Sure there's more software bloat, and webpage bloat, but if anything the overall user experience has gotten faster. And that's even with resource hogs like Retina displays and 4K video.
Like, go look up YouTube videos of people using older systems (not VM's). A Mac in 1989 takes forever to open an application, open a file, or save a file. The HDD clicking away... Remember how Word implemented "fast save" to shorten save times, which appended a lot of changes rather than rewriting the whole file? Nobody worries about that today.
"Windows NT on 600MHz machine opens apps instantly. What happened?"
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36447704
There's also the note that this person was running NT on a later system far, far faster than it was designed for:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36447461
When we're trying to reproduce what older systems were like, it's important not to be combining software from earlier era on hardware from a later one.
How much faster? Our hardware is several orders of magnitude faster than 20-30 years ago. And yet it takes multiple seconds to start even the simplest app doing nothing, and don't get me started on more complex software
This is what I don't get when people say. On my MacBook, I just launched TextEdit. The entire "launch" time is basically taken up by a window zoom effect that is maybe half a second.
I just put chrome://restart into my browser bar, and Chrome quit and fully relaunched in about three quarters of a second. (And then obviously it takes more time to load the tab contents.)
Double-clicking on a multi-page, 2 MB PDF takes about two-thirds of a second to open Preview and render.
As far as I'm concerned, everything's lightning fast. There's absolute no "taking multiple seconds", whether it's a simple text editor or an entire web browser.
I mean, they advertised "instant wake up from sleep" as a feature... That Macs had in 2008.
I have a Windows machine that starts from NVMe. It takes a full minute for it to start a handful of startup apps, also in NVme: Firefox, Steam, 1password. What is it doing?
On anecdotal evidence, one thing I recall from the late 90's/early 00's era of computing is the sheer prevalence of splash screens. If you wanted to open an application up, the first thing it displayed was a splash screen, with a progress bar that would animate to show you that it was doing something. And these splash screens have become far less prevalent in modern software, which at least anecdotally throws some doubt on Wirth's Law.
There are several noticeable and unforgivable performance issues that I experience regularly with WIN11.
The most-painful is that the WIN11 START MENU will occasionally (about once or twice per day) for no apparent reason, stop responding for 30-45 seconds.
During this period, keystrokes are not responded to (but they are going into the keyboard buffer). When it recovers from its "blackout" it will spit out everything in the keyboard buffer.
WTF is it doing during those 45 seconds?
I can't prove it but I would bet money that it is trying to send telemetry to the Mother-Ship and got its request "load-balanced" onto a node that is not responding.