Windows NT on 600MHz machine opens apps instantly. What happened?

I am always frustrated with the usual answer to these kinds of demonstrations: “Yes, but these new apps are doing so much more. Also, security.”

Except, that they are not, not at the time they are launched at least. And even if they were, we have a hundred-fold more compute power, with a hundredth of the latency for memory and storage.

Regarding security, it should have negligible effect in most cases. At least, effects should not be perceptible to the human mind.

It really is just a consequence of the way we develop software nowadays. We do not need to optimize programs to make them work at all, so we just do not. We work on new features, and we hire people who can churn new features.

And we decided to optimize for developer time, instead of user time. So, instead of painstakingly developing a Web site, a native application, an Android app, and an iOS app, we just push Web apps everywhere.

> Except, that they are not

My experiences with NixOS show me that they are. What do I mean by that? I am forced (MSFT Intune) to use Ubuntu for work, and was using MacOS prior to that. Both took a good heft of time to boot up, especially compared to the WinNT example. They are general purpose and come with everything under the sun installed in-case the user needs it. In the latter case (MacOS) your hands are also pretty tied when it comes to slimming it down (to be clear, apps are easy to remove, but not system cruft).

The slowest parts of bootup on my personal PC (NixOS) are POST and the GRUB timeout. NixOS takes less time than either (< 2 seconds). I chalk that up to NixOS installing very little more than I tell it to.

I agree that WebApps make situation significantly worse, but the OS itself is full of garbage that does eat CPU cycles and IOPs.