Computer Help and Support

... why can't they be a thousand times better?

Why is the operating system (in this case, Windows) allowed to use up so many resources?

I look at Windows and it's just layers and layers upon layers of abstraction, virtual machines running on virtual machines all the way down through the x86 CPUs, which are virtual machines themselves.

Increased power has been put to use in video handling, for games, video editing, etc., but that power is in the proprietary GPU, access to which is buried under several layers of abstraction within the operating system.

Linux is suffering similar development, the introduction of the much maligned (and rightly so)
systemd being a current example of that.

But maybe I'm just yelling "get off my lawn." I'm old enough to remember being irritated by the size of Turbo-Pascal's runtime (a huge 7 kilobytes!) compiled into every Turbo Pascal program. That made a difference when 300 bits-per-second modems were still common, and PCs might have memories of 256 Kilobytes. At 300 bits per second a minimal Turbo Pascal executable took about four minutes to download.

Still, one thing I like about Linux is that I can usually get it running on machines I get for free. Often these are machines that have be rendered unusable by Windows itself and Windows software.