If you spent what people paid for a PC in 1983 (literally, without any inflation) you probably wouldn't notice anything being perceptually slower.
Like the first Mac retailed for $2500 US. Go spend $2500 on a PC today, you'll have a great time.
Granted, economies of scale make this kind of a dumb argument. But it has a bit of truth to it. People are just less willing to spend as much on their machines, as well as push much more limited platforms like mobile to their limits. We should definitely deal with that as developers, don't get me wrong - but not having to deal with the optimizations they dealt with 40 years ago doesn't make me unhappy.
Not true.
I have a top of the line Intel processor that’s less than 2 years old (launched, not bought). 970 Evo Pro that’s the one of the fastest drives around. 32 GB RAM (don’t remember the speed but it was and is supposed to be super fast).
Explorer takes a second or two to launch. The ducking start menu takes a moment and sometimes causes the entire OS to lock up for a second.
The twitter rant is spot on.
There’s so much of supposed value add BS that the core usage scenarios go to shit.
And this is coming from a Product Manager. :-)
Anyway the referencing problem is painful. I feel it often. Google maps or Apple Maps. Try to plan a vacation and Mark interesting places on it to identify the best location to stay. Yup gotta use that memory. Well isn’t that one of the rules of UX design, don’t make me think?
Regarding OSes: storage has gotten so much faster and CPUs haven’t, that storage drivers and file systems are now the bottleneck. We need less layers of abstraction to compensate. The old model of IO is super slow is no longer accurate.
Honestly it sounds like your problem is Windows.
I'm writing this on an AMD Phenom II, running Debian and StumpWM, that's over 10 years old. I've upgraded the hard drive to an SSD, and the memory from 8 Gb to 16 Gb (4 Gb DIMMs were very expensive when I first built it) and it's as fast as can be.
My work computer is much newer, has twice as much memory and a newer Intel processor, and I really can't tell the difference except for CPU bound tasks that run for a long time, like compiling large projects.
Have to voice my agreement. Linux is an expensive investment but so very much worth it. Each time my colleagues complain about their computers it is because of Windows. I count myself lucky to have Linux as my only desktop and the skill to maintain it. I run an ancient i5 2500k with 8GB RAM and SSD. All the games I play work fine on Steam Proton. I still have to figure out how in the world Reddit on Firefox manages to completely lock the system up, with looping audio and frozen cursor. Nothing else causes that fault.
Fellow X220 user here... a solution for this exact problem where the system runs out of memory and then you sit there staring and waiting until it churns around long enough until it can do stuff again is to run earlyoom[0].
It will kill off the firefox process (or whichever is the main memory hog) early, which is also annoying but less so than having to wait minutes until you can use your computer again.