Basic desktop interaction is the same as 22 years ago, yet modern desktop environments are orders of magnitude slower at performing those same basic tasks.
What is striking is the fact that the interactions are the same between old and new shells/applications/syscalls/whatever, but modern software on modern hardware feels so much slower. The only reason for this is that modern software is doing a lot more stuff in the nooks and crannies of those interactions that it didn't used to do. Perhaps some of that stuff is useful, but some of it has to be code that is just less efficient or was just shoveled in because the CPU was faster and the RAM was more spacious.
Latency of what? Starting the OS is definitely faster. Launching software is also orders of magnitude faster. HDD don't requires hours of defragmentation to avoid slowing down to a halt. I was only a teenager in the windows 98 era but I remember I was just always waiting for the computer. This is not something I have experienced in a long time now.
In an application like Teams, the delay between striking a key on the keyboard and the corresponding glyph appearing on screen is comically bad - two orders of magnitude higher than performing the equivalent action on a computer from the early 1980s.
Surprise is modern OS runs slower in comparison without much perceptible improvements, inviting such a conclusion through rosy glasses that purported improvements since "then" must be nothing more than extreme amount of software bloat.
I think the big question everyone has in mind when they make comments about old OSes running fast on modern hardware is, "what is the juice that we are getting for the squeeze?"
It's not just that Win98 runs faster on modern hardware. It's that it does the same--or at least similar, as far as the user is concerned--tasks as Win11, but faster.
That leaves a gaping hole of "what was so important to add to the OS that it warrants slower interactions at every turn".
I opened the settings app on my work computer running Win10 the other day and it took a good 5 seconds before it showed up and painted. On Win-anything-less-than-or-equal-to-7, the settings window opened immediately and navigating to different settings was also immediate.
So what is Win10/11 doing?
And Linux isn't immune to the bloat. It is still smaller/faster than Windows, but it has managed to stay within a constant factor of Windows all this time. Modern Linux is significantly fatter than 20, even 10 year old Windows.
If the answer were "corpos gonna bloat", what's Linux's excuse? Operating systems across the board have gotten bigger and slower over time, for little visible benefit, and nobody has a coherent answer for why.
Some of the causes for bloat apply to both commercial and floss projects:
- heavier use of serialized I/O means much lower risk of pointer corruption or related threats, but adds overhead
- so do simple safety/sanity/security checks - each by itself is harmless, but over 10-20 years they add up
- more abstraction layers and more bookkeeping to handle much more complicated hardware setups, or just the passage of time (a Y2K secure date field takes two more bytes, a 64-bit time_t takes 4 more bytes than a 32-bit one, etc.)
- userspace devs are as lazy as they can be. Gnome these days is mostly Javascript to make the constant pointless rewrites faster, something that would've been unheard of 20 years ago. (The *box WMs meanwhile are still as fast as before.)
I'm failing to see the surprise. Isn't it a a given that old SW runs faster on modern HW when you factor in how far HW evolved since then.