MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

I completely understand why things are going the way they are as our computing environment has become ever more hostile. But I am very nostalgic for the time where I would power up a Vic-20 and within seconds be able to get to work.

Teaching my daughter to program on a modern computer, we spend more time bootstrapping and in process, than we do in actual development.

That computers are just slower to interact with now is such a truism that we hardly remark upon it any more. It seems utterly insane that in the early 90's I could just run Windows 3.1 on a bit of kit that in all likelihood wouldn't even power a toaster today, and the experience was, well, frictionless. I don't recall ever thinking "wtf is this thing doing?", whereas today, by contrast, if I have the audacity to be afk for long enough for my Windows 10 box to go sleep I know I am in for an infuriating waste of minutes' worth of disk thrashing before the bloody thing even deigns to reacknowledge my existence.

I switched to a linux desktop full time last week because of this exact problem. VPN w/ windows would flake out on me all the time, and I got sooo tired of just...waiting. Remember when windows search worked? Like, you could press the windows key, type what you were looking for and find it? Quickly?

Being able to turn the computer on, type in my password and have it be just..ready is so incredibly refreshing. Having a terminal with 0 latency, where copy/paste is sane? Worth a zillion dollars to me right now.

Currently playing with opensuse tumbleweed, i'll probably get frustrated by something and move to arch, so I can fix that something and also be frustrated by a hundred other things.

Windows search turning into bing search is one of the most frustrating little things. You used to be able to instantly pull up files by name but now it just dumps you random garbage from the internet.