I recently used a very minimal install of Void on a machine that crushes what I had in, say, 2005, on a performance basis (2GB memory, dual-core Celeron clocked over 1Ghz, solid-state disk) and the whole system was slooooow and choppy even using mostly suckless software like dwm, including their Surf (webkit-based but otherwise as minimal as it gets) browser—if I opened even one "web app" or more than a couple lighter pages at once.
If you remove the requirement for a modern Web experience, we used to fit pretty damn good GUI operating systems on single live-boot floppy disks (QNX had one of these, IIRC, and it was great—much better UI responsiveness under load than a Linux desktop, kinda like BeOS but even tinier)
Only thing that is non-stock is the ram size has been increased in capacity but I rarely use all of it (only if I have like 50+ browser tabs open) Just a guess but never counted it.
I think the keys to a fast desktop experience is
-stay away from linux. The kernel and most distros suffer from kitchensinkitis.
-don't use a heavy window manager. I use a custom configuration of Motif (it works and does not get in the way).
With quality software old tech is still more than competent today. I can watch HD youtube videos too if I want.
Office suites and programs like inkscape work fine. This is a 2 core machine.
If I need more compute power I can use the cloud.
> -don't use a heavy window manager. I use a custom configuration of Motif (it works and does not get in the way).
Yeah, that's why I picked Void. It's only a little fatter than Alpine, but better-suited to desktop use. Agreed that Linux generally has never (in the 20ish years I've used it, anyway) felt high-performance, exactly, on a workstation, but Void keeps out the garbage services Linux has accumulated over the years, unless you install them yourself, so gets it to a point where it's only slightly fatter than circa 2000 Linux (kernel's grown larger, no getting around that). Used dwm because it's extremely light. Certainly Gnome wouldn't have worked, to pick the worst possible option (resource-use wise).
Overall, Linux continues to feel like it does very poorly (in a workstation/desktop context, anyway) any time there's any contention for resources whatsoever, including just multiple things needing CPU cycles. Which is... kinda a shitty way to be, for a multitasking operating system.
Maybe I'd have had better luck with a BSD, I dunno. It felt OK to use, though, as long as I avoided the Web. I think that machine's going back to being a Lakka box under my TV, but next time I'm on something relatively weak maybe I'll cycle through a couple of the BSDs to see if any of them work better for me.
It was kept alive by two entirely disparate user groups: the iMac crowd who only used a browser (or the AOL client), and professional designer users who spent the entire day in Avid (or Pro Tools or After Effects or QuarkXPress or Photoshop).
But, jokes aside, I still got a lot of work done in Mac OS 9 back in the day, so it wasn't nearly that dire even if it was best not to peek under the hood.
> And also for more rigorous work tasks (programming, video editing, sound editing)
Somewhat amusingly, an OS like DOS (or QNX) would probably be better at video/sound editing than any "modern" OS. It took a long time for Linux to be able to do audio processing or other real-time low latency things. Even today you may have to tweak things a bit[1] depending on your use case. A video editor that has complete control over your machine would absolutely scream. A lightweight DOS with support for newer hardware (USB, PCIe, etc.) with a thin Vulkan/OpenGL and networking stack would probably be ideal for these types of apps.
I run it text-only on some crap Dell Dimension in my basement workshop. 15-21 megabytes of memory used on a default install. Has networking, framebuffer, usb, and otherwise all the modern trimmings. Probably the closest you'll ever come to a modern DOS experience. Like one commenter above said, everything seems more proprietary now. The moment I realised we no longer live in an open standards world, was when I realised there was no text-mode Discord client, not even possible to make without getting banned from the service.
People don't do "on device" anymore outside of unusual situations.