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Comment by hombre_fatal | Hacker News Reader

Even if end-users had the data to reasonably tie-break on software quality and performance, as I scroll my list of open applications not a single one of them can be swapped out with another just because it were more performant.

For example: Docker, iterm2, WhatsApp, Notes.app, Postico, Cursor, Calibre.

I'm using all of these for specific reasons, not for reasons so trivial that I can just use the best-performing solution in each niche.

So it seems obviously true that it's more important that software exists to fill my needs in the first place than it pass some performance bar.

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I’m surprised in your list because it contains 3 apps that I’ve replaced specifically due to performance issues (docker, iterm and notes). I don’t consider myself particularly performance sensitive (at home) either. So it might be true that the world is even _less_ likely to pay for resource efficiency than we think.

What did you replace Docker with?

Podman

Podman might have some limited API compatibility, but it's a completely different tool. Just off the bat it's not compatible with Skaffold, apparently.

That an alternate tool might perform better is compatible with the claim that performance alone is never the only difference between software.

Podman might be faster than Docker, but since it's a different tool, migrating to it would involve figuring out any number of breakage in my toolchain that doesn't feel worth it to me since performance isn't the only thing that matters.

Except you’ve already swapped terminal for iterm, and orbstack already exists in part because docker left so much room for improvement, especially on the perf front.

I swapped Terminal for iTerm2 because I wanted specific features, not because of performance. iTerm2 is probably slower for all I care.

Another example is that I use oh-my-zsh which is adds weirdly long startup time to a shell session, but it lets me use plugins that add things like git status and kubectl context to my prompt instead of fiddling with that myself.

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