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Comment by gary_0 | Hacker News Reader

> Funnily enough, everything ran at about the same speed as it does now.

Actually, where I was sitting on a decent PC with broadband Internet at the time, everything was much, much faster. I remember seeing a video on here where someone actually booted up a computer from the 2000's and showed how snappy everything was, including Visual Studio, but when I search YouTube for it, it ignores most of my keywords and returns a bunch of "how to speed up your computer" spam. And I can't find it in my bookmarks. Oh well.

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> I remember seeing a video on here where someone actually booted up a computer from the 2000's and showed how snappy everything was...

Was this what you were referring to?: https://jmmv.dev/2023/06/fast-machines-slow-machines.html

Notice also how you can clearly see which window is selected, and which item within that window is selected. Microsoft has just lost the plot.

Wow that was a great read, thank you. It's funny that it is already starting to break due to all of the links and ad tracking, which is another kind of rot.

Use Linux/KDE. None of the gains from the switch to SSDs have been lost. Everything is instant even on an n100. You only need something more powerful for compilation, gaming, or heavy multimedia (like the 200 Mbps 4k60 video my camera produces, which isn't accelerated by most processors because it's using 4:2:2 chroma subsampling).

> Use Linux/KDE

I do. It's not without its problems but currently it's the least bad solution.

Xfce or LXQt are also great alternatives, blazing fast even on 15 year-old hardware. Old hardware can be slow for basic web browsing and multimedia (e.g. watching videos with modern codecs) but other low-level uses are absolutely fine.

> "I remember seeing a video on here where someone actually booted up a computer from the 2000's and showed how snappy everything was, including Visual Studio"

Was it this one? Casey Muratori ranting about Visual Studio Debugger slowness, and he shows a video of Visual Studio opening and debugging faster on a single core Pentium 4 from 20 years earlier - https://youtu.be/GC-0tCy4P1U?t=2160

Or this one? Roger Clark developing Notepad in C++ on Windows 2000 and commenting how fast Visual Studio opens: https://youtu.be/Z2b-a4r7hro?t=491

Yeah, that's the one! And hmm, it's interesting that there's more than one video out there going "look how fast old computers were from a user standpoint". They've really been boiling the frog when it comes to terrible UX over the past 20 years.

Given the refinements to the hardware, the modern scale of manufacturing and accessible market, and the sheer amount of engineering manpower a tech company can bring to bear nowadays, you'd think standards would have risen into the stratosphere, but instead the tech consumer is cowed into accepting slow, buggy, abusive, invasive trash.

These days to get a snappy experience, one has to aggressively block everything and only selectively unblock the bare minimum, so that one doesn't get tons of bloat thrown in the direction of one's browser. Oh and forget about running JavaScript, because it _will_ be abused by websites. And then sites have the audacity to claim one is a bot.

Many websites are so shitty, they don't even manage to display static text, without one downloading tons of their JS BS.

The browser is one thing, but even native applications have worse input latency than they did in the 80's and 90's.

https://danluu.com/input-lag/

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25290118

I think the web is not livable anymore without Firefox and uBlock Origin.

I can't recall desktop application times, but I remember using the web in the 00s. Websites took a noticeable blip to load. Pictures took seconds to minutes to load, top to bottom, on my connection. Runescape took an hour to update on dial up.

I do remember applications like Microsoft word's UI constantly freezing though.

YouTube has become enshittified at a record clip. Search is useless and shorts have turned it into just another TikTok brain dopamine machine.

> just another TikTok brain dopamine machine.

You can fight this machine.

You can view shorts on desktop. In a browser on desktop, when you see one on your subscriptions tab (or the front page if you still use that), you can right-click and open in new tab. You can replace "shorts/" with "watch?v=" in the URL and load the same video in the regular UI. You don't have to scroll down.

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