I remove desktop animations, motion effects and all fluff and it gets better but there is still visible lag between me clicking and the app opening.
Are there any OSes left that don't add this kind of fluff? The ones that are absolutely as lean as possible and focus on getting work done.
I mean I am a simple person. I don't need any of the fluff in the OSes. I don't need animation effects, motion effects, transparency. Nothing. When I want to open a desktop app, I just want to open and do what I tell it to do.
Any OS like that for me? Am I the only one who needs a simple OS that does things without frills?
What I'm saying is you're not after a lean operating system - you're after fast I/O and that you can get with money. Also the lag you mention is not about operating systems, it's about apps. My "ls" startup is pretty fast:
$ time ls
Desktop Documents Downloads Music Pictures Videos bin code
real 0m0.006s
user 0m0.000s
sys 0m0.000sPlan 9 might also be an option, but that might lack the desktop apps you expect to have.
No composition means no animations, and everything will feel smooth and snappy as heck!
They testing floppies, CDs; check for printer on LPT; spent many time to figure out what USB stuff connected to computer, etc, etc.
And don't forget, setup scripts are basically running on extremely slow Shell language, which is interpreted and keep simple for considerations of system service. - For example, some systems used Perl for shell tasks, but now it avoided, because too hard to support Perl itself, so people decided to return to Shell and concentrate on it.
Second, most current systems are monolith type, so they cannot load-unload drivers on demand, and have to load some typical configuration as one big piece at startup and check all it's parts.
You could manually disconnect many checks in startup scripts, you could even customize list of your drivers, but these are really big hassles, and big amount of work.
Some systems now remade to include trick, so their startup running on background, so some things you will got much faster, but if you try to use them too soon, you will see, that some things you may need, are not accessible already, but will appear later, for example on my Ubuntu on core i7, SATA SSD, I measured from 30s to about 100s before all appear.
To be honest, exist many minimal OSes, with microkernel, compiled shell, and other features, making them startup very fast, but unfortunately, none of them considered mass production, all are experimental.
Even special OSes, like Ubuntu touch, considered for Smartphones, are mostly considered as secondary project (non main priority), so even with all their limitations, you will not got even as workable solution as classic Ubuntu.
[0] : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light-weight_Linux_distributio...
[1] Linux from scratch : https://www.linuxfromscratch.org/
[2] Yocto : https://www.yoctoproject.org/
[3] Contiki : https://docs.contiki-ng.org/en/develop/
It takes less than a second on my 13 year old ThinkPad running Debian/Gnome3, but what's the difference half a second saved makes? And why even close it?
Focus on the greatness you're about to perform and thank the second for giving you that focus.
Yes. Windows 95 or MacOS 9.
> Am I the only one who needs a simple OS that does things without frills?
Likely.
If I click it, it's up in under half a bounce
Word takes longer to open ... but it's also a pretty big application
Likewise Firefox takes several bounces (but it's recovering whoknowshowmany tabs I left open when i closed it)
Boot time on my [first generation] M1-based MBP is faster than anything I can recall running that's anywhere near "modern" (distinctly disingenuous to compare book time on a Mac Classic or SE30 to a modern system - yes, that 30-year-old device started "fast" ... but it also wasn't doing much!)
Even with all the items I have set to come up at boot (about a dozen utilities on this machine), I'm able to start working pretty quickly after a reboot's initiated (which I also only ever do for OS updates that mandate it)
And any time that's "too long to wait through" I mitigate the same way waiting on my dishwasher to be done cleaning dishes: I go do something else (grab a coffee, make a call...)
Your first three things to check regardless of OS:
- storage speed (is it a spinny 5400rpm drive? NVMe? SATA SSD?)
- RAM - the old mantra is as true today as it's ever been - the more the merrier
- CPU speed and core count ... this one is more nebulous: ARM is different from x86-64 is different from SPARC etc; even various flavors of each of those CPU families are different from each other! An AMD 64-core with 768MB cache is going to be a lot different from its sibling offering that only has 256MB cache
As for a random, modern OS that is "lean" ... check OpenBSD, NetBSD, or Haiku-OS (the opensource reimplementation and modernization of BeOS from yesteryear)
But those "lean" OSes are going to need a lot of "deleaning" to get them into a state most people want to use (perhaps excepting Haiku) - on Linux, you can pick a lightweight desktop environment ... but the impact on performance (unless you're on a pretty low-resource device) of running fwvm, say, over KDE is nearly indistinguishable - because you're not spending most of your time interacting with the OS, per se - you're interacting with some set of applications on top of the OS
The OS, largely, is irrelevant - choosing any specific OS comes down to three rational factors (and then a bunch of personal preferences):
- does it run what I need it to?
- can I afford it?
- can I interoperate well-enough with my friends/colleagues/etc to use this hardware and OS vs that OS and hardware?
I wish I could run Haiku full-time...But it does not [yet] support many applications I have to have access to (and the web-based versions of them won't run reliably on the browsers available for the OS [yet])