alt Hacker NewsI feel like this principle could be codified as "the system is not a workspace."
The use of the system as a workspace goes back to when computers were either very small and always personal only to one user, or when they were very big and administrated by dedicated system administrators who were the only ones with permission to install things. Both these conditions are obsolete.
But the system is not a workspace acts like resources are free. Everything that’s wrong with a modern computer being slower than one from 30 years ago at running user applications has its roots in this kind of thing. It’s more obvious on mobile devices but desktops still suffer. Android needs more RAM and had worse power utilization until a lot was done to move toward native compiled code and background process control. Meanwhile Electron apps think it’s okay to run multiple copies of Javascript environments like working RAM is free and performance isn’t hurt.