| 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. |
- 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.)