>almost innavigable for someone with quick reflexes
My few short years with Windows 3.1+ spoiled me for all future versions of windows. Instant closing, instant alt-tabbing, double-clicking the top-left corner icon to close, (nearly) instant opening of simple apps like File Manager and Notepad... not to mention the instant crashes.
Linux got close but still always felt clunky, while future versions of Windows and MacOS just kept abstracting themselves from my tactile sensation farther and farther away...
That is what I have been banging on about for years. Latency added, not just in Software, but in Hardware as well from Display, Keyboard, Mouse and even Network. The past 20+ years the whole industry nearly went all out on optimising for throughput.
Sometimes I look at macOS, Windows 10. Apart from some UI facelift I dont even remember a single user feature that was relevant or important in the past 5 years. Apart from latency added cause of feature bloat
The beauty of Gaming is that there are finally some incentives for people to work on the issue.
And a video from Microsoft Research on 1ms Latency
>Sometimes I look at macOS, Windows 10. Apart from some UI facelift I dont even remember a single user feature
The user "feature" that comes quickest to mind for Windows 10 was the first run of calc.exe showing a popup notification begging for a 5-star rating in the Microsoft Store.
The fucking CALCULATOR. Literally the first and most basic function any computer ever had, which has had NO ui changes in the million software and hardware permutations for 70 years, because it's already perfect. Something has gone unfathomably, fundamentally wrong with how Microsoft works internally.
I installed the Win7 calculator, and it works like a charm. The no-hex functionality and splash screen really are terrible. I was used to start typing immediately after win+r calc ...
They might. It would not surprise me if a lot of people just type their calculations into the browser address bar or in their Internet search engine's input box. Or search for a calculator web application, and use that as their calculator.
> The past 20+ years the whole industry nearly went all out on optimising for throughput.
It used to be that GPU drivers would queue up to ~10 frames just to get slightly higher FPS in benchmarks (while adding basically a quarter of a second input lag)... naturally, this is an extremely bad trade-off for gaming, but made them look a few percent (at most) better on paper.
"Finally" seems a bit myopic. The war against latency has been going on continuously since the beginning, even in gaming. Check out nearly any content John Carmack has ever written or spoken on the topic of gaming or VR, just as one example.
For those of us who grew up with 8-bit home computers low latency was the starting point. On my first computer you could detect a keypress, update video memory and (assuming the beam was in the right place) see the results on screen in a few microseconds.
Right? I opened a Windows XP VM inside my 10 box a bit ago to play an old game, and oh boy was that incredibly snappy compared to what we have now. Sure, it's running in anachronistic hardware, but where did we go wrong?
The thing is... I don't care, and I'm sure the original Win 3.1 commenter doesn't care either. I am old enough to have experienced Win 3.1 (and making it slower with the "magic-whatever" software that made animated icons, anyone remember their rabbit/hat logo?).
Aaaanyway: Give me a "chrooted/jailed" environment where I have all my "dumb", "no internet" connection apps (Jails are 2000 technology, chroot is older), and be done with it, so that if anyone hacks my machine or if I quadruple-click on that virus it is only going to affect the chroot environment and doesn't see anything else.
Truth is, a lot of contemporary commercial OS sluggishness comes from ""features"" that are either some kind of telemetry, or just "security" preventing me (the user) from doing things the the company does not want me to do (like the asinine OSX "feature" of disabling write access to certain parts of MY hard disk by default)
I remember XP not being able to paint windows or move the mouse cursor at descent frame-rate under load. It was so bad compared to Mac OS X from the same time.
Neither does Windows 10, my mouse frequently stutters on the first few minutes after booting, and I don't use any particularly invasive customizations.
That’s wild. I remember when windows XP came out I was amazed it was so large. The OS was 300 megabytes or something - and it took up a significant portion of my computer’s hard drive. Despite all of Microsoft’s claims about “media enhancements” it seemed horribly bloated and ugly. It was the embarrassing stepchild of windows 2000 - which I still adore. How times have changed!
My few short years with Windows 3.1+ spoiled me for all future versions of windows. Instant closing, instant alt-tabbing, double-clicking the top-left corner icon to close, (nearly) instant opening of simple apps like File Manager and Notepad... not to mention the instant crashes.
Linux got close but still always felt clunky, while future versions of Windows and MacOS just kept abstracting themselves from my tactile sensation farther and farther away...