I don't buy into this mentality. It's just wasting time. Your user suffers due to bloat and slowness on commercial software (like websites full of tracking and heavy UI design) due to economical reasons (no benefit in optimizing user perf for the company) and not due to system software like one Drew writes.
It's just kind of a LARP of "old school" and "minimalistic", which is fine. Just let's not pretend there's some practical benefit.
In 2022 a Sandy Bridge (2012) computer is still a viable computer and viable for the foreseeable future. In 2012, a late Pentium III/early Pentium 4 was not yet an antique but already severely outdated.
Sure, maybe my computer might have screamed at me if I tried to watch AV1 or H.265 4K video, but... my computer is 10 years old and so is my monitor, so I don't have a 4K monitor. And, quite frankly, I don't see the point upgrading from 1080 to 4K.
It saves footage in a very inefficient format which is horrible to edit with, so it'll be slow and clunky on anything.
A lot of people editing iPhone footage are going to use a phone-native app like CapCut, but even with that coping with the horribly inefficient compression of h.264 and h.265 footage gets them up to egg-frying temperature very quickly.
Your argument "that's a myth" is based on a task that's so small in terms of percentage it's literally a rounding error.
I'm typing this on a 2010 computer (i7 870 @ 2.93GHz, 16GB RAM), which I also use to write software (C, Lazarus, JS, Go using VSCode, Vim, Emacs), browse web, use web apps (miro, tinkercad, asciiflow, a few others).
Inkscape works acceptably, light image retouching using Gimp works acceptably.
I used to play Starcraft II, Far Cry 3/4/5 on this machine until an upgrade nuked my Wine installation and I didn't bother to fix that.
My steam library is filled with games that work on this machine.
Out of the thousands of tasks that people use their computer for, two of them can't be done acceptably on this machine.
Components using planar transistors will last longer.
This does not help save your electrolytic capacitors, which are a primary limiter of an electronic device's longevity.
I still need to get around to replacing mine with tantalums…
And if system software developers believed that line of reasoning, then that would be slow as well, and if the commercial application vendors gave half as much attention and effort then those wouldn't be so bloated and awful.
Did you not read the article? He makes a direct comparison between two window managers and the different levels of performance they provide. The system software obviously matters.
Moreover, there's huge benefits to optimizing the performance, even from a corporate perspective. There's just often not many market driven reasons to do so, and so many companies are willfully blind to this truth.
So, you assertion seems to boil down to "everyone else does it in a crappy way because they are ignorant, so you should too, to avoid 'wasting time'." It's a bizarre take.
Hmm. Like with most things, there are benefits and drawbacks to this approach, but outright dismissal as 'LARP' is, at best, uncharitable. Are you sure you cannot come up with at least one good practical reason?
The idea that using underpowered computer makes you write some faster or better software etc. is just silly. Especially that all the really fast and well known projects in last few years tend to come from Rust people, with their super heavy compiler that has no respect for RAM and storage usage.
It's by definition always better to have a faster box than slower one. You want to see how it works on much slower boxes? Run it with a CPU quota or in a VM. People don't do it, not because they can't, or because they have too fast computers, but because they have other priorities.
I will admit that I would rather someone with more experience commented on this rather than me.
That said, I disagree on general principle.
When you are restrained ( sometimes severely restrained ) by the environment, the net result is that you use resources a lot more efficiently. I absolutely get that we are kinda spoiled now with crazy hardware that is basically a supercomputer from not so long ago and it is hard to let that convenience and power go, but that lends to the bloated software landscape we have today that manages to overuse just about every resource available.
With limited power, you are effectively forced to write better. It is not completely unlike training with weights. It is not silly. It produces real results.
...so? I don't understand why I should begrudge his preferences.
How is it wasting time?
> Your user suffers due to bloat and slowness on commercial software [..] due to economical reasons
The article mentions KDE which i wouldn't categorize as commercial software.
There is room to improvement in regards to Rust's compilation speed.
That they rather spend resources in other areas deemed more critical is another matter.
However I must admit, it has improved a lot on my humble 1215B netbook from 2009.