Can still be done if all you want is a command-line to come up and be responsive.
Most folks want web, email, images, and even a bit of security from their computer today. Could always be faster, but I think the days of "bam!" ready are past due to those requirements. Unless the computer is only sleeping, like an iphone for example.
Those things don't preclude responsiveness though. Modern software is sitting on top of mountains of inefficiencies and legacy baggage. This was found just months ago https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/09/20-year-old-linux-wo... "A bit of security" is also quite apt, since there's huge room for improvement there too. I wish I could find a way to get paid to improve all this. Currently I'm only doing it for mobile apps.
>Most folks want web, email, images, and even a bit of security from their computer today. Could always be faster, but I think the days of "bam!" ready are past due to those requirements. Unless the computer is only sleeping, like an iphone for example.
Sure, but a modern computer also has orders of magnitude more processing power than devices that only ran a command line. There is no reason that we cant have both, except incompetence and/or bad economic incentives.
While I agree that incompetence and bad incentives are ever–present, and that all software can be optimized by application of a little elbow grease, I disagree that these are the only reasons.
For example, properly displaying text now requires having a copy of at least the most important parts of the Unicode standard in memory. Things like knowing if a character occupies one, two, or many character cells are very important for even a simple text terminal. Word splitting, kerning, shaping, bi–directional text display, the number of possible refinements grows without bound and all of them need metadata about each and every character. Your average web browser has megabytes of the stuff just sitting around in memory so that it is ready as soon as a character has to go up on the screen. Older computer just didn’t have that kind of memory to spare.
If you want the old–school experience you can still boot straight into the Linux Console, which still thinks that there are only 256 characters. It seems to be reasonably snappy.
Folks will pay for simple and ready immediately, or complicated, multi-user, and rich in a minute. (Plus significant backwards compat.) There is no big need for complicated and ready now. Pulling in the long tail of functionality often desired takes time, and it is mostly IO-bound not CPU bound, which hasn't increased as fast.
I suppose you could put a ton of OS and libraries in a (modern equiv of EEP)ROM for immediate access. The original Macintosh was kinda like that. But things went the other way when disk storage dropped in price a lot faster than chip storage.
Maybe we're back to a point where the former is economically viable, but there would be a lot of historic baggage to overcome.
I agree. Around 2008 when I got my first SSD installed, windows 7 and PCLinuxOS2007 would open apps like Word instantly. You'd click and it'd be there within 100ms.
Now with windows 10 on a much faster pc, clicking apps like Firefox, the start menu, word take seconds to load.
I recently fired up my windows 7 VM to mod an old game console and it was exactly how I remembered. You click something and it's instantly opened.
Most folks want web, email, images, and even a bit of security from their computer today. Could always be faster, but I think the days of "bam!" ready are past due to those requirements. Unless the computer is only sleeping, like an iphone for example.