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Comment by proc0 | Hacker News Reader

It's amazing to me that Mac and Windows don't really feel (from UX standpoint) that much faster or smoother than 10 years ago despite hardware being much more powerful. Computers get faster but software keeps operating on the "edge" by adding more complexity. Linux is nice, but it would be nicer to have a UX focused product that keeps it simple and takes advantage of fast hardware instead of seeing it as an opportunity to load it with more complexity for seemingly no benefit.

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The main problem is Mac's windows management. I'm having good success with the new stage manager feature along with "reduced motion" enabled, and some hotkeys to activate apps. This gives me near-instant transitions, which I really love about many Linux window managers. (Like Sway.)

This with M1 is the smoothest UX I've ever had, even compared to my powerful Windows computer. While Linux and SwayWM did feel a bit more snappy, the other part of the UX was lacking enough that I spent too much time tweaking and not enough time getting shit done.

My work M1 Mac is buttery smooth. Shame about the mess they've made of Window management and focus stealing crap.

They don’t feel faster than a decade ago and they feel significantly slower than two decades ago. There has to be some “law” name for how software expands to consume any increased resources.

I expect that's a corollary to Parkinson's law

You're correct, there is:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_and_Bill%27s_law

Bill and Andy's law says software gets slower at the same rate that hardware gets faster.

Wirth's law says software gets slower more quickly than hardware gets faster.

There are other similar eponymous laws, but they're basically those two laws stated differently or with different attributions.

>Linux is nice, but it would be nicer to have a UX focused product that keeps it simple and takes advantage of fast hardware instead of

Try XFCE or some other low-resource UI.

Fluxbox ftw!!

It's amazing to me how many glaringly obvious issues Windows 10 still has. Recently I had to leave the comfort of my PopOS! desktop and use a brand-new Windows 10 gaming laptop.

Windows + "putty" would regularly lose keystrokes at the beginning of the word. And for whatever reason, typing "putty" would not select "putty" as the top choice, but "puttygen".

And then I wrote a text in Notepad where I had to paste in some information. Ctrl+V and started typing. Boy was I surprised that the paste command was delayed and pasted halfway into the next word.

Like WTF Microsoft? You have 4 CPU cores boosting to 4+ GHz and you can't keep up with my typing speed in the core UI of your OS? Is this thing dedicated entirely to vision-impaired retirees?

I had a 2019 Macbook and it felt like an unbearably slow piece of crap that constantly had the spinning ball and fans blasting full speed doing just about nothing. Now my 2020 M1 feels extremely snappy. Everything is instant now.

> Linux is nice, but it would be nicer to have a UX focused product

I feel like this is being over-used at this point. Modern gnome works fine.

GNOME is garbage made by people who really really wish they were working on tablet UIs but weren't good enough to work for Apple or Google. They repeatedly show disdain for the user base and their product is nigh unusable without extensions they provide no guarantee will continue working version to version.

I guess it doesn't work for you. I have no problems with it. In fact, I vastly prefer it to both Windows and OSX.

For me, I like the simplicity. I don't need any extensions. I don't have to hunt around for settings in ten different places with different user interfaces (windows, I'm looking at you). I have never got on with the window management in OSX, but some clearly prefer it.

I guess KDE is what people who want everything to be customisable out of the box should use, but I haven't tried that in years.

What if I don't want modern UIs and want to go back the old days of spinning skull gifs and flames?

Try NSCDE https://github.com/NsCDE/NsCDE

I disagree. I have been using Kubuntu and Fedora at work.

Fedora supposedly is amazing because always ahead, and I would, except that I'm terrified of upgrading because every time I do, gnome breaks plugins. Gnome without plugins is not usable from my perspective (system tray), which essentially managed to create this horrible situation where I have to delay upgrading for 6 months to be on the safe side.

Kubuntu on the other side, is ubuntu. Canonical messed up badly with Pro, so I'm looking for alternatives. That's when I realized that my only problem with Fedora IS GNOME. Next time, I'm sticking to KDE, I don't care what the most common one is, KDE seems to be more stable and that's important to me.

And the window manager is way more flexibility for heavy multidesktop users...

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