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Comment by missedthecue | Hacker News Reader

"My computer today is 10-20x more powerful than the 2010 one, yet somehow everything is slower, uglier, and less reliable."

Seems like rose colored nostalgia glasses.

- Operating systems have become MUCH more stable. I restart my computer every 3 months, it used to be every 2 days.

- I remember when I had to pause a youtube video and wait for the grey bar to advance before watching the next 90 seconds of it, and then repeating. I remember constant Skype issues around 2010. Facetime is practically flawless. Encoding has quietly gotten a lot better.

- Adaptability is amazing. I remember when software was only available on extremely specific devices, and now I can access almost everything I have from literally every device.

- Encryption by default is practically universal now.

- Seamless syncing. From version recovery to web browsing. We multitask a lot more.

- Universal file formats and APIs

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> Operating systems have become MUCH more stable

2010 is Windows 7 era, not the dark ages of pre-XP-SP2. I don't recall having computer crashes out of the blue - all the ones I've experienced are due to my own fault by trying to overclock the system.

I'm sure shitty hardware and drivers is a thing (this is traditionally where Apple excelled at in comparison) but I don't recall it being an issue on quality hardware.

> I had to pause a youtube video and wait for the grey bar to advance before watching the next 90 seconds of it

Shitty Wi-Fi/broadband/peering? Ironically nowadays I sometimes experience that too, except instead of waiting for video to download I'm waiting for some Javascript to finish re-rendering the page 3 times.

> I remember constant Skype issues around 2010

Again shitty connection maybe? I was spending every evening on Skype calls and to this day it's been way more reliable than anything I've tried since, thanks to it being P2P. So I guess if you were having constant issues it's down to the network.

> I don't recall having computer crashes out of the blue...

I think usually Windows machines crash into blue instead

That's really just a meme though. NT has always been rock solid with just some driver related issues dotted around.

> Seems like rose colored nostalgia glasses.

Not really. I used a Windows 2000 computer a few months ago and it worked like a charm: quickly and efficiently. Modern Windows feels leagues behind in performance.

Agree, I never used Windows 2000, but I used NT4 in the late nineties and it was rock solid, no less reliable than Windows 11, and of course, snappier on vastly lesser hardware, I think I used it on a Pentium III.

Operating Systems are more stable compared to early nineties, but not 2010. I was using NT4 in the late nineties, and it was rock solid. I had a Sun Ultra 1 at home at the time, and that was rock solid too.

Stability got good in the mid-late nineties for most Operating Systems, it's mostly plateaued since then, because it's not like you can be more than 100% reliable. My Sun Ultra 1 never once crashed in the time I owned it, same for my NT4 machine at work.

> Operating systems have become MUCH more stable.

While restarting some versions of Windows servers in the 2000s and 2010s to workaround memory leaks was normal, old OSes through history have been stable.

Linux has been around for decades and has been very stable.

Windows 3.1, 3.11 for workgroups, NT 4.0, Server 2000, XP, Vista, 10 & 11 have all been fairly stable after patches.

Win 95 and 98 after patches were stable enough. Win ME and 8 were crap, but Win 8 was more just crap experience.

Really most of the problems with Microsoft, Apple, Linux desktop environments and package systems could be categorized into being related to increases in complexity, many unnecessary changes, and just poor design or experience.

IBM chose macOS years ago because of the reduced cost to maintain them, while most IT professionals continue to choose Microsoft because the barrier to entry cost is low and because of familiarity, likely because younger people have Windows because it’s cheaper, they can play more games on it, and that’s what they grew up with, but Linux continues to be the primary server OS.

Little of that has to do with stability, and just because Windows 10 & 11 are stable doesn’t mean that things weren’t more stable 40-50 years ago. Linux admins for years prided themselves on the uptime metrics back then.

Netware. That thing stayed up forever on cheap clone hardware.

> … 40-50 years ago. Linux admins …

Note that Linux admins would’ve been in last ~40 years, but yes things were stable even longer ago. The problems came mostly with memory/resources not being cleaned up in C/C++ libraries and programs, primarily in Windows, because it was a little more chaotic with a lot of dev, a lot of differing hardware, and not as much oversight.

Not one of the OSes you mention were around 40 years ago (i.e. in 1985)

I think they were just saying that was the decade when microcomputers started coming about in offices

> I restart my computer every 3 months

Funny how habits stick, I still shut my primary desktop down at the end of every day because for all of my youth that was just what you did.

They boot so damn fast it doesn't really matter and I kinda like starting the day with a "fresh" desktop (same reason I clean my desk every night - starting work with a neat desk is great - I trash it through the day and repeat).

Do you rely on state saving things like resumed browser sessions, or just really start fresh every day?

I start fresh every day. Bookmarks and git are durable, browser sessions are transient.

I'd call you an inspiration but that would be giving myself too much credit because in reality I don't think I could even convince myself to try.

Fully fresh everyday, it’s in the history if I want whatever it was.

I’m still fairly ruthless about not having a tonne of tabs open (also gonna be an age thing, I predate tabbed web browsers and for a while after their introduction you’d either grind them to a halt or crash them entirely with too many tabs open and too many wasn’t many).

I admire this. I'm also old but fell on the "comically large number of tabs" side.

I remember that when I clicked a button in the UI and got an instant reaction instead a pause because some resource has to be loaded the cloud.

Restarting?

Huh I remember times when I was basically reinstalling the system once a month because of file system issues.

Putting computer to hibernation nowadays works and earlier it would most definitely cause problems.

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