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Comment by anigbrowl | Hacker News Reader

I have almost the same background (Vic-20, if you thought programming was hard try having only 3.5k of RAM) and feel the same irritation...but I don't wonder why computers aren't faster, I wonder why operating systems and application is so utterly shit.

I have a Moto X phone (not too old) and watching it slow down is almost comical. Sometimes I'll decide to close a few apps and hitting the selector button brings up screenshots of all the open apps. Then I have to wait a few seconds for the X to appear on the app frames so I can close them.

If I had the inclination and temperment to be one of those YouTube personalities who makes a schtick out of complaining about things I would have no shortage of material for a 'designed by idiots' channel.

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I think most of the shit is concentrated on a couple of notable platforms: Windows and Android. Outside of that space I've noticed less productivity hampering nightmare tools and OS features. Really I get perhaps one or two bits of stupid from Linux a year on the server-side, usually when integrating it with Windows ironically, and on the macOS/iOS front I haven't had a notable issue since I switched about a year ago.

I'm using Linux for my daily work for more than ten years now and develop for MacOS since around 2000, and I honestly cannot confirm this. If you have a fast and well-tuned machine, the sluggishness of modern applications might not be so notable, but it surely is there, and then there are also many usability issues of desktop software on Linux. Not to speak of browser-based applications, which mostly have unusable user interfaces anyway. For MacOS, usability is still high, but the multithreading and API layering on Cocoa is and always has felt sluggish to me. I no longer use Mail.app but remember it as a particularly bad example.

I agree with the OP, for actual use computers can do more powerful things than they used to be able to, no doubt about that, but programs and operating systems continue to feel slow and clumsy. Android in particular, but in the end all operating systems.

Bloated GUI frameworks, use of unoptimized images in GUIs, and non-optimal multicore programming are to blame, I guess.

The nice thing about GNU/Linux is that the you can almost completely avoid all of the "desktop applications." I only ever start X when I need Firefox or mupdf. Everything else is a nice lightweight TTY app that I run in tmux. My 1.3 GHz celleron netbook is incredibly responsive set up this way.

Similar but with XFCE, it rarely feels sluggish and I nearly always know why.

I had a laptop celeron 600mhz running xfce and abiword (I think it was xubuntu 14.04 or something) with no networking (only a dialup modem was available). It was a great, responsive typewriter with formatting and backspace!

Aye, for me XFCE is the sweet spot of does what I want without getting in the way and speed.

It's funny really because I mostly use it on an 8 core 32GB Ryzen 1700 desktop.

Expect Firefox to demand a potent GPU just to load soon enough, thanks to GTK3...

Isn't the current version of firefox GTK3? I run it on my laptop with just the EFI framebufer and while it's /the/ most sluggish app installed it's still usable.

It is, and it may work for now. But as i become familiar with the mentality of the GTK devs i worry how long that will be an option.

Gtk3 literally uses the exact same rendering API as Gtk2, Cairo, which is accelerated by your Xorg driver the same as it has been for decades.

None of this even matters because Firefox isn't a traditional application and renders most thing itself using Skia.

Same, but I don't want to play text adventures for the rest of my life either. Graphics are a Good Thing.

Good luck on improving the situation as long as you have people running around who consider this all fine and normal.

https://ptrthomas.wordpress.com/2006/06/06/java-call-stack-f...

Looking through that graph like "you know what we need? More abstractions!"

This actually annoys me badly. One of the problems I see regularly is applications that fail to log enough of the stack to see what the entry point of the thing that actually went wrong is because the syslog packet size is set to 512 bytes. The problem is clearly syslog then, not the 12KiB of stack your app throws when something goes pop!?!?

Um, yeah, the problem is someone setting an arbitrary limit because it was easier to implement. To argue otherwise is basically to claim that there is no possible justification for a deep stack, which, well, good luck proving that. Anyway, even if I don't like all that abstraction (I don't), I may not have a choice in platform (or logging system), so blaming useless syslog messages on the app developer is adding insult to injury. Not that blame is terribly useful when the best course of action is to just burn the whole thing down and start over. :)

The arbitrary limit is a performance thing. Fits neatly in one UDP datagram and passes through everything unhampered by MTU etc.

Agree that burning the whole thing down is the right thing when you get to this place :)

Logging the stack in what format? 500 bytes could fit as much as two hundred numeric entries, or as few as five fully detailed text entries.

If you think Java or Ruby is bad, don’t even try looking at the JS ecosystem.

I still can't face looking at the JS ecosystem after dealing with Netscape 4 back in the day. It did me some psychological damage which will never go away.

Idiomatic Java is idiotic.

Most of the hate for Java that I see is really hate for the idioms. The nice things about idioms is that you don't have to follow them. But for whatever reason, Java devs stick to them. And that's how you get monstrosities like that stack trace and Fizz Buzz Enterprise Edition.

> I no longer use Mail.app but remember it as a particularly bad example.

Huh. I used to think that my Mac Mini was just too puny for my huge mailboxes.

I now use Evolution on openSUSE running on a Ryzen 1700 with an nVME SSD, and it still feels kind of slow-ish. So maybe that program is in need of some loving optimization, too (would not surprise me if it did), or my mailboxes are just unreasonably big (would not surprise me, either). Probably a bit of both.

That's just Evolution. It's a big, complicated turd that uses a thread pool with no priorities. So you can sit there waiting to read a message while it is blocked checking your other folders. Also it's keyboard shortcuts are stupid.

Thunderbird is a lot better.

Unfortunately, Thunderbird does not like to talk to Microsoft Exchange Servers in their native tongue. If it weren't for that, or if my employer did not run on Exchange, I would be using Thunderbird already.

Let me just clarify that I don't use Linux on the desktop. I find it quite horrible to work with, particularly since the demise of Gnome 2. On the server and for development, it is fast and efficient. Most of the development work I do is from the Mac desktop to Linux machines.

I find macOS the "least bad" desktop experience. I think that's the true assertion from my initial comment. But I have a very high end MBP.

As a point for comparison which holds true across different applications, if I take the Photos application on macOS and port the data to the Photos app on Windows 10 and on Android, both of the latter are unusable with a dataset of 30GiB. I have tried this (in reverse!)

I haven't had any problems with Mail.app but I only use that for trivial home email. I use Outlook. Now that's a turd.

the op was building chrome. building on osx exhibits similar issues. there are instructions in the readme on how to configure macos not to chug and lose all responsiveness when building chrome.

You don't have to wait for the X. Just swipe them away.

Or just don't close activities ever, it's pretty pointless. It doesn't actually kill the app if it's still open.

The point I'm making is that the core UI shouldn't be limping along like this. Bad performance for an individual app is understandable, but when the basic UI is no longer efficient or responsive it makes everything worse.

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