This take is common, understandable, but at the same time mostly just cynical and I think misguided.
First, application launch times have to do with storage and memory speed over raw CPU power. So, without knowing your exact specs, I can’t tell you if your launch times for your new and old machine are actually a problem, especially if you’ve upgraded your older machine to an SSD or if your new machine still uses a HDD for its main drive.
Second, I simply don’t believe you that it takes a full three seconds to open gnome calculator on your new machine. Or your old one, really. (It makes me want to ask the annoying question: is Linux that bad? My Mac or Windows machine has opened the calculator instantly regardless of the era).
Finally, this is actually the most important point: capability of your computer is still miles ahead of what it used to be. Try playing 1080p video on your 2004 machine. Now try 4K.
Maybe you say that high resolution video isn’t important. I don’t agree, but fine, let’s move on:
Browser performance is another hugely important aspect where your 2004 machine will get smoked. Sure, you can remain cynical about websites getting “bloated,” but you should also realize that almost all business applications and some seriously complex general purpose applications are all moving to the web. Things like video conferencing in a browser window were a pipe dream in 2004. Microsoft word used to be considered a big complex and slow application, and now multiple competitors just run it right in your browser.
This is a very good thing for interoperability and for making your Linux system actually useful instead of having to jump on your Windows partition every time you want to collaborate on a Microsoft Word document.
You may not like Apple machines but step into an Apple store one day and play around with the cheapest M1 MacBook Air computer. It has no fan, doesn’t get hot on your lap, and the battery lasts 15 hours. Yet, it beats the 16-inch Intel MacBook Pro that is still the most current model on some benchmarks - a machine that is hot, loud, heavy, and will give you probably 6 hours of battery at best with the largest possible battery that’s legal to fly with.
I think the long story short is that software developers leveraging the hardware is actually a good thing. It means that our capabilities are increasing and developers have less friction, so they can deliver more complex and useful functionality. As long as UI latency is within the acceptable range, allowing developers to build more complex software and focus on functionality over performance optimization could be argued to be a very good thing.
In 2004 a developer would struggle to make a decent cross platform application with rich functionality. Something like a chat application with embedded media would need to be written three times to cover three platforms, and I’m still not aware of any chat app in 2004 that had a whole application and webhook ecosystem. The most important part about a chat application is for it to be interoperable! Now you’ve got Slack, which is practically a business operating system. Rather than being annoyed about that I think we should be impressed.
(I also disagree that gaming is just a niche use of hardware. That’s an industry with higher revenues than movies and sports combined).
First, let me say I mostly agree with you that storage speed is more important for application launch speed than CPU or RAM.
I have an nvme ssd which gets around 450MB/s according to dd, a Ryzen 3900x (12 cores, 24 threads) and 64 gigabytes of RAM.
That being said, IntelliJ Community edition, installed as a snap, takes 24 seconds to get to splash screen, 57 additional seconds for the splash screen to disappear then another 35 seconds before the first text appears in the IntelliJ window (it's a blank gray window before that) for a grand total of 1 minute and 56 seconds of startup time.
Some things are just unreasonably slow despite absolute beastmode hardware.
I don't know what "installed as a snap" means, but:
I'm running WSL 2 with MobaXterm and from running idea.sh, intellij's splash screen comes up in less than 1 second, and my list of projects comes up in about 3 seconds.
It's a packaging system for Ubuntu (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snap_(package_manager)). It's not that IntelliJ is slow, it's that something to do with the snap packages makes them dog slow (Same thing happened with Spotify installed through snap, while a .deb launches in about a second).
> Second, I simply don’t believe you that it takes a full three seconds to open gnome calculator on your new machine. Or your old one, really. (It makes me want to ask the annoying question: is Linux that bad? My Mac or Windows machine has opened the calculator instantly regardless of the era).
I believe it. It takes 10 seconds or so for the Windows 10 calculator to cold-start on my laptop.
I made a shortcut to Windows 10 calculator at work, and beyond the ridiculous workarounds I had to google to get it to start from a hotkey, it's absurdly slow, like 5 seconds.
I was shocked the first time I did it because Win7 calculator was basically instant.
This is on a reasonable i7 PC with an SSD that is not slow for other office-y things.
Why God Why, Microsoft? You're a multi-billion dollar company. You can't make a calculator that starts quickly??
I just opened the calculator on my Windows 10 system (latest stable version) and did not see any splash screen.
(You can also perform calculations straight from the Windows search bar. macOS also let’s you perform calculations directly from spotlight search without opening an app.)
First, application launch times have to do with storage and memory speed over raw CPU power. So, without knowing your exact specs, I can’t tell you if your launch times for your new and old machine are actually a problem, especially if you’ve upgraded your older machine to an SSD or if your new machine still uses a HDD for its main drive.
Second, I simply don’t believe you that it takes a full three seconds to open gnome calculator on your new machine. Or your old one, really. (It makes me want to ask the annoying question: is Linux that bad? My Mac or Windows machine has opened the calculator instantly regardless of the era).
Finally, this is actually the most important point: capability of your computer is still miles ahead of what it used to be. Try playing 1080p video on your 2004 machine. Now try 4K.
Maybe you say that high resolution video isn’t important. I don’t agree, but fine, let’s move on:
Browser performance is another hugely important aspect where your 2004 machine will get smoked. Sure, you can remain cynical about websites getting “bloated,” but you should also realize that almost all business applications and some seriously complex general purpose applications are all moving to the web. Things like video conferencing in a browser window were a pipe dream in 2004. Microsoft word used to be considered a big complex and slow application, and now multiple competitors just run it right in your browser.
This is a very good thing for interoperability and for making your Linux system actually useful instead of having to jump on your Windows partition every time you want to collaborate on a Microsoft Word document.
You may not like Apple machines but step into an Apple store one day and play around with the cheapest M1 MacBook Air computer. It has no fan, doesn’t get hot on your lap, and the battery lasts 15 hours. Yet, it beats the 16-inch Intel MacBook Pro that is still the most current model on some benchmarks - a machine that is hot, loud, heavy, and will give you probably 6 hours of battery at best with the largest possible battery that’s legal to fly with.
I think the long story short is that software developers leveraging the hardware is actually a good thing. It means that our capabilities are increasing and developers have less friction, so they can deliver more complex and useful functionality. As long as UI latency is within the acceptable range, allowing developers to build more complex software and focus on functionality over performance optimization could be argued to be a very good thing.
In 2004 a developer would struggle to make a decent cross platform application with rich functionality. Something like a chat application with embedded media would need to be written three times to cover three platforms, and I’m still not aware of any chat app in 2004 that had a whole application and webhook ecosystem. The most important part about a chat application is for it to be interoperable! Now you’ve got Slack, which is practically a business operating system. Rather than being annoyed about that I think we should be impressed.
(I also disagree that gaming is just a niche use of hardware. That’s an industry with higher revenues than movies and sports combined).