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I bought a Mac

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237 points todsacerdoti | 2 comments | 14 Apr 25 01:11 UTC | HN request time: 0.437s | source
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dijit ◴[14 Apr 25 01:39 UTC] No.43677319[source]▶
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!

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cosmic_cheese ◴[14 Apr 25 02:09 UTC] No.43677458[source]▶
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.

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colonial ◴[14 Apr 25 02:35 UTC] No.43677577[source]▶
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.

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cosmic_cheese ◴[14 Apr 25 02:47 UTC] No.43677632[source]▶
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.

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1. xethos ◴[14 Apr 25 04:15 UTC] No.43677998[source]▶
> 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

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2. cosmic_cheese ◴[14 Apr 25 05:40 UTC] No.43678390[source]▶
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.