But why? What good is an operating system on a multi-core device that allows anything to get that close to the performance envelope? This is a fine example of competition driving change for change's sake rather than real innovation and everything ending up worse as a result. I like new features as much as the next person, but not when they compromise core functionality. Not being able to type is inexcusable.
I agree. However at this point, I don't see anything an OS can do to help.
I see plenty of typing slowdowns every other day now. But I'm not sure just how many of them are the OS's fault. When your typing seems to lag, there are two places that can be slowing it down - the input side (reacting to hardware events) and the output side (drawing and updating the UI).
I suppose keyboard buffers are pretty well isolated, and native UI controls tend to work fine too. The problem is, everyone now goes for non-native controls. You type in e.g. Firefox, and it is slow not because of your OS, but because Firefox does all its UI drawing by itself. And God help you if the application you want to use is done in Electron. There's so many layers of non-nativeness on top of that, that the OS has close to zero say in what's being done. There's no way to help that - resource quotas will only make the problem worse, and giving such program free reign will only take everything else down.
All in all, it's just - again - problem of people writing shitty software, because of laziness and time-to-market reasons. Blame "Worse is Better".
Agreed, abstraction seem to be exploding these days and I’m not even sure we are at the end of the road yet! Linux or Windows never had any trouble with essentially realtime keyboard feedback in their Terminal windows. It’s not the OS.
Intellij still freezes while indexing on my work desktop which has 8 cores and 16 threads, at least they finally allowed pause/resume for that so that's a win.
In this particular case, yes. But this subthread was about a more general principle of letting an app exhaust system's performance. What I'm saying is that, when facing a crappily coded app, the OS can at best choose between letting it suck or letting the performance of everything suck.
You have alternatives though. I've been using basically the same linux environment for about a decade now.
I don't have a proper desktop environment like Gnome or KDE, just Xorg and StumpWM as a window manager. Then I have Firefox, Emacs and urxvt running tmux. I use a handful of GTK applications when the need arises like Gimp, Inkscape, Evince and maybe a couple others. Done.
It boots up in a few seconds from a SSD, it's always snappy. It worked fine on a core2duo and HDD 10 years ago, it works even better on an i5 and SSD now.
Yeah I have a Linux environment on a keychain USB device that I now use often enough to think seriously about abandoning Windows (though I don't hate Win as such, but kept using it because of some applications I relied upon).
Linux has (sometimes) had sort of the opposite problem, insufficient innovation in user interface design. I'm looking forward to Gnome 3 now; I felt that when CSS took over the web a lot of UI innovation moved to the server end and stalled at the client (think the really long hiatus in the development of Enlightenment, which was at one time the cutting edge of UI design/customizability while still being fast and responsive).
If you want ideas for where Linux capabilities should b going, please go check out Flowstone, which I think is criminally under-appreciated. The current version uses Ruby, but previous incarnations allowed you deploy code in C or assembler(!) within the visual programming environment. It's doin' me a heckin' confuse that this isn't a standard development environment option for everything from shell scripts to large-scale applications. Once you go to flow-based programming text-only IDEs look masochistic and pointless, and text-only is a terrible way to teach programming to people because discovery and syntax are inaccessible and really better done by computers. I like NoFlo for js development but the Linux desktop is crying out to be brought into a flow-based paradigm.
Sorry about going a bit off-topic but when I see exhortations to go with extremely simple solutions like StumpWM I have the opposite-but-similar reaction to the OP: why am I running some beast of a computer (at least by historical standards) so I can have a 20 year old user interface? Surely there is some middle ground between cancerous levels of abstraction/feature creep and monk-like asceticism.
