10 ms·

Not that I want the UX To _look_ like Windows 95, but I sure do feel nostalgic how fast and responsive the desktop “felt” back in those days. These days, it is

Not that I want the UX To _look_ like Windows 95, but I sure do feel nostalgic how fast and responsive the desktop “felt” back in those days. These days, it is a rarity to see a native app that is as responsive. It feels like all native apps burn through CPU cycles in cosmetic things and animations that it feels sluggish in comparison.

moron4hire 3y ago
My Windows 11 laptop at home is quite snappy. My Windows 10 laptop at work with more RAM, a better SSD, and a newer, faster CPU, is not. It's because they virus scan and authorization check every single file access, every time. Even starting small programs like Notepad takes at least 2 seconds at work whereas it's instantaneous at home. Same story at my previous job. Actually, my work laptop had been faster than my personal one for a while because I had gotten a special purchase due to the nature of my work and IT didn't know what to do with it (we contracted IT services out to a 3rd party. We were a small non-tech company). But then someone caught wind and I was made to figure out how to get IT's tracking software installed for them. And that's when I started working from home all the time (a situation I could manage as the non-tech company wanted me to own the code personally. Yes, a little weird, but it was all a tiny sure other for the company). It's not the tech, it's the bureaucracy.
- throwaway2990 3y ago
  I got a dell XPS 15 for work, 2022 one. 32gb 12700h. It’s slow and loud. Especially compared to my personal laptop. Not enough to be annoying tho. But then IT decided they want some software installed to make sure they can monitor for bad processes. Wow it’s annoyingly slow now for development because every process is analysised.
  - tracker1 3y ago
    I find that doing almost everything under WSL is a much better experience, if you can spare enough ram to the environment. Mostly because the monitoring software doesn't run inside the WSL/Ubuntu env.
- accrual 3y ago
  > It's because they virus scan and authorization check every single file access, every time. Haha, I know this. I could be doing absolutely nothing and my 10th Gen work laptop CPU is chugging along at 40% utilization.
- backendanon 3y ago
  Windows and Microsoft are the bureaucracy.
KirillPanov 3y ago
WHATWG has joined the chat
mati365 3y ago
[flagged]
- BaculumMeumEst 3y ago
  If you're curious about Gentoo, sure. But you're not going to get a perceptible advantage for the substantial time investment.
  - BasedAnon 3y ago
    [flagged]
rpastuszak 3y ago
My experience was different as my first Windows PC was already quite old when I got it, so I was used to random delays in UI feedback. My current M1 feels like what you've just described. I tried to run DSL (damn small linux) on my P60 around 2003-4 and felt what you've just described. The UI seemed to respond before the interaction! Then, a few months ago I spent a an evening or two messing with Microsoft Bob (Win 3.11) then Win 95 trying to code a simple website compatible with the tech of the time, using the tools available at the time. Everything felt so snappy. I don't mind animations applied thoughtfully (e.g. short UI transitions emphasising the state change), but what annoys me the most is animation jank, drops in frame rate, unpredictable delays. Older Windows versions weren't that great in that regard either (do you remember how much time it used to take for the "Open With" dialog, or event file context menu to show up on Win, when you right clicked on a file in Win9x-7?)
- xp84 3y ago
  I miss, when I had a jailbroken phone, briefly being able to set the animation time to zero. Everything is so much faster, even with hardware that can more than handle the GPU stuff. It’s now (on fast hardware) the actual animation frames themselves that are literally wasting my time. I wish Apple would let me watch each of their oh-so-clever animations one time to give these “designers” their satisfaction, and just jump-cut to the final state from that point on.
  - accrual 3y ago
    I think Android KitKat 4.4 had an animation time slider hidden in some "Developer" menu that could be trivally enabled. It made my phone feel so much faster.
  - pjerem 3y ago
    https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT202655 https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT202655
    - xp84 3y ago
      I like that it’s there, but sadly Apple thinks you need to wait through a dissolve animation that’s equally lengthy, for some reason.
soraminazuki 3y ago
That's not how I remember it. Windows 9x was slow and constantly crashing. Booting and launching programs took ages. To be fair, the performance problems had more to do with the available hardware back then, but still.
- ekianjo 3y ago
  > Windows 9x was slow because hard drives. Now we have SSDs and the desktop is slower than ever still.
  - squarefoot 3y ago
    Desktop became slow when windows and widgets became objects, as in the OOP sense. The transition from hardcoded primitives to objects that would be created and destroyed on the fly slowed things down a lot, but that is the price to pay to have code that runs on very different platforms, also adapting itself to different screen sizes and resolutions, dynamic objects, etc.
    - winrid 3y ago
      In C++ it would still be very fast. I doubt you'd notice the difference. The turning point was MS switching to C# for everything. Now built in apps load slow because the code is not JIT compiled yet, and I bet other issues...
    - regularfry 3y ago
      So we should expect the introduction of MFC in 1992 to draw the dividing line between the halcyon "fast desktop" days and modern slowness?
    - circuit10 3y ago
      I doubt it makes much difference. At least in C++ objects are just structs unless you’re using polymorphism, and tracking a few things like the position of a window can’t be very intensive anyway. It’s probably more things like loading assets and rendering effects and background tasks that slow it down
hknapp 3y ago
http://copy.sh/v86/?profile=windows95 http://copy.sh/v86/?profile=windows95
treve 3y ago
KDE Plasma in my opinion comes closest to this. It's stayed very snappy over the years and I'm mainly a laptop user.
- dmonitor 3y ago
  turn off animations and it flies
- backendanon 3y ago
  Agreed, I use KDE on both my desktop and personal laptop.
Roark66 3y ago
One of the biggest things that contribute to the feeling of slowness today are all the animations /transitions etc. The very first thing I do when installing a new version of gnome is disable all of it. It suddenly feels 5x faster.
treve 3y ago
KDE Plasma in my opinion comes closest to this. It's stayed very snappy over the years and I'm mainly a laptop user. I'm on Gnome because I prefer the design, but if you want fast it might be worth a shot.
- thrtythreeforty 3y ago
  Initial releases of KDE 4 were absolute pigs. They spent several years trimming fat from those until it started to be useful for me around KDE 4.9 or so. Plasma 5 and onward have been excellent.
overgard 3y ago
I think nostalgia might have rewritten your memory. Spinning rust disks meant apps would take 5-10 seconds to load, moving and resizing windows was laggy and left behind repaint artifacts, and anything network related took approximately forever
- wildrhythms 3y ago
  There was a recent thread with twitter clips showing old Windows vs. new Windows and how old Windows opened its programs noticeably faster. https://twitter.com/jmmv/status/1671670996921896960?s=20 https://twitter.com/jmmv/status/1671670996921896960?s=20 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36503983 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36503983
- acdha 3y ago
  Yes - what he described was the experience using BeOS, which had an amazing I/O scheduler, but switching back to Win95 was noticeably worse on latency. A big problem was I/O deadlines - I knew so many people who burned “coasters” because Win95 and classic MacOS couldn’t reliably feed data to a CD writer with a small buffer. Audio capture and data acquisition were similarly fragile if you needed latency guarantees lower than hundreds of milliseconds.
bitwize 3y ago
Windows 9x feels snappy and responsive -- on a VM on modern hardware. On the hardware of the day... yeah, it chugged. You needed about 16 MiB of RAM and a graphics accelerator for acceptable performance in 1995, and that was quite a beefy system for that year.
- tracker1 3y ago
  I got the wrong ram (64mb instead of 16) and will say it ran like a dream on a 5x86-133 with a cache module. NT4 ran really well on there as well for the time. OS/2 didn't behave quite right, after NT4 I never really looked back. Kept a 9x partition for games only.

moron4hire 3y ago

My Windows 11 laptop at home is quite snappy. My Windows 10 laptop at work with more RAM, a better SSD, and a newer, faster CPU, is not. It's because they virus scan and authorization check every single file access, every time. Even starting small programs like Notepad takes at least 2 seconds at work whereas it's instantaneous at home. Same story at my previous job. Actually, my work laptop had been faster than my personal one for a while because I had gotten a special purchase due to the nature of my work and IT didn't know what to do with it (we contracted IT services out to a 3rd party. We were a small non-tech company). But then someone caught wind and I was made to figure out how to get IT's tracking software installed for them. And that's when I started working from home all the time (a situation I could manage as the non-tech company wanted me to own the code personally. Yes, a little weird, but it was all a tiny sure other for the company). It's not the tech, it's the bureaucracy.

throwaway2990 3y ago
I got a dell XPS 15 for work, 2022 one. 32gb 12700h. It’s slow and loud. Especially compared to my personal laptop. Not enough to be annoying tho. But then IT decided they want some software installed to make sure they can monitor for bad processes. Wow it’s annoyingly slow now for development because every process is analysised.
- tracker1 3y ago
  I find that doing almost everything under WSL is a much better experience, if you can spare enough ram to the environment. Mostly because the monitoring software doesn't run inside the WSL/Ubuntu env.
accrual 3y ago
> It's because they virus scan and authorization check every single file access, every time. Haha, I know this. I could be doing absolutely nothing and my 10th Gen work laptop CPU is chugging along at 40% utilization.
backendanon 3y ago
Windows and Microsoft are the bureaucracy.

KirillPanov 3y ago

WHATWG has joined the chat

mati365 3y ago

[flagged]

BaculumMeumEst 3y ago
If you're curious about Gentoo, sure. But you're not going to get a perceptible advantage for the substantial time investment.
- BasedAnon 3y ago
  [flagged]

rpastuszak 3y ago

My experience was different as my first Windows PC was already quite old when I got it, so I was used to random delays in UI feedback. My current M1 feels like what you've just described. I tried to run DSL (damn small linux) on my P60 around 2003-4 and felt what you've just described. The UI seemed to respond before the interaction! Then, a few months ago I spent a an evening or two messing with Microsoft Bob (Win 3.11) then Win 95 trying to code a simple website compatible with the tech of the time, using the tools available at the time. Everything felt so snappy. I don't mind animations applied thoughtfully (e.g. short UI transitions emphasising the state change), but what annoys me the most is animation jank, drops in frame rate, unpredictable delays. Older Windows versions weren't that great in that regard either (do you remember how much time it used to take for the "Open With" dialog, or event file context menu to show up on Win, when you right clicked on a file in Win9x-7?)

xp84 3y ago
I miss, when I had a jailbroken phone, briefly being able to set the animation time to zero. Everything is so much faster, even with hardware that can more than handle the GPU stuff. It’s now (on fast hardware) the actual animation frames themselves that are literally wasting my time. I wish Apple would let me watch each of their oh-so-clever animations one time to give these “designers” their satisfaction, and just jump-cut to the final state from that point on.
- accrual 3y ago
  I think Android KitKat 4.4 had an animation time slider hidden in some "Developer" menu that could be trivally enabled. It made my phone feel so much faster.
- pjerem 3y ago
  https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT202655 https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT202655
  - xp84 3y ago
    I like that it’s there, but sadly Apple thinks you need to wait through a dissolve animation that’s equally lengthy, for some reason.

soraminazuki 3y ago

That's not how I remember it. Windows 9x was slow and constantly crashing. Booting and launching programs took ages. To be fair, the performance problems had more to do with the available hardware back then, but still.

ekianjo 3y ago
> Windows 9x was slow because hard drives. Now we have SSDs and the desktop is slower than ever still.
- squarefoot 3y ago
  Desktop became slow when windows and widgets became objects, as in the OOP sense. The transition from hardcoded primitives to objects that would be created and destroyed on the fly slowed things down a lot, but that is the price to pay to have code that runs on very different platforms, also adapting itself to different screen sizes and resolutions, dynamic objects, etc.
  - winrid 3y ago
    In C++ it would still be very fast. I doubt you'd notice the difference. The turning point was MS switching to C# for everything. Now built in apps load slow because the code is not JIT compiled yet, and I bet other issues...
  - regularfry 3y ago
    So we should expect the introduction of MFC in 1992 to draw the dividing line between the halcyon "fast desktop" days and modern slowness?
  - circuit10 3y ago
    I doubt it makes much difference. At least in C++ objects are just structs unless you’re using polymorphism, and tracking a few things like the position of a window can’t be very intensive anyway. It’s probably more things like loading assets and rendering effects and background tasks that slow it down

hknapp 3y ago

http://copy.sh/v86/?profile=windows95 http://copy.sh/v86/?profile=windows95

treve 3y ago

KDE Plasma in my opinion comes closest to this. It's stayed very snappy over the years and I'm mainly a laptop user.

dmonitor 3y ago
turn off animations and it flies
backendanon 3y ago
Agreed, I use KDE on both my desktop and personal laptop.

Roark66 3y ago

One of the biggest things that contribute to the feeling of slowness today are all the animations /transitions etc. The very first thing I do when installing a new version of gnome is disable all of it. It suddenly feels 5x faster.

treve 3y ago

KDE Plasma in my opinion comes closest to this. It's stayed very snappy over the years and I'm mainly a laptop user. I'm on Gnome because I prefer the design, but if you want fast it might be worth a shot.

thrtythreeforty 3y ago
Initial releases of KDE 4 were absolute pigs. They spent several years trimming fat from those until it started to be useful for me around KDE 4.9 or so. Plasma 5 and onward have been excellent.

overgard 3y ago

I think nostalgia might have rewritten your memory. Spinning rust disks meant apps would take 5-10 seconds to load, moving and resizing windows was laggy and left behind repaint artifacts, and anything network related took approximately forever

wildrhythms 3y ago
There was a recent thread with twitter clips showing old Windows vs. new Windows and how old Windows opened its programs noticeably faster. https://twitter.com/jmmv/status/1671670996921896960?s=20 https://twitter.com/jmmv/status/1671670996921896960?s=20 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36503983 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36503983
acdha 3y ago
Yes - what he described was the experience using BeOS, which had an amazing I/O scheduler, but switching back to Win95 was noticeably worse on latency. A big problem was I/O deadlines - I knew so many people who burned “coasters” because Win95 and classic MacOS couldn’t reliably feed data to a CD writer with a small buffer. Audio capture and data acquisition were similarly fragile if you needed latency guarantees lower than hundreds of milliseconds.

bitwize 3y ago

Windows 9x feels snappy and responsive -- on a VM on modern hardware. On the hardware of the day... yeah, it chugged. You needed about 16 MiB of RAM and a graphics accelerator for acceptable performance in 1995, and that was quite a beefy system for that year.

tracker1 3y ago
I got the wrong ram (64mb instead of 16) and will say it ran like a dream on a 5x86-133 with a cache module. NT4 ran really well on there as well for the time. OS/2 didn't behave quite right, after NT4 I never really looked back. Kept a 9x partition for games only.