4 ms·

Had a lot of fun reading that. I'm a bit of a hoarder when it comes to technology, truth be told there's a certain rose tinted nostalgia that I get from thinki

by dijit 2y ago

Had a lot of fun reading that. I'm a bit of a hoarder when it comes to technology, truth be told there's a certain rose tinted nostalgia that I get from thinking about early 00's technology. It was still the era where UI's felt immediate and snappy- that anything related to actual computation or internet was jank and slow, but it had a whiff of a hopeful future about it. Every PC upgrade made things more snappy back then... Now I dread upgrades. Hey ho. It's endearing to know that one more bit of early 00's technology has been given a new lease on life. Would be cool to write some native software for it!

xoa 2y ago
This painfully speaks to me, though on the hoarding front I was convinced to get rid of certain old stuff and now I honestly regret giving up my old Bondi Blue PM G3 400. But on a more recent note I do still have an original Mac Pro and recently had reason to set it up again with 10.6 Server. And firing that up and getting back in really hit me like a ton of bricks, yeah there are all sorts of capabilities available now on the newest systems, but the UX there was just so much more pleasant in a number of tiny ways. You've also said it well, in fact I'd go further and say there was far more then a mere "whiff" of a hopeful future. I looked forward very much to each new release, with concrete useful improvements and the promise of more. In retrospect that was actually the pinnacle of Apple's (genuinely quite decent and promising) server efforts, of a potential alternate world line where they positioned themselves as a strong solution for running things without internet dependencies and subscriptions required. The MP continued to iterate along reliably and nicely until 2010, at which point it died off as a focus at Apple with absolutely agonizing slowness, and with it the dream of a continued upward progression in market support for value oriented hardware capabilities beyond what Apple themselves deigned to offer. Sigh.
cosmic_cheese 2y ago
I’m sure that snappiness is possible in modern software, but nobody really seems to pursue it outside of hyper-minimal Linux desktops which aren’t everybody’s cup of tea. Not that GNOME, KDE, XFCE, etc on modern machines are bad exactly, but you definitely feel a considerable amount of extra latency everywhere vs. e.g. a 500Mhz PowerBook G3 running OS 9 or OS X 10.2-10.4, which drags the experience down. I’m sure some of degree of latency increase is unavoidable thanks to all of the layers involved in the Linux stack as well as compositing and all that, but I’d bet that there’s a considerable amount that could be optimized away if there were a concerted effort to do so.
- colonial 2y ago
  I've actually been pleasantly surprised by how well most Linux stacks work in resource constrained environments. I have a first-generation Framework - the ones with the shitty Intel CPUs that don't support proper S3 sleep, only the awful "modern standby" - and I often throttle the clock to 400 MHz to save battery. GNOME's performance doesn't degrade at all; the only place it feels "un-snappy" is when starting heavier apps.
  - cosmic_cheese 2y ago
    Linux desktops certainly handle low-resource environments well, particularly compared to Windows, but even so it has some omnipresent elevated latency relative to late 90s/early 00s commercial operating systems, which can be felt even on powerful hardware. It’s hardly a dealbreaker and not even really a problem (which is probably why it’s still there) but making software instantaneous does wonders for improving how it feels to use.
    - xethos 2y ago
      > making software instantaneous does wonders for improving how it feels to use. When you phrase it like that, I'm actually more surprised Linux suffers from the extra latency. When most software is written to scratch an itch and optimization beyond "works on my machine" is for fun, you'd expect latency to evaporate over time
      - cosmic_cheese 2y ago
        It’s beyond my realm of expertise so I can’t speak confidently, but my hunch is that many of the responsiveness papercuts are cross-domain in nature, which makes them more difficult to track down and fix (not to mention makes who’s responsible for fixing them more murky). Another big chunk likely comes down to the tradeoffs all the big DEs have made in favor of making development easier or improving DX. This is understandable but at the same time it would be nice if at least one took a hardline stance towards commiting performance reductions and placed responsiveness as a chief concern, much as the operating systems of yesteryear did.
MiddleEndian 2y ago
I used my 2003ish Power Mac G4 MDD some time around 2014 before giving it to a friend and I noticed how quickly everything responded. Kinda annoyed me how we've regressed in that regard.
anal_reactor 2y ago
> It was still the era where UI's felt immediate and snappy I'll never forget my first smartphone. Whenever somebody called, it took so long for the screen to turn on, that the other person would often hang up before I could answer. I'd just sit there with a ringing phone in my hand, waiting for its screen to turn on.
- hypercube33 2y ago
  I'd really like to know what phone you had but my first attempt to buy one was a Windows based phone. I remember asking them to let me check it out so they grabbed a new one and turned it on...5 minutes later it was still booting. I deeply miss my Palm m100 and it's snappy interface and ability to run all week on some AAA batteries.
  - anal_reactor 2y ago
    It was Samsung Galaxy Mini 2. I think it was the worst phone that was yet vaguely usable.

by dijit 2y ago

xoa 2y ago

This painfully speaks to me, though on the hoarding front I was convinced to get rid of certain old stuff and now I honestly regret giving up my old Bondi Blue PM G3 400. But on a more recent note I do still have an original Mac Pro and recently had reason to set it up again with 10.6 Server. And firing that up and getting back in really hit me like a ton of bricks, yeah there are all sorts of capabilities available now on the newest systems, but the UX there was just so much more pleasant in a number of tiny ways. You've also said it well, in fact I'd go further and say there was far more then a mere "whiff" of a hopeful future. I looked forward very much to each new release, with concrete useful improvements and the promise of more. In retrospect that was actually the pinnacle of Apple's (genuinely quite decent and promising) server efforts, of a potential alternate world line where they positioned themselves as a strong solution for running things without internet dependencies and subscriptions required. The MP continued to iterate along reliably and nicely until 2010, at which point it died off as a focus at Apple with absolutely agonizing slowness, and with it the dream of a continued upward progression in market support for value oriented hardware capabilities beyond what Apple themselves deigned to offer. Sigh.

cosmic_cheese 2y ago

I’m sure that snappiness is possible in modern software, but nobody really seems to pursue it outside of hyper-minimal Linux desktops which aren’t everybody’s cup of tea. Not that GNOME, KDE, XFCE, etc on modern machines are bad exactly, but you definitely feel a considerable amount of extra latency everywhere vs. e.g. a 500Mhz PowerBook G3 running OS 9 or OS X 10.2-10.4, which drags the experience down. I’m sure some of degree of latency increase is unavoidable thanks to all of the layers involved in the Linux stack as well as compositing and all that, but I’d bet that there’s a considerable amount that could be optimized away if there were a concerted effort to do so.

colonial 2y ago
I've actually been pleasantly surprised by how well most Linux stacks work in resource constrained environments. I have a first-generation Framework - the ones with the shitty Intel CPUs that don't support proper S3 sleep, only the awful "modern standby" - and I often throttle the clock to 400 MHz to save battery. GNOME's performance doesn't degrade at all; the only place it feels "un-snappy" is when starting heavier apps.
- cosmic_cheese 2y ago
  Linux desktops certainly handle low-resource environments well, particularly compared to Windows, but even so it has some omnipresent elevated latency relative to late 90s/early 00s commercial operating systems, which can be felt even on powerful hardware. It’s hardly a dealbreaker and not even really a problem (which is probably why it’s still there) but making software instantaneous does wonders for improving how it feels to use.
  - xethos 2y ago
    > making software instantaneous does wonders for improving how it feels to use. When you phrase it like that, I'm actually more surprised Linux suffers from the extra latency. When most software is written to scratch an itch and optimization beyond "works on my machine" is for fun, you'd expect latency to evaporate over time
    - cosmic_cheese 2y ago
      It’s beyond my realm of expertise so I can’t speak confidently, but my hunch is that many of the responsiveness papercuts are cross-domain in nature, which makes them more difficult to track down and fix (not to mention makes who’s responsible for fixing them more murky). Another big chunk likely comes down to the tradeoffs all the big DEs have made in favor of making development easier or improving DX. This is understandable but at the same time it would be nice if at least one took a hardline stance towards commiting performance reductions and placed responsiveness as a chief concern, much as the operating systems of yesteryear did.

MiddleEndian 2y ago

I used my 2003ish Power Mac G4 MDD some time around 2014 before giving it to a friend and I noticed how quickly everything responded. Kinda annoyed me how we've regressed in that regard.

anal_reactor 2y ago

> It was still the era where UI's felt immediate and snappy I'll never forget my first smartphone. Whenever somebody called, it took so long for the screen to turn on, that the other person would often hang up before I could answer. I'd just sit there with a ringing phone in my hand, waiting for its screen to turn on.

hypercube33 2y ago
I'd really like to know what phone you had but my first attempt to buy one was a Windows based phone. I remember asking them to let me check it out so they grabbed a new one and turned it on...5 minutes later it was still booting. I deeply miss my Palm m100 and it's snappy interface and ability to run all week on some AAA batteries.
- anal_reactor 2y ago
  It was Samsung Galaxy Mini 2. I think it was the worst phone that was yet vaguely usable.