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Comment by lazyjones | Hacker News Reader

This is hilarious for people who used to boot their OS instantly from ROM in 1985 ... The main culprits here are OS bloat and inefficient boot procedures, not the performance of the storage system.

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To be fair, you did not boot into an OS those days, booted into a single threaded REPL with a library, a “slight” difference...

In 1985, the Atari ST came out and that same year supported booting into its (single-tasking) GUI OS from ROM, quite a step up from the BASIC REPLs I assume you're referencing here.

Indeed O:-) You may have had to wait until as late as April 1989 to have a credibly decent GUI and (collective) multi-tasking straight from ROM.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_RISC_OS#RISC_OS_2

But as a consumer, I can't control for that. I can read specs on SSD speed.

> OS bloat

Results from tradeoffs against other things and is not going away.

> But as a consumer, I can't control for that. I can read specs on SSD speed

You have options. I used to have a Windows PC for all tasks (with these annoying issues) and have since moved to an iPad for most tasks, a PS4 for games and a MacBook for programming (which I admittedly don‘t do much anymore). SSD speed is not relevant anymore, booting has been replaced by opening/picking up/starting from hibernation.

What stops you putting your xOS PC in standy/hibernation ? I believe you compare different situations/needs

Hardware has been getting faster for decades; somehow software always manages to slow it down. I don't think there's a way to win this race without either changing the tradeoffs or building a software culture that actually cares about performance.

As the quotation goes: "What Andy giveth, Bill taketh away."

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