I fondly remember locally-executing software with local persistence by default.
To provide a counterpoint, though, during that time my entire family shared one desktop PC. Looking around me, right now: work macbook, personal linux laptop, smartphone, steam deck. I suspect that the workflows that were "fine" in 1995 would really wear on me today. Especially the ones that involve migrating documents from place-to-place for collaboration while trying to maintain a canonical master copy somehow.
Today, because of de-facto reliance on the cloud, "setting up" a new machine - regardless of its OS - takes me about 20 minutes. If my laptop fell off of my bike, that would suck, but I wouldn't irretrievably lose important data.
There are downsides to the current cloud-first paradigm too, of course. But I don't think it's _all_ downside.
I never migrated the majority of what I do to "the cloud" and I have multiple devices, laptops etc. in my house. Setting up a new Linux install takes me about 20 minutes. Wouldn't know about Windows. Then again, I probably use way fewer "services" / "apps" than most people. It's funny, I've always been a very tech savvy computer nerd. I've developed software for a living for 25 years. But the older I get and the more the industry changes the less I find I use "modern tech" as a consumer.
I'm also not thinking back to 1995. This all started, in my memory, following the "mobile revolution" at the tail-end of the 00s. That's when more and more software that I use every day stopped selling perpetual licenses and started charging monthly subscriptions. Everything went "mobile first" and "cloud first" and it got more and more persistent as the 2010s went on.
On a positive note, there is some software that used to be inaccessible due to price, like Avid's Pro Tools, that I can now afford thanks to the switch in pricing models.
But even if it took me an entire weekend to set up a new device, I think that I would still prefer that over needing literally everything to have Internet access. It removes the control from me, the user, and places it in the hands of "the corporation." They can change the software without my consent. They can suffer outages (to be fair we can have local hardware failures too but it's under my control which makes a difference). I remember almost returning my PS4 when it required me to connect it to the Internet just to be able to use it on first boot.
> But the older I get and the more the industry changes the less I find I use "modern tech" as a consumer.
It may be a "get out of my lawn!!" reaction, but I find modern software distasteful.
I want to use software that enable me to invent and do nice things. Not software that locks me in a pre-designed process. Even if most of the time I don't go inventing, and if the pre-designed process is nice, that difference still sores me.
You aren't alone. Open ended systems are usually far more powerful and interesting than rigid ones. I need an extremely compelling reason to even consider picking up a new online-only/saas or similar tool.
Investing time and energy into a tool that can be ruined or lost at any point in the future, or might turn out to be too limited, is a huge risk. It doesn't take getting burned too many times to start getting a lot more wary.
I suspect preferences will hinge on peoples' budgets for personal responsibility. As my non-digital responsibilities have increased, I've found it nice to be able to delegate to "the cloud" - even at the loss of independence & control.
If there were a personally-owned "cloud" setup, I would prefer that. A box that plugs into my fiber connection and provides the equivalents of the cloud services I use, with data stored locally and backed up automatically to a secure server. A man can dream.
Such a thing exists, but building and maintaining that come at a pretty high cost to your personal time. There’s very little that we do in the cloud that doesn’t have an on-prem (at home) equivalent. You could even rent servers at a CoLo or something and provide yourself regional resiliency, etc.
There's no reason why it should come at a pretty high cost to one's personal time, though. A plug-and-play box with a well-defined API for storage and sync is not an insurmountable engineering problem. The economics of it is why we don't have one, yet.
Because I wanted hardware that's already been tested end-to-end with not only linux in general, but the distro & version I'm using (Fedora 36).
Using the same hardware that Lenovo ships with linux out-of-the-box, as well as the same hardware that Red Hat employees use, is worth more to me than a couple of extra performance cores. CPUs have been "fast enough" for my use cases for years.
That sounds rough! I would probably look into getting a full replacement (possibly with a different model) from Lenovo, given such persistent "lemon" issues.
There are regular HN threads discussing good development machines, especially from people hoping to find an OSS alternative to MS, Google, & Apple walled gardens. The hardware & operating system used for building products is a discussion relevant to many of us here.
I don't know if the fingerprint reader works - I don't like them, so haven't tried to set it up (it's integrated into the power button, which of course does work).
I haven't spent more than 8-10 hours off of a charger, so I don't know what the death point is for the battery. At least a full day working & streaming.
I use Fedora, not Ubuntu, so I can't speak to Ubuntu's hibernation. Power management works seamlessly on Fedora: connecting/disconnecting battery, opening/closing lid when connecting/not, timing out to sleep, awaking on keypress or lid open, etc etc. All the annoying combinations that, previously, I've had issues with on Linux devices.
Thanks for the trackpoint tip! I do want to try to acclimate to it because that sounds like a nice workflow. It's hard to break muscle memory, though.
However, the feeling of speed is made up of much more than just the hardware's capabilities. The OS you use, the toolchain you have access to, impacts your experience as well.
This X1 matches 92% of a 2022 MB Air's single-core performance and 94% of its multi-core performance (https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/19092431). I'm happy to wait an extra 100ms for something to compile in order to have a nicer daily experience of the machine and operating system.
m1/m2 performance is only great while you live within it's limits. It's all special optimization tricks in hardware to match up with certain common software operations. Great if your usage pattern matches.
It's almost like when hardware has special bits that make benchmarks scream because they know exactly what the benchmark software does, yet normal work is the same or worse than anyone else. It's not exactly that bad. M1/M2 does perform a lot of real work a lot better. But it's "a bit like that"
It's just that it only works if your usage matches what Apple targeted as what most people will ever need to do.
I have had similar experiences to you in the past, which is why I posted about the different experience I had with the latest Thinkpad X1 Carbon that comes with Fedora Linux out of the box.
The 2022 MacBook Air gets 1932 and 8919, respectively, so the X1 matches 92% of its single-core performance and 94% of its multi-core performance. You and I may have different definitions of "noticeably slower" and "terribly inadequate."
> Fan runs, loudly, if you even breathe on the machine
Ironically, the first time I've heard the fans is running geekbench just now, and even then they were quiet.
Given all this, I think it's unlikely we're talking about the same machine.
I still am not willing to migrate browsers in order to use Bing, however.