Binary size on a desktop OS is almost totally irrelevant in practice. Memory size matters a little more, but your OS will generally do a good job of loading what it needs (ie, huge binaries can still start quickly) and paging out what it doesn't.
People have aesthetic complaints about "bloat", but again this is orthogonal to the actual speed of anything.
Well, the bloat has made many programs slower than they could be. Software is eating up the advances we get in hardware. Modern Word 365 is not any faster than Word 95 on a Pentium 66 in normal use. That is a ~100MHz computer with maybe 16MB RAM, and a rotating hard drive.
Bloat making software bigger will in many cases also make it slower.
Also, the UX on Windows 95 was consistent and easy to learn. Now, much software fail on stuff like disabling a button when you have clicked it and the computer is working.
MacOS is on a steady curve to the bottom. It is not alone.
The software bloat and decreasing quality is a serious issue.
I see this sentiment again and again, but the Windows 95 experience I remember included frequent spinning hourglasses, blue screens of death from faulty drivers, everything grinding to a halt when memory is near exhaustion or files are being copied between disks, tons of third party applications (and even Microsoft applications, like Office) that disregarded the Windows UI standards, constantly having to run CHKDSK and defrag, not to mention malware/virus vulnerability...
Latency when the system is under low load was definitely better, although a big contributor to that is changes in input and display hardware. But otherwise I'd much rather have today's "bloated" experience over the real world of the '90s.
Thing is, our computers are magnitudes of orders faster than 20-30 years ago. Why isn't our software orders of magnitudes faster? I'll settle for just 10 times faster.
If you take software from 20 years ago, and run it on modern hardware, it will be instant in most operations.
Clock speeds certainly aren't orders of magnitude faster than they were 20 years ago. The vast majority of the performance improvements of the past two decades have gone into improved capability, stability, and security. I don't consider streaming 4K video to be "bloat" personally.
Let's not forget the reinstalls to have the system perform properly again. I must have installed Win94 dozens of times over the years. I've never fresh-installed OS X once. I frankly don't even know how to do that with the current version.
I still think iOS was more fun in the Forstall-skeuomorphic era, and screen elements were easier to differentiate.
macOS icons also used to have distinct silhouettes which made them easier to distinguish, but now everything is a square tile. Screen controls which used to be visible and targetable are now hidden and are harder to hit when they do appear.
It feels like we are still under the tyranny of the (Jony Ivian?) streamlined aesthetic over usability and functionality, as if a library decided to organize books by size and color.
In the case of Apple, it's often Apple software eating up the benefits of Apple hardware.
Unfortunately subtle differences (such as improved reliability/security or a streamlined workflow) are lost in the computing market, where people are attracted to the new and shiny rather than the old and usable. Also designers like to mess with things.
> Memory size matters a little more, but your OS will generally do a good job of loading what it needs (ie, huge binaries can still start quickly) and paging out what it doesn't.
And yet Electron apps often garnish that memory bloat and computational inefficiency with sluggish performance and a clunky user experience.
It's a shame when an 8GB Mac mini doesn't have enough RAM to run apps comfortably. Of course there's a bit of a corrupt bargain going on between bloated software and Apple since the latter wants to upsell you to a more expensive model.
Binary size, yes, since that's just sequentially reading bytes from an SSD. What sucks about modern software is input latency and overall responsiveness.
I would love to, if things actually worked on it! Since everything is HTTPS now and you need TLS1.3 for many things, running very retro things for daily usage is next to impossible.
> There’s nothing stopping anyone from going back and using all of that old software exclusively.
You need to search for it on old ftp sites.
> For some reason everyone prefers the newer software, though. Perhaps there’s more to it than binary size?
The compilers have "evolved". Compiling old code is challenging, to say the least.
I do compile old programs when the new seem to explode: xpdf, xsnow.
Compiling old compilers is impossible because they rely on ancient kernel headers.
People have aesthetic complaints about "bloat", but again this is orthogonal to the actual speed of anything.