alt Hacker NewsHaha this is true but I have rewritten many things now. I use so much of a custom software stack. You can go down to primitives you like.
Most of the software I use is custom now but not in like a deep way. E.g. it turns out that browser engines are blazing fast. So what’s slow? The chrome around it, the extensions. These things I just rewrite.
It turns out that MacOS GUI primitives are also really fast. It’s just that most software poorly uses it. I rewrote text viewer applications, and a terminal emulator chrome that uses libghostty. I don’t claim originality or skill. I only claim annoyance.
Now that I’ve reached the point where the thing in the way is my OS which I have trouble modifying I suddenly understand why Omarchy is compelling to so many people. And I get why DHH is so excited about it.
You can have a bespoke system on a fast, reliable base. Why wouldn’t you do it? Why suffer?
There are limits. USB keyboards are just always going to be slower than PS/2 keyboards. You can close the gap, but USB is just fundamentally adding wrapping layers that introduce latency over the direct polling PS/2 used. And there's a lot of this at the hardware level, where standardized connections with complex protocols replace weird custom connectors. USB is most definitely easier to plug something in to than PS/2 ports, where you had different ports for mouse and keyboard and they weren't interchangeable. (Ok, some very late motherboards supported using either in a single port, but it wasn't the way most PCs worked.)
You can do a lot at the high levels, but everything needs to be reworked from the hardware level up to match the latency of older systems.