably sluggish (high latency), and audio is delayed by over half a second, desynchronizing entirely from video.
blihp 5y ago
I had (still have, actually) a Quadra 840AV which was the fastest 68k Mac they ever made and it never felt this fast. If they emulated the actual performance of a 68k (and associated hardware) you wouldn't long for the performance it offered. But sure, running a much simpler (and more efficient out of necessity) OS on modern hardware, even emulated, screams on today's hardware. On the other hand, it didn't pack anywhere near the amount of functionality so the majority of the ROM and OS will fit in the L3 cache of today's processors so of course it's fast.
- anthk 5y ago
  The faster 68k ever was an Amiga with ShapeShifter ;).
thanatos519 5y ago
It's all about latency. Both of the following made my computers feel super snappy again! Liquorix kernel: https://liquorix.net/ https://liquorix.net/ ... Just a well-tuned kernel build, really. Kitty terminal: https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/ https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/ ... It took a while to make Kitty play nice with GNU Screen because the author has a hate-on for terminal multiplexers, but it was totally worth it.
- 3np 5y ago
  > It took a while to make Kitty play nice with GNU Screen because the author has a hate-on for terminal multiplexers, but it was totally worth it. Do you have a link or some pointers to share?
  - jasonjayr 5y ago
    I'm curious about that too, kitty + tmux has been a solid replacement for my long use of urxvt + it's tabs plugin, and it was no trouble at all to get setup
- smackeyacky 5y ago
  My daily driver ancient HP deskside server I use as a workstation is bonkers snappy running liquorix under debian.
  - watersb 5y ago
    Curious! What model and configuration are you using?
    - smackeyacky 5y ago
      Its an ML330 G6, dual x5650 6 core Xeons and 96gb of memory. Old ATI radeon 6570 graphics card. Very cheap to put together, great for android studio and .NET development.
- anthk 5y ago
  Try Xanmod instead of Liquorix. Also, if your hardware it's fully supported under Linux-Libre, apply the Xanmod patches for that kernel. You'll get crazy speeds.
pram 5y ago
Seems like something isn't right, Warcraft 2 is running extremely slow (M1 Max + Safari)
FpUser 5y ago
Well, first of all it "is running inside modern OS " and being snappy while the OS does all kinds of other things. What is often slow are desktop applications build with total disregard for performance. Everything must be done using web stack common attitude does not help much either.
bitwize 5y ago
Try an Amiga with plenty of disk space and RAM. It took the PC world 10 or more years to catch up with the Amiga in responsiveness. Part of the reason was the Amiga OS was designed for user interaction, and the keyboard, mouse, and display got plum choice of IRQs. The next time I would see something as snappy as the Amiga was an M1 Mac.
- whywhywhywhy 5y ago
  PC never really felt as solid as an Amiga. It just feels like a single coherent system and PC feels like hacks upon hacks upon hacks and the seams show when it moves.
  - the_only_law 5y ago
    > PC feels like hacks upon hacks upon hacks and the seams show when it moves. And to this day, it just keeps getting worse.
    - whywhywhywhy 5y ago
      Blown away that if windows ever fails to boot I have to unplug from my gpu then plug into my motherboard and reboot to see what’s up with it.
alimov 5y ago
I agree with you, and I think that part of the issue are the animations that run when doing practically anything on a newer OS, like maximizing or minimizing a window. Edit: in some cases animations can be disabled, which does a bit to bring back the snappy feel, but there are probably additional reasons why the modern stuff might not be/feel as snappy.

When I want to get work done quickly, I boot up Windows XP in a VM. It's just so damn snappy it's unbelievable. What Moore giveth, Gates taketh away...

ilrwbwrkhv 5y ago
I swear. What happened here? Like why do things feel sluggish than software over 20 years ago? I just can't wrap my mind around it. We have SSDs and infinite CPU and RAM now compared to those days, yet there is always this feeling the computer is doing something more than I asked for behind the scenes. Even on websites, you can feel when you click on a link, it is doing something more. It's a very uncomfortable feeling.
- buildbot 5y ago
  It really is bad. Somehow I brought an 8 core desktop to its knees because a combination of heavy disk+network IO and using pycharm caused windows to just stop servicing pycharm at all, until I stopped the download. I had free memory, disk, and cpu time, I think interrupt processing was stalled or filled? But the hardware was idle.
- naikrovek 5y ago
  > What happened here? three things, I think: 1) people saying (and believing) that CPU, RAM, and disk are fast enough and cheap enough to be effectively infinite, and no longer worthy of concern. put another way: developers feeling that their target platforms are no longer constrained. 2) many software developers simply stopped caring about performance and began implementing all kinds of things extremely naively. new developers do this continually for many years early in their careers. 3) JavaScript. the places this language is used today, where it should never, ever be used. excruciatingly slow language. and JavaScript is EVERYWHERE, even on extremely constrained platforms, doing work, when almost any other language would have been a better choice.
  - qudat 5y ago
    > 3) JavaScript. the places this language is used today, where it should never, ever be used. excruciatingly slow language. [citation needed] Slow, fast are relative terms. What are you comparing it against?
  - methyl 5y ago
    Javascript is one of the fastest dynamically typed languages. People use it instead of other languages because the productivity of dynamically typed languages is generally higher. I’d be interested in hearing what are those other languages that would be faster to run and not slower to program in.
    - eloisius 5y ago
      "Not slower to program in" is a cost savings to the business, but let's be honest about that being what it is. It's a cost savings for the business that results in a crummier product for customers. Just like trimming a single tomato from the salad on in-flight meals is a cost savings to Delta. Doesn't mean it's a "better" salad.
      - methyl 5y ago
        It's a question of having it or not at all. Poor salad is better than no salad.
        eloisius 5y ago
        As far as I can tell, it's a question of having or not having whizbang bloated apps like Slack, but we had perfectly acceptable word processors, spreadsheets, 3D modeling tools, etc a long time ago. The current gen, JS-powered versions of those tools (Google Drive, Quip, Notion) all feel slower. Sure, there are fewer BSODs now so it probably evens out, but the extremely low latency UX of those tools back in the Windows 2000/XP days is lost.
        whywhywhywhy 5y ago
- jedberg 5y ago
  You just don't remember 20 years ago. The modern OSs at the time were sluggish too, as they were pushing the limits of their hardware. Your computer today would be pretty quick if it only did what your computer of 20 years ago did and in only 1024x768. OSs today do a lot more than 20 years ago at about the same speed as 20 years ago. Now, we can debate if all the extras are necessary, but that seems like a different debate than speed.
  - eloisius 5y ago
    I think that’s what GP was saying. It feels like everything is doing way more behind the scenes, and it feels sluggish. I almost can’t type anything long in Slack because the key input latency is so awful. What is it doing? Firing off a cascade of JS event hooks that pre-query reaction gifs, fetching away status for every user I might have mentioned, or what? Slack is obviously a pathological example, but it illustrates what’s feeling more and more common in modern GUI applications.
    - markdog12 5y ago
      https://twitter.com/programmer_just/status/1253098759266893827 https://twitter.com/programmer_just/status/12530987592668938...
    - whywhywhywhy 5y ago
      >What is it doing? Firing off a cascade of JS event hooks that pre-query reaction gifs, fetching away status for every user I might have mentioned, or what? Probably not sluggish for any of that, just that some incompetent dev didn’t want to deal with the built in input control or the inconsistency between OSes so they rolled their own and coded it badly. Number of times I’ve had to deal with devs doing things like deciding we must create a custom color picker only for them to code it and it glitches if you drag your mouse off the edge of the color wheel. Or coding their own text controls that break OS spellcheck or autocomplete and have input delay for some reason. Just isn’t that much talent about up to the task of building inputs yet all the low talents rush to roll their own for the smallest reasons.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- tentacleuno 5y ago
  > Even on websites, you can feel when you click on a link, it is doing something more. It's a very uncomfortable feeling. I know what you mean! Some websites make link clicks take a little longer. I'm not sure if it's due to tracking...
- flomo 5y ago
  > Even on websites, you can feel when you click on a link, it is doing something more It is, analytics hooks which require network round trips. Otherwise disagree and this is false memories and/or very superficial observation of "snappiness".
- edwcross 5y ago
  We transitioned from a "high-trust society" (where software, Internet, etc, did not need to take into account so many security considerations, protect itself from enemies everywhere) into a "low-trust society" (encryption everywhere, hardware mitigations for Spectre-kind attacks, Javascript-based tracking, etc). The overhead is similar to the one people face in third-world countries: you pay once for the government (taxes), then again for basic services (private education, private security, private health, private transportation), and you still end up in a worse situation than in a (high-trust) first-world country. I tried using a Core 2 Duo laptop recently, but the simple fact that HTTPS is mandatory nowadays, and Core 2 doesn't have AES-NI, makes the laptop spin its fan much more than it should, even if I try to use an old Linux/Windows.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- skocznymroczny 5y ago
  Most apps connect to the internet for 'updates' 'content synchronization'. Every time you open a new tab in your app there's some spinning wheel you have to wait for.
slig 5y ago
What kind of work can you do on a WinXP VM? I can imagine working on Word or Excel on that OS.

rado 5y ago

Teams on an insanely fast M1 Max is slower than this.

ilrwbwrkhv 5y ago
I know!!! I am on an M1 pro myself and a lot of modern apps feel more sluggish than this.
lynguist 5y ago
You can use Teams as a Microsoft Edge web app. It runs natively and is very fast.
- rado 5y ago
  Kind of. I have audio/video permissions issues in the browser. Trying to use the app as much as possible on iPad Pro, it's fine there.

nyanpasu64 5y ago

It's striking how quickly all the apps load and respond to user input. Nonetheless this in-browser version suffers from layers of abstraction; the mouse cursor feels noticeably sluggish (high latency), and audio is delayed by over half a second, desynchronizing entirely from video.

blihp 5y ago

I had (still have, actually) a Quadra 840AV which was the fastest 68k Mac they ever made and it never felt this fast. If they emulated the actual performance of a 68k (and associated hardware) you wouldn't long for the performance it offered. But sure, running a much simpler (and more efficient out of necessity) OS on modern hardware, even emulated, screams on today's hardware. On the other hand, it didn't pack anywhere near the amount of functionality so the majority of the ROM and OS will fit in the L3 cache of today's processors so of course it's fast.

anthk 5y ago
The faster 68k ever was an Amiga with ShapeShifter ;).

thanatos519 5y ago

It's all about latency. Both of the following made my computers feel super snappy again! Liquorix kernel: https://liquorix.net/ https://liquorix.net/ ... Just a well-tuned kernel build, really. Kitty terminal: https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/ https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/ ... It took a while to make Kitty play nice with GNU Screen because the author has a hate-on for terminal multiplexers, but it was totally worth it.

3np 5y ago
> It took a while to make Kitty play nice with GNU Screen because the author has a hate-on for terminal multiplexers, but it was totally worth it. Do you have a link or some pointers to share?
- jasonjayr 5y ago
  I'm curious about that too, kitty + tmux has been a solid replacement for my long use of urxvt + it's tabs plugin, and it was no trouble at all to get setup
smackeyacky 5y ago
My daily driver ancient HP deskside server I use as a workstation is bonkers snappy running liquorix under debian.
- watersb 5y ago
  Curious! What model and configuration are you using?
  - smackeyacky 5y ago
    Its an ML330 G6, dual x5650 6 core Xeons and 96gb of memory. Old ATI radeon 6570 graphics card. Very cheap to put together, great for android studio and .NET development.
anthk 5y ago
Try Xanmod instead of Liquorix. Also, if your hardware it's fully supported under Linux-Libre, apply the Xanmod patches for that kernel. You'll get crazy speeds.

pram 5y ago

Seems like something isn't right, Warcraft 2 is running extremely slow (M1 Max + Safari)

FpUser 5y ago

Well, first of all it "is running inside modern OS " and being snappy while the OS does all kinds of other things. What is often slow are desktop applications build with total disregard for performance. Everything must be done using web stack common attitude does not help much either.

bitwize 5y ago

Try an Amiga with plenty of disk space and RAM. It took the PC world 10 or more years to catch up with the Amiga in responsiveness. Part of the reason was the Amiga OS was designed for user interaction, and the keyboard, mouse, and display got plum choice of IRQs. The next time I would see something as snappy as the Amiga was an M1 Mac.

whywhywhywhy 5y ago
PC never really felt as solid as an Amiga. It just feels like a single coherent system and PC feels like hacks upon hacks upon hacks and the seams show when it moves.
- the_only_law 5y ago
  > PC feels like hacks upon hacks upon hacks and the seams show when it moves. And to this day, it just keeps getting worse.
  - whywhywhywhy 5y ago
    Blown away that if windows ever fails to boot I have to unplug from my gpu then plug into my motherboard and reboot to see what’s up with it.

alimov 5y ago

I agree with you, and I think that part of the issue are the animations that run when doing practically anything on a newer OS, like maximizing or minimizing a window. Edit: in some cases animations can be disabled, which does a bit to bring back the snappy feel, but there are probably additional reasons why the modern stuff might not be/feel as snappy.