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2. The graphics are a lot more sophisticated. Animation and transparency and lots of good stuff.

Strong disagree. Borderless icons floating in a sea of flatness is not "more sophisticated" by any means than the fully-customisable UI which was common in the XP era, and the huge amount of "skinning" that was also very popular. Transparent/translucent effects became common with Vista and that was run on the GPU, which was in general much less powerful than the ones today.

I'll add a 5th point: Thanks to a low barrier to entry, the average developer now is much lower quality than the average 20 years ago.

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Fair point, it does seem like the modern graphics are less sophisticated than the transparent/translucent of the Vista era.

And yes, I would very much agree regarding the quality of the average developer. To devs nowadays who might feel sad about that, I don't think it's most developers fault, rather they/we are the product of a system (such as a scrum) that only cares about quality and performance when it's bad enough to be noticed by many users. Beyond that, you get promoted and good annual reviews by shipping features, regardless of whether they are actually quality/performant or not.

To your 5th point: newer generations have not been confronted with the hardware limitations older generations had to cope with.

Hence, optimization is not a skill new generations of developers are forced to learn.

newer generations have not been confronted with the hardware limitations older generations had to cope with.

That has been true for every new generation of programmers since the invention of computers. My uncle started to program using Fortran IV in the 60s and he said that the 'real' programmers at the time looked down on the likes of him for using such an inefficient high level language and not learning how to program properly.

Good point :)

It reminds me of "kids have no manners anymore" that has been recorded since antiquity.

I assume Windows 11 handles high DPI monitors a lot better than Windows XP, which must add some complexity to graphics rendering.

Is it a joke? Today's GPUs are miles and miles away from what we got back then. The is no brainer to compare Nvidia 6600 gt and some 3060.

Raw power that we have now in our PCs and laptops are enormous and some better high DPI handling cannot justify why everything nowadays is so sluggish an laggy.

> I assume Windows 11 handles high DPI monitors a lot better than Windows XP

YMMV. I think "a lot better" is an overstatement. You have some fractional scaling which, depending of the program, might do what you need. But the fact that you cannot change fonts and colors is a real issue. Not everybody loves gray on gray.

> Thanks to a low barrier to entry, the average developer now is much lower quality than the average 20 years ago.

I think this is a big reason why we have lots of poorly performing JavaScript based software.

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