But, like, I literally want to know why this is happening on a technical level. Notepad is Notepad. What the heck is it doing that makes it take so much longer? What would it take to get back to this level of responsiveness on a machine which has, let's say, 2gb of memory and an Intel atom chip, which is still a heck of a lot more than that NT machine was running on.
Developers are falling victim to the same illness that pervades our whole economy: ignoring the ground truth. When Tesla announces a cybertruck it's not because Elon is thinking of selling cybertrucks. It's because he increases the stock price. When developers develop they're developing to fulfil buzzword checklists and not to tell the CPU what to do to accomplish a goal - that's seen as secondary.
Because nowadays notepad is unfortunately a "Packaged Application" (UWP), and starting a Packaged Application involves a ton of system components (IIRC relies on an Activation Manager to make RPC and DCOM calls, create an AppContainer and various tokens, to, maybe, if you are lucky, spawn a process). There are more details about this in Windows Internals 7th, Part 2.
But it's not like this is limited to Windows. I'd guess that if you tried to open TextEdit on an extremely old and low-end Intel Mac (which again is still an order of magnitude faster than computers 20 years ago which could edit text just fine), the app would take a while to launch. And it probably wouldn't be a great experience.
I haven't used desktop Linux recently, but my expectation would be that e.g. gnome is a little better than Windows and macOS, but still not great compared to what we had 20 years ago.
So there's just something broadly bloated about modern software. And, sure, people largely don't notice because modern hardware is so damn fast, but we're also forcing users to buy hardware that is much faster than what they should need.
GP points out that faster CPUs allow us to do things that weren't possible in the old days, like real-time video transcoding, and I agree that's great! But if you just need to check your damn email, you should be able to save a great deal of money with a machine that's laughably underpowered by "modern" standards, while still checking your email at the speed of light.
What is all this software doing? I guess we're e.g. rendering at higher resolutions than we used to, but isn't the GPU supposed to take care of that?
layers upon layers of abstraction. Windows testing every single application in case it needs to drop down to 32 bit or windows 95 compat. Security checking, telemetry, theming, spinning up GPU to draw what you see.
