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Comment by mgkimsal | Hacker News Reader

I wish modern OS could keep up with my typing and window switching and app launching and ...

I'm constantly perturbed and interrupted when some app window just 'hangs' for a few seconds (some garbage collection going on, probably?). I can't pinpoint any one thing, just... everything seems relatively slow in 2022 compared to, even 10 years ago, and certainly 20. Applications weren't always phoning home to check things during bootup, which I suspect happens a lot now. Our computers are dozens of times faster than in the 90s, and, computationally, some things get done much faster, but others - around UI, it seems - apparently regress.

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The worst are the modern async UIs that become responsive early and then reset their state when they fully load - so if you e.g. already typed part of your search string, you can actually briefly see it in the textbox, and then it gets cleared away. Very common on websites, somewhat common on the desktop, in my experience.

Ironically, the old apps that just "hang" for a while during initialization handle this better, because they don't process input at all, so it all just gets queued.

Latency is the worst thing when operating any machinery. I don't know why people tolerate it so much with computers. It's one of the most important things for me when using any software. That's why a long time ago I settled on using tools like emacs, git, i3/sway etc. When I try trendy tools like VSCode etc. I can't believe the latency people put up with.

VSCode has a pretty bad latency problem, and it's the reason I stay away and use Notepad++ or VS2022. Sublime if on Mac.

I use git on the command line. My largest bitch is when it says "invalid command. you typed 'statsu', the closest command to this is 'status'"

Kill me now - it's a non-destructive command, and you KNOW what I was trying to say!

Those mishaps don't happen in IDEs.

there is a reason linux systems with i3 window managers are getting super popular these days. It's all about the instant response

I've been using i3 for years, there's just nothing that compares to a tiling window.

If I'm in windows I use virtuawin with alt+1, alt+2, etc for switching desktops. Not nearly the same, but works so much better than the builtin crap Windows has.

Paradoxically, I don't use alt+tab in windows to switch between programs. I used to do that, but then around XP (I think) they added the ability for programs to inject themselves into the alt+tab list. That means it's no longer completely consistent, which means I now have to think and check what alt+tab actually does so it stopped being any faster than just using the mouse.

So now if I need to flip between them quickly I'll either put them on different monitors (I use 3) and/or put them on different desktops. The combination makes me effectively as productive without the use of alt+tab. And it feels similar-ish to i3, so it's a bit comfortable in that respect as well.

NOTE: Anyone thinking virtuawin is like i3, it's not. It's just the best virtual desktop on windows (imo of course). Nothing on windows comes close to i3.

This makes me wonder if real time operating systems might one day become popular as interfaces for powerusers

Because power users tired of slow userspace will want their kernel to be slow too?

Preach it - my inability to figure out or control why the UI decides it's time to ignore what I'm typing in realtime while it's trying to back up a file (or whatever) is the cause of so many frustrations

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