Yeah, I believe you. And honestly, what have we really gained except for bloat over the last 20 years? I don’t think desktop apps or the web are really much better now than they were before. Hardware got better, software got worse, ended up a net negative, I’d say. 7 was nice. XP was fine. I still miss the simplicity of 95…
Audacity works much better. Mostly because the hardware is better. It used to be really slow to work with, and really slow to convert WAV files to MP3. Now it’s fast and easy to use.
I absolutely agree with you, except that Windows 95 wasn’t very reliable when gaming. I was never a big gamer but my son was, and Win 95 crashes were annoying. Then XP came along with the rock-solid NT kernel and the DirectX API for games, and all was sweetness and light! Ever since then the new stuff has mostly been bloat, and it’s getting worse than ever.
Yeah. MP3s used to take forever to make! Now you can download an entire song and transcode it before you even have time to show a progress bar. Kids these days will never know the pain of a failed rip or having to choose which 10 songs to load onto a MP3 player…
True, that was a big deal.
It wasn’t just the “making mp3” part that was slow. Opening files was slow. Selecting a chunk to do something to was slow. There was a lot of waiting with every step. Now, i expect it to react immediately, and it does.
Really? I remember interfaces being so much quicker in the day, with the start menu opening instantly, dialogs and menus being snappy, etc. It’s all so slow nowadays even on CPUs and GPUs a thousand times faster. Maybe the long running operations took longer then, but the overall experience felt so much more responsive than today’s bloated apps.
Could just be my memory though, too…
If you are taking about Excel, absolutely. But audacity used to be slow, because the processing was heavy.
Speaking of slow laggy… I’m going nuts using Excel at work, it’s soooo glacially slow. i think it’s onedrive.
In happier news, I decided it twas time to attempt to install Minecraft on my new Linux laptop. I googled, and was ready to do it via command line, but I decided to see if I could just use the app store, and found a highly rated “minecraft installer” package. The most difficult part was convincing Microsoft I am the same person I used to play as, but I successfully logged into my online world. Next up, I guess I should copy over some local files for single player stuff. And I guess I ought to test and make sure it works with headphones. But I almost never play with headphones, so it’s not urgent.
Really liking this new laptop, honestly. (New, as in, new OS. I’ve had the hardware since before the pandemic.)
(bolding mine)
See, that’s exactly the reason I would try it. The computer is a throwaway as is, and I’d get to play around without it mattering. I’d be able to tell really quickly if it worked with Mint, since the USB stick installer won’t boot if it won’t. (Though I’d probably look it up anyways.)
I’d very much suspect a Sempron with GBs of memory and an SSD is probably a newer Sempron. Might even be a dual core.
My newly linuxed computer isn’t a hobby. It’s my travel laptop. I like it too just work without thinning about it. That stopped being the case under windows. I had to work too hard to find my files and have them handy when i needed them.
Yes, i had some little roads bumps installing Linux. But as best as i can tell, now it just works. It even flipped the screen the tablet mode yesterday, when i put it down sideways, partly open.