I love my smart TV. I love the way it takes a long time to boot up because it’s trying to refresh the advertisements on the home screen. I delight in the way it randomly restarts because it’s downloaded an update without asking me, each of which makes the TV slower and slower with every subsequent install. I adore the way it buries the apps that I want to use, and that I use without fail every single time, below the apps that it’s being paid to promote and which I have never touched in my life and would never use without the cold metal of a glock pressed hard against my sweating temple. I am infinitely thrilled by the way the interface lags constantly, due to the need to have one thousand unnecessary animations rendered on hardware ripped wholesale from a ten year old phone. I feel myself borne aloft on wings of pure joy when I am notified that my data will be collected and analysed to determine my usage patterns. Even now I am writing this from a field of beautiful flowers and soft luscious grass as I lie and look up happily at the bright blue sky, smiling happily to know that this is the future of technology
The last bit about being happy that PCs were regressing was sarcastic, the rest wasn’t. I did build my own PC. With the exception of a laptop I got while I was in college, I’ve always built my own PCs and have done so since I was 9 or 10. I was legitimately shocked at how much more responsive that shitty XP machine was when I first got it running again, despite being slow as fuck. PCs have gotten faster, but the programs, driver packages and “”“necessary”“” bloatware that tries to run in the background is insane.
Software has gotten so ridiculously bloated and slow, but you don’t notice it until you go back to an older OS. Then you realize that there’s a lot of software for Win98, XP, etc that does the same exact thing, or more, as its Windows 10 equivalents, but it does it with a fraction of the ram, hard drive space, and processing power. For an example, I currently have a mouse with remappable buttons, and 10-15yrs ago I had a Logitech keyboard with a ton of macro keys and a cool little LCD display that could interact with some games to tell you things like health, ammo, who was in control of what parts of the map, etc, depending on the game. Why is it that the software required to remap the buttons on the mouse runs like ass while the Logitech software for the macro keys never gave me any issues 10-15 years ago? They do almost the exact same thing. WHY IS IT SO FUCKING SLOW!?
The reason why I haven’t switched to Linux is because there are programs that I use which likely wouldn’t perform well running via Wine or Proton, and I really don’t want to dual-boot and deal with the headache of having to reboot every time I want to use it. However, I’m starting to get to the point where I’m seriously considering it, despite the headache and annoyance.