Comment by dist-epoch
3 years ago
People keep complaining, but nobody goes back to using the old software (even on new machines).
Because the old software is missing 80% of the features needed today.
It's like comparing a go-kart (simple, fast, easy to use) with a car (big, slow, complex). Yet you don't see people in go-karts.
Which features? For instance, Kopete had far more features than Slack and Discord combined and using 10X less resources. With inline videos, videoconferences, inline LaTeX rendering and who knows what.
Ironically Spotify and the rest of the Electron turds barely cover the 10% of what we did with Amarok and KDE3 with Kparts and using 10% of the resources.
What we are seeing it's people using damn 18-wheelers with less features than a tricycle.
Opera for instance was propietary but it even had a Torrent/Email client while being usable even under a Pentium 4 at amazing speeds.
Now try that today with Vivaldi.
More IM. Pidgin. Bloat it to the extreme with 4 or 5 or even 10 protocols being run at once while adding lots of plugins such as services for Google Translate, inline videos or HTML parsing until it uses ~512MB of RAM. Still it runs far snappier than Discord, it uses 4X less RAM and a simple Athlon/Pentium III can drive literal thousands of conversations in parallel.
The old software isn't available, or it's full of security holes.
Which features did the slower Notepad gained? And just as importantly - which of these features could not have been gained without a drop in startup time?
That makes me wonder, would a notepad executable from XP or 7 run on 10 and 11, and would it be faster?
On my Win 10 machine with an SSD and animations turned off Notepad and cmd do launch almost as fast as in that NT demo so maybe it wouldn't be much of a difference.
I'm not sure this is a great example. A formula 1 car is significantly larger and more complex than any go-kart is is 4-5x as fast. In fact almost any car you can purchase will significantly out perform a go-kart.
I don't think just adding features means software must be slower. I would venture to guess Emacs has more features that Word, especially when you factor in plugins, and is significantly faster than Word.