The real sad part for me is the amount of e-waste this produces. Especially in devices like laptops.
A clean Linux distro can extend a laptops life by a decade. I have a laptop from the c2d era that I threw an ssd in and put Linux on. Perfectly serviceable as a basic machine.
I don’t typically see computers getting replaced because they are “slow” but because of factors more related to support like apple dropping support for older models just because of reasons. Or companies doing routine system replacements because their fleet of computers are getting banged up and damaged and since they are XYZ years since their release and are no longer in production their costs and complexity with repair, maintenance time, etc… Are no longer worthwhile. Not to mention, the more insecure members of our species feel their self worth is dependent on how fancy and new their things are.
If you want to point fingers at why performance for operating systems and programs has declined over the years I would say it’s mostly in part due to security functions.
I doubt that the main source of software performance issues is due to security. I think the main problem is that software is not optimized anymore. Add this lib and that one.
Most devs I work with don’t even know how much CPU or memory their application needs to run.
I have an ancient early W7-era AMD dual core (bulldozer based? So it’s actually like 1.5c) that runs just peachy on Lubuntu LTS, 8gb of mismatched used Ram I got for free, and an ancient slow HDD.
I use it for D&D (Roll20 and Foundry) and MTG (Cockatrice).
I tested W10 with a ReadyBoost sd card and 2gb RAM and it barely worked.
It’s shocking how much faster Linux runs compared to a modern windows installation. I do worry however that as more and more programmers focus on web apps that we will eventually see the same problem on Linux as well. Developing desktop applications for Linux is already a pain and the ease of making modern web apps will amplify the problem. At least Linux won’t have all of the awful bloat that Microsoft runs in the background on windows these days, but I don’t think we will be able to escape from web app hell on Linux.
I do worry however that as more and more programmers focus on web apps that we will eventually see the same problem on Linux as well.
I wouldn’t worry about it. If it becomes a problem in Linux, there would have already been an implosion in Windows land and I am pretty sure people will start to notice and come up with better solutions. I honestly don’t understand why web apps have to bundle their own Electron builds instead of just sharing a common installation of specific versions of Electron.
I have a love/hate relationship with desktop web apps on Linux. They are a great blessing in some ways because I get to run apps that just wouldn’t be available to me otherwise because Linux typically isn’t a priority for consumer-focused services. Often support exists as a convenient bonus because it came with the web app platform choice.
On the other hand, you get a web app, which looks nice (hopefully) but gobbles down your resources.
The telemetry thing is why I almost always turn that off in every program that has the option to disable it. You can really see the difference in a lot of games, especially online games, with just that 1 thing. It’s insane.
As an individual that has worked in IT for over a decade, yes. We keep making things incredibly fast, and for complex operations, that speed gain is realized, but for diverse, simple tasks, there’s ultimately, very little difference between something rather old and something rather new. The most significant uplift in real-world performance has been the SSD. Simply, eliminating, or nearly-eliminating the delay of spinning disks seek times is by far the best thing that’s happened for performance. Newer OSes and newer hardware go hand-in-hand, because with added hardware speed, comes software complexity, which is why a late-stage Windows 7 system typically will outperform an early stage Windows 10 machine; what I mean by “stage” here, is the point in time where the OS is considered “current” where early-stage is that it has recently become the currently newest OS, vs late stage, when it is soon to be overshadowed by something newer.
Microsoft made great performance gains over many years with windows since migrating to all NT-kernel OSes, around Windows XP, things got faster and faster, right up to around windows 8. Windows 7 was the last version, IMO, that was designed to be faster than it’s predecessors with more speed improvements than losses from the added complexity of the OS; from then on, we’ve been adding more complexity (ie, slowing things down) at a faster rate than we can optimize and speed them up. Vista was a huge leap forward in security, adding code signing, specifically for drivers and such; in that process, MS streamlined drivers to run in a more-native way, though kernel-mode drivers were more or less a thing of the past; this, however, caused a lot of issues as XP-era drivers wouldn’t work with Vista very well, if at all. Windows 7 further streamlined this, and as far as I know, there have been minimal if any improvements since.
In all of these cases, based on the XP base code (derived from NT4), it is still functionally slower than 9x, since all versions of 9x are written in x86 machine code rather than C, which is what NT is based on AFAIK. The migration to C code brought two things with it, the first, and most pertinent thing is slowdowns in the form of compiler optimizations, or rather, the lack of compiler optimizations, the second thing is portability, as the codebase is now C, the platform can now be recompiled fairly easily for different architectures, this was a long-term play by MS to ensure future compatibility with any architecture that may arise moving forward, all that MS would need to make Windows work on x (whatever arch is “next”), would be to write a C compiler for x, then begin compiling and debugging the code. MS has been ready and even produced several builds of windows for ARM and for MIPS specifically, and can likely migrate to RISC V anytime they want (if they haven’t already). This was the most significant slowdown from 9x to XP.
As time went on, security features started being integrated into the OS at the kernel level, everything from driver and application signing, to encryption (full-drive, aka bitlocker, and data-in-flight, aka AES or HTTPS), and more. The TPM requirement for Windows 11 is the next basic step in this march forward for security. They’re going this way because they have to. In order to be considered a viable OS for high-security applications, like government use, they must have security features that restrict access and ensure the security of data both in flight and at rest (on disk), the TPM is the next big step to doing that. The random seed in the TPM is far superior to any pseudo-random software seed that may exist, and the secured vault ensures that only authorized access is permitted to the security keys on the TPM, for things like full-disk encryption. The entire industry has been moving this direction just under the surface; and if you haven’t had an eye to watch for it, then it would be completely invisible to you. This describes most consumers and especially gamers, who just want fast games and reliable access to their computers.
Speaking of consumers, at the same time, MS, like almost all software/web/whatever companies, have been moving towards making you, and specifically, your data, into a product they can sell. this is the Google approach. As an entity, at least until fairly recently, Google didn’t make any money from their customers directly, instead they harvested their data, profiled all the users and sold advertisements based on that information, and they were INCREDIBLY successful at it and made plenty enough to keep them afloat. They’ve recently gotten into hardware and service (all the “as a service”) offerings which has allowed them to grow. Facebook and Amazon have both done the same (among others but there’s too many to list), and many other companies, including MS, are wondering “why not us too” because they see dollar signs down the road, as long as they can collect enough information about you to sell; So MS in their unique position, can basically cram down your throat all the data-harvesting malware they want, provided it never gets flagged as what it really is: MALWARE.
IMO, since Windows 7, they’ve been doing recon on all their users to try to obtain this information, which is part of the reason why everyone is being forced into using their Microsoft accounts for their PC logins on any non-pro and non-enterprise version of windows. This way they can tie the data they’re collecting about you, to you specifically. As of Windows 11, this has ramped up significantly. More and more malware to observe you and your behavior, and basically build an advertising profile for you that they can sell. They want more information all the time, and the process of collecting that information and pushing it back to MS to sell has become more and more invasive as time goes on; these processes take computing power away from you as the consumer to serve MS’s end goals, of selling you, their paying customer, to their advertisers. They will be paid on both sides (by you, for their product, and by their advertisers for your information). The worst part about it is that they haven’t really had any significant push-back on any of it.
If you go back to Windows 9x, or DOS/Windows 3.1 days, none of this was happening, so the performance you got, was the performance the hardware could deliver; now, all of your programs have to go through so many layers to actually hit the hardware to be executed, that it’s slowed things down to the point where it’s DRAMATICALLY NOTICABLE. So yeah, if you’re doing something intensive, like running a compression or encryption or benchmark or similar, you’ll get very close to the real performance of the system, but if you’re dynamically switching between apps, launching relatively small programs frequently, and generally multitasking, you’re going to be hit hard by this. Not only does the OS need to index your action to build your advertising profile, it also needs to run the antivirus to scan the files you’re accessing to make sure nobody else’s malware is going to run, and observe every action you take, to report back to the overlords about what you’re doing. In this always-on, always-connected world, you’re paying for them to spy on you pretty much all the time. It’s so DRAMATICALLY WORSE with windows 11, that it’s becoming apparent that this is happening - to everyone; as someone who has seen all of this growing from the shadows in IT for a decade, I’m entirely unsurprised. Simply upgrading your computer to a newer OS makes it slower, always. I’ve never wondered why, I’ve always known. There’s more moving parts they’re putting in the way. It’s not that the PC is slower, it just has SO MUCH MORE TO DO that it doesn’t move faster, and often, it’s noticeably slowed down by the processes.
Without jumping ship to Linux or some other FOSS, you’re basically SOL… Your phone is spying on you (whether android or iOS), your PCs are spying on you (whether Chromebook, Windows, or MAC), your “smart” home everything is spying on you, whether you have amazon alexa, google home, or Apple’s equivalent… Now, even your car is starting to spy on you. Regardless of what it is, if it’s more complex than a toaster, it’s probably reporting your information to someone. There’s very few if any software companies that are not doing this. Your choice then becomes a choice of equally bad options of who collects your data to sell it to whomever wants it, or go full tinfoil-hat and start expunging everything from your life that has a circuit more complicated than a 1980’s fridge in it, and going to live in the forest. I’m doomed to sell my data to someone; so far it’s mainly been MS and Google. My line of work doesn’t really allow me to go “off-grid” and survive in my field; not everyone is in my position. So make your choice. This isn’t going to get better anytime soon, and as far as I can see, it will never stop… so choose.
I love this but my lemmy client really needs to shorten long messages and have an (expand) button if we’re gonna have huge character limits like this because scrolling past this took an hour.
Stop buying games that need 220gb of drive space, an Nvidia gtx 690000 and a 7263641677 core processor then. More than a 60gb download size means I pirate it unless it’s a really really damn good game. Games with no drm that can be run without a $20k computer, I buy.
Games are far from the worst examples of this. Largely games are still very high performance. Some lax policies on sizes are not the norm, most data is large because it’s just high detail.
The real losses are simple desktop apps being entire web engines.
Games are definitely not very well optimised. For one, most indie publishers are artists rather than software developers, which means that they do not have the technical expertise to properly program their applications, especially on the OpenGL/Vulkan/Direct3D side of things. Large video game corporations, in contrast, are indeed quite capable of reducing the hardware requirements and increasing the performance of their games, but they are often not willing, as became particularly evident recently with Jedi: Survivor, where a major public outcry was required for them to fix the game’s performance problems, which they have done quite competently.
It’s not just applications. I recently “upgraded” two of my PCs from Windows 8.1 to to Windows 10. Ever since that having the mouse polling rate above like 125Hz and moving the cursor would result in frame drops in games.
This happened across two machines with different hardware, the only common denominator being the switch in Windows version. Tried a bunch of troubleshooting until I ultimately upgraded CPU + RAM due to RAM becoming faulty some time later on one of the machines. That finally resolved the issue.
So yeah, having to upgrade your hardware not because it’s showing its age but rather because the software running on it has become more inefficient is a real problem IMO.
Time to uninstall Windows 11 and go back to 3.11! Sure, it won’t run anything made since the mid 90s at best, but what it does run will surely be lightning fast!!
Time to uninstall Windows 11 and go back to 3.11! Sure, it won’t run anything made since the mid 90s at best, but what it does run will surely be lightning fast!!
Time to uninstall Windows 11 and go back to 3.11! Sure, it won’t run anything made since the mid 90s at best, but what it does run will surely be lightning fast!!
A lightweight Linux distro can get you the same results with current software. Hell, even Ubuntu will. The deterrent has always been that you have to tinker with it to get it to work right, but that’s a lot less true now then it was in the past. I recently installed Ubuntu 22.04 on my wife’s old iMac and it’s lightening fast and worked straight out of the box with no tinkering whatsoever. It’s about 20 times faster than it was running iOS.
I would be curious about the feasibility of a “performance mode” that was basically “reboot you into a “single program” mode”. I assume it would be unreasonable given so much software relies on the tools modern OSes provide, unless the software itself was made with this in mind.
You’d imagine some giant like Adobe would figure out a way to run dedicated machines, given they have so much software that uses lots of resources. But then, as best as I would find it for games, I imagine most people don’t want to give up alt-tabbing to their web browsers.
Edit: Besides. The real benefits would hit until you were coding to the metal anyway, right? Assuming that’s still feasible too.
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