The thing that makes me crazy is that the thing that we do on computers are basically the same each year, yet software are more and more heavy. For example just in 2010 a Linux distribution with a DE just started did consume 100Mb of RAM, an optimized version 60Mb of RAM. I remember it perfectly. I had 2Gb of RAM and did not have even a swap partition.
Now just a decade later, a computer with less than 8Gb of RAM is unusable. A computer with 8Gb of RAM is barely usable. Each new software uses Electron and consumes roughly 1Gb of RAM minimum! Browsers consume a ton of RAM, basically everything consumes an absurd amount of memory.
Not talking about Windows, I don't even know how people can use it. Every time I help my mother with the computer is so slow, and we talk about a recent PC with an i5 and 8Gb of RAM. It takes ages to startup, software takes ages to launch, it takes 1 hour if you need to do updates. How can people use these system and not complain? I would throw my computer out of the window if it takes more than a minute to boot up, even Windows 98 was faster!
Think also about all the finished stand-alone applications which have been discarded because of replacement APIs, or because they were written in assembly. We had near-perfect (limited feature-wise from a 3-decade view, of course) word processors, spreadsheets, and single-user databases in the late 80s/early 90s which were, except for many specific use-case additions, complete & only in need of regular maintenance & quality-of-life updates were there a way to keep them current. They were in many cases far better quality & documented than almost any similar applications you can get your hands on today; so many work-years done in parallel, repeated, & lost. If there wouldn't be software sourcing & document interchange issues, it would be tempting to do all my actual office-style work on a virtual mid-90s system & move things over to the host system when printing or sending data.
Addition: consider also how few resources these applications used, & how they, if they were able to run natively on contemporary systems, would have minuscule system demands compared to their present equivalents with only somewhat less capability.
Outside gaming, ai and big data, aka things for instance my parents don’t use at all, what limited feature wise? Browsers, sure, however my father prefers Teletext and newsgroups and Viditel (doesn’t exist anymore but he mentions it quite a lot) over ad infested slow as pudding websites. Email didn’t change since the 90s, word processors changed but not with stuff most people use (I still miss WP; it was just better imho; I went over to Latex because I find Word a complete horror show and that didn’t change), spreadsheets are used by pros and amateurs alike as a database mostly for making lists; nothing new there. You can go on and on; put an average user behind a 80s/90s pc (arguably after win95 release; DOS was an issue for many and 3.1 was horrible; or Mac OS) and they will barely notice the difference. Except for the above list of ai, big data, gaming and most importantly, browsers. Ai is mostly an api so that can be fixed (I saw a c64 openai chat somewhere) , big data is a very small % of humanity using that and gaming, well, depends what you like. I personally hate 3d games; I like 80s shmups and most people who game are on mobile playing cwazy diamonds or whatnot which I can implement on an msx 8 bit machine from the early 80s. Of course the massive multiplayer open world 3d stuff doesn’t work.
Anyway; as I said before here responding to what software/hardware to use for their parents; whenever someone asks me to revive their computer, I install Debian with i3 wm and dillo and ff as browser, Libreoffice and thunderbird. It takes a few hours to get used to but people (who are not in IT or any other computer fahig job) are flabbergasted by the speed, low latency and battery life. I did an x220 (with 9 cell) install last week; from win xp to the above setup; battery life jumped from 3 to 12 hours and everything is fast.
I install about 50 of those for people in my town throughout the year; people think they depend on certain software, but they really usually don’t. If they do, most things people ask for now work quite well under Wine. I have a simple script which starts an easy ‘Home Screen’ on i3 with massive buttons of their favourite apps which open on another screen (1 full screen per screen); people keep asking why Microsoft doesn’t do that instead of those annoying windows…
Windows 98 was often running on fragmented disks. I recall it taking minutes before I could do useful work. And having multiple apps open at once was more rare. While possible it often ended in crashes or unusable slowness.
Experienced same, it was faster to not multitask, do one thing a time. You would think launching 2 tasks would take 2x time with same resources, but it felt more like 3-4x. Disk was 1GB back then. I blame it on disk seek times and less advanced IO scheduling.
> The thing that makes me crazy is that the thing that we do on computers are basically the same each year
I think that is some kind of fallacy. We are doing the same things but the quality of those things is vastly different. I collect vintage computers and I think you'd be surprised how limited we were while doing the same things. I wouldn't want to go back.
Although I will say your experience with Windows is different than mine. On all my machines, regardless of specs, start up is fast so the point where I don't even think about it.
I have a Macintosh Plus, SE, 7200, and iMac G3 (System 6, 6, 7, 9) I've been using for fun lately after fixing many of them up. Even with real SCSI harddrives in the SE, 7200, and iMac, they're such a joy to use compared to a modern OS. Often much more responsive, UI is always more consistent, not to mention better aesthetics. They really don't make software like they used to. A web browser or OS should not be slow on any modern hardware but here we are.
System 7 runs so fast in BasiliskII on an old Atom netbook. I recently saw a video showing System 6 running in an emulator on an ESP32 microcontroller on an expansion card in an Apple II. It was substantially faster than the Mac Plus it was emulating. It really takes seeing this kind of thing to understand the magnitude of the problem.
My daily runner is a T400 Laptop with 4GB RAM on a fairly slim Linux distro. But in the last 6-12 months it is starting to feel a little tight when it comes to anything web browsing. Even things like Thunderbird are getting very bulky in keeping up with web rendering standards.
I pulled down an Audiobook player the other day, once all dependencies were meet, it need 1.3GB to function! At least VLC is still slim.
Not discounting your lament about memory use, this caught my eye:
> I would throw my computer out of the window if it takes more than a minute to boot up, even Windows 98 was faster!
Sure, Windows has grown a lot in size (as have other OSes). But startup is typically bounded by disk random access, not compute power or memory (granted, I don't use Windows, if 8GB is not enough to boot the OS then things are much worse than I thought). Have you tried putting an SSD in that thing?
(And yes, I realise the irony of saying "just buy more expensive hardware". But SSDs are actually really cheap these days.)
This whole thread needs a huge amount of salt and some empirical examples. I think if you compared side-by-side it’d be different. I remember my upgrade from 2019 MacBook to M1, when every single task felt about 50% faster. Or from swapping a window laptop’s HDD with an SSD. (Absolutely massive performance improvement!) Waiting forever for older windows computers to boot, update, index or search files, install software, launch programs, etc. Waiting ages for an older iMac to render an iMovie timeline.
Others in the thread talking about the heyday of older spreadsheet and document programs that were just as fast. So? I bet you could write a book on the new features and more advanced tools that MS Excel offers today compared to 1995.
We went from things taking minutes to taking seconds. So you could improve things by 50% and that could be VERY noticeable. (1min to 30s, for example.) If your app already launches in 500ms, 250ms is not going to make your laptop feel 2x faster even if it is. On top of that, since speed has been good enough for general computing for several years now, new laptops focus more on energy efficiency. I bet that new laptop has meaningfully better battery and thermal performance!
How advanced is excel now comparing with 2016 version?
New expensive laptop had the same "fast" feeling which fade with new iterations of software. Browser takes insane amount of CPU and memory but isn't faster.
Maybe some intense CPU tasks like zipping folder is faster then ever, but I'm not zipping all day. However Slack is behaving like there is server side remote rendering for each screen...
If you keep your software up to date, every hardware upgrade will feel like a significant improvement. But you're comparing the end of one hardware cycle to the beginning of the next. You regain by upgrading what you previously lost to gradual bloat.
Most of my windows PC's boot time happens before my computer even starts loading the OS. If I enabled fast boot in my bios, I'm pretty sure my PC would boot in around 15 seconds.
Now just a decade later, a computer with less than 8Gb of RAM is unusable. A computer with 8Gb of RAM is barely usable. Each new software uses Electron and consumes roughly 1Gb of RAM minimum! Browsers consume a ton of RAM, basically everything consumes an absurd amount of memory.
Not talking about Windows, I don't even know how people can use it. Every time I help my mother with the computer is so slow, and we talk about a recent PC with an i5 and 8Gb of RAM. It takes ages to startup, software takes ages to launch, it takes 1 hour if you need to do updates. How can people use these system and not complain? I would throw my computer out of the window if it takes more than a minute to boot up, even Windows 98 was faster!