It’s a different world now though. I could go into detail of the differences, but suffice to say you cannot compare them.
Having said that, Windows lately seems to just be slow on very modern systems for no reason I can ascertain.
I swapped back to Linux as primary os a few weeks ago and it’s just so snappy in terms of ui responsiveness. It’s not better in every way. But for sure I never sit waiting for windows to decide to show me the context menu for an item in explorer.
Anyway in short, the main reason for the difference with old and new computer systems is the necessary abstraction.
That’s complete nonsense I’m afraid. While abstractions are necessary, the bloat of modern software absolutely isn’t. A lot of the bloat isn’t fundamental, but a result of things growing through accretion, and people papering over legacy designs instead of starting fresh.
The selection pressures of the industry do not favor efficiency. Software developers are able to write inefficient software and rely on hardware getting faster. Meanwhile, hardware manufacturers benefit from bloated software because it creates demand for new hardware.
Phones are a perfect example of this in action. Most of the essential apps on the phone haven’t changed in any significant way in over a decade. Yet, they continue getting less and less performant without any visible benefit for the user. Imagine if instead, hardware stayed the same and people focused on optimizing software to be more efficient over the past decade.
Except it’s not nonsense. I’ve worked in development through both eras. You need to develop in an abstracted way because there are so many variations on hardware to deal with.
There is bloating for sure, and of course. A lot is because it’s usually much better to use an existing library than reinvent the wheel. And the library needs to cover many other use cases than your own. I encountered this myself, where I used a Web library to work with releases on forgejo, had it working generally, but then saw there was a library for it. The boilerplate to make the library work was more than I did to just make the Web requests.
But that’s mostly size. The bloat in terms of speed is mostly in the operating system I think and hardware abstraction. Not libraries by and large.
I’m also going to say legacy systems being papered over doesn’t always make things slower. Where I work, I’ve worked on our legacy system for decades. But on the current product for probably the past 5-10. We still sell both. The legacy system is not the slower system.
You’re making the fallacy of equating abstractions with inefficiency. Abstractions are indeed useful, and they make it possible to express higher level concepts easily. However, most of inefficiency we have in modern tech stacks doesn’t come from the need for abstraction. It comes from the fact that these stacks evolved over many decades, and things were bolted on as the need arose. This is even a problem at a hardware level now https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3212479
The problem isn’t that legacy systems are themselves inefficient, it’s with the fact that things have been bolted on top of them now to do things that were never envisioned originally, to provide backwards compatibility, and so on. Take something like Windows as an example that can still run DOS programs from the 80s. The amount of layers you have in the stack is mind blowing.
Check out KolibriOS. It’s a tiny modern operating system written in assembly.
2024: What are you doing with 16GB RAM and 300% CPU at 5.4GHz?
- Running some random process introduced with Windows 11 that adds literally nothing to the users experience other than heat and fan noise
I mean, the taskbar, start menu and file explorer header is written in react native
Wait seriously? I’d have assumed it would at least be written in .NET or something and not fucking JavaScript.
That flashing colon between hour and minute is rendered server-side! What a masterpiece!
With 16gb of RAM and 102% CPU, the computer shows you a UI on any underlying hardware, any monitor/tv/whatever, handles a moise, keyboard, sound, handles any hardware interruption, probably fetches and sends stuff to the internet, scans your disk to index files so you can search almost instantly through gigabytes of storage whether it’s USB sticks, ssds, harddrive, nvme drive. And probably a lot of other stuff I’m forgetting. Meanwhile the other thingy with 4kb ram did college math problems. Impressive for the time yes, but that’s it.
Yes, nowadays there is a lot of inefficiency, but that comparison does not, and never did, make sense.
You are being practical. I would say the fair amount of RAM in usage achieving all those tasks is 512MB. Just checked my Gentoo box with XFCE and Bluetooth & PulseAudio crap running, no tuning, merely 700MB of RAM in use.
Sure, then you can start libreoffice calc and go up to around 1g of ram and close to 0% CPU anyway.
My point wasn’t on exact numbers because obviously the ones in the image are made up, unless that excel file is a monster of macros, VBA scripts and connections to numerous data lakes.
Completely unconnected to OP, but oh fuck do I hate that Microsoft Excel couldn’t open two documents side by side before like 2017. They all opened in one instance of the app unless you launch another as an admin, and it even screamed at you that it can’t open files with the same name. W?T?F?
