[qsort]

(obligatory security patches aside) Major OSs are arguably almost exactly the same as they were 20 years ago, with some random nonsense baked in. Functionally speaking, there's no reason I couldn't be on OSX Tiger or Windows 2000. Linux did get better in terms of hardware support. Freaking NDISWrapper still gives me nightmares.

[kitsunesoba]

> Functionally speaking, there's no reason I couldn't be on OSX Tiger or Windows 2000.

On the Mac side I think I'd go up to at least 10.5/10.6 for its native virtual desktop implementation (Spaces) that's actually better than modern Spaces by way of being a 2D grid instead of a single row.

[calvinmorrison]

Plus better networking, pulseaudio and a bunch of user level services got a lot better. If anyone remembers what a nightmare HAL was or that there was a time before dbus being used universally

[asveikau]

Pulse audio is a negative. A lot of times getting rid of it makes things better. That's been true for the entire life of the daemon.

Linux had the recommended API as OSS, alsa, pulse ... In the same time frame FreeBSD just had OSS and it still works pretty well.

[eru]

Linux also got faster.

[Aachen]

Something tells me that a kernel from 1995 would run on lower-end hardware than a 2023 kernel with "speed improvements" (and an unmentioned million added features)

[Delk]

Sure, it might. But that doesn't mean things like schedulers or I/O handling haven't improved and got better in terms of latency or at handling various workloads.

Other things that may not be noticeable to most people but matter to others may also have improved, such as audio latency; I don't know how e.g. Pipewire or PulseAudio compares to plain ALSA in terms of that, but at least plain ALSA apparently wasn't enough for audio work back then because there was Jack, and I'm also under the impression that latency and responsivity in general have improved a lot on the kernel level as well, and not just in terms of audio.

Open source graphics drivers have also improved a lot over the years. Perhaps the entire graphics stack has, or perhaps overhauls of the stack have facilitated some of the improvements in the drivers themselves, but I don't have enough expertise to judge that.

Improvements (or degradation) in performance are rarely something that happens evenly across the board.

[eru]

Do you mean what counts as lower-end hardware in 2023?

In that case, I doubt it. You probably couldn't even use all your RAM. Linux back then also supported only a single processor (if it boots at all): symmetric multiprocessing support was added in 1996.

[pajko]

Not necessarily, at least on my M520-based X201 it got slower in media-related workloads with recent kernels (last 1.5 year or so). But both KiCad and FreeCad are faster than in Win7.

[nortonham]

>NDISWrapper

That's a name I haven't heard in a long long time haha

[systems_glitch]

One encounter was sufficient to get me to buy hardware that Linux directly supported :P

[skerit]

> Freaking NDISWrapper still gives me nightmares

Whoa, the memories to NDISWrapper. And 802.11g