I still have the brainwash/muscle-memory to type:

$ gunzip -c somefile.tar.gz | tar xvf -

.. because there was, once, a day when the terminal buffer available for this pipe was bigger than available memory offered to a process by default, meaning the thing would unpack faster if I did that versus:

$ tar zxvf somefile.tar.gz

Admittedly, this discrepancy of available memory was usually because the BOFH hadn't realized there was also an allocation for pipes-per-user, so it was a neat trick to get around the hard limits that BOFH had imposed on some of my processes in terms of heap allocation ..

No, it has to do with every time you move the mouse over a window, a hover event is sent to the application, which runs its main event loop. Either the installer only updated its progress bar when an event happened (in which case it would only appear to be going faster, because the progress bar would move more smoothly) or there was some really terribly written code that literally only made progress when an (unrelated) event happened. My guess is the former.

Explanation for that is here: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20210126-00/?p=10...

There must be so many subtle features like these that people use subconsciously, and when they try to move to another operating system, they try it, nothing happens and they get frustrated.