It’s disappointing that we can go from computers in the 80s with 1mhz processors and 64k of ram being considered powerful, to 2ghz, and 4gb of ram being unusable. I get that we require way more from our operating systems now, but does it really add up to that much more?
I think there's an inflection point somewhere around 15 years ago (early-mid 2000s) that marked the start of mass webification of software. Back then network I/O was the bottleneck for web software, and web developers didn't really need to care about compute resources. The web was light enough for the things people did at the time (excluding flash games, etc.). Not so today, web has gotten enormously complex (and filled to the brim with multimedia) but it's still written with little concern for performance. And this tech (with electron) is replacing traditional desktop software that was, before the inflection point, written by developers who learned their craft in the 90s when performance actually mattered and you couldn't solve every problem just by slapping three gigabytes worth of new dependencies at it.
I find that software is just bigger, slower, less ergonomic. It might SIGSEGV less but there's no shortage of spinners, UI jank, "oops, something went wrong", update churn & related breakage, and other issues.
I'm hoping there are enough retrocomputing / suckless / gemini / low tech / sustainability / etc. enthusiasts to slow start a software revolution. At least one that serves the niche and allows us to leave most of the obese garbage behind.
Most of it comes down to the modern web being a massive bloated pile of crap.
My desktop experience on low power ARM machines only really falls apart when it comes time to do modern web things (twitch, youtube, discord). Live video streaming largely works great at 480-720p, but if I don't hurry up and disable chat when there are more than 100 people talking it quickly brings the entire system to its knees.
Although I can't really blame my pinebook pro when that happens because I have recentish dual core machines (Macbook Air 2017) that hit 100% cpu usage when twitch or youtube live stream chats are moving quickly.
