Comment by agumonkey

I had similar impressions with multiple setup:

    - dell p2 300 win95
    - early core duo era with linux 2.4 (some kali linux image)

in both cases there was something very odd, the crude os design (no parallel systemd etc), gui toolkit and desktop environment (no compositor, glitchy) wasn't an issue and the low amount of lag felt very good. it's the same feeling when driving 90s cars, the drive feels directly connected to the whole, it's cruder but it feels better

and saying this as a fan of recent linux kernel and systemd parallelism with the crazy cpu over ssd speed.. i was utterly surprised