I bought a Mac

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!

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.

Gnome and KDE plasma or whatever are horrible steps back in my experience. Laggy or slow loading of content in apps such as their app catalogs or hitching and lockups feel gross on a capable modern system even with 24gb of ram. Windows 11 isn't much better honestly where I relate to the video showing Win2k vs Win11 and apps take forever to load now.

Sure they are pretty looking but so was stuff like Aero which felt faster on worse hardware so what is going on? I feel like around the mid 2000s we went down the path of putting heavy, slow web-like user interfaces into the OS and brought everything down with it in favor of the scalability of DPI and easier (?) development. It's not really the OS either it's the apps. We've been making trade offs at the cost of usability and speed.