Things that used to be hard and are now easy

As an i3 user, basically going without a DE, I recently tried to breathe new life into an old core 2 duo laptop that was in very good shape and basically just used to browse the web and play spider solitaire. It was on Windows 7, and I don't think upgrading to 10 would have been worth it with that CPU and 2gb of RAM.

I picked Debian, and put the different DEs through its paces. I started with those that should have been more lightweight, but ultimately found that only kde of all things gave an acceptable user experience while not feeling overly slow.

I don't remember which was which, I tried mate, cinnamon, lxqt And maybe something else I'm forgetting now. One of them was really slow to react to the multimedia keys, and then would appear to buffer the keystrokes from the key repeat like it's the MS-DOS days, ie you press brightness up, nothing happens, so you hold the key, and when it finally starts adjusting the brightness you immediately let go of the key but it still goes on and on to maximum brightness. Then another one couldn't be convinced to behave in a consistent way when it comes to screen brightness wrt (un)plugging mains power and using the brightness keys. It was something like: unplug, screen goes brighter as I manually adjusted it way down before on mains power (sitting in dark room), and the default setting for battery happened to be higher. Annoying but ok, but then if you touch the brightness controls again it first goes up again and then very low and whatnot. Like, there might be some very clever intentions behind this that I didn't catch right there, but then I doubt the non-tech-savby person this was intended for would get what kind of 4D chess magic was going on there. It just felt like it was spazzing around. Then the third one installed and had all its icons missing and the font rendered way too large. That's just the three most blatant issues I ran into. Installed KDE last and everything was sane and usable, to my surprise.

Granted, some of the issues, especially the icon/font one are probably just packaging mistakes on debians side; I don't know how often people really install multiple DEs in parallel, so this might be untested territory, but still, showed me once again that as much as I like Linux, I'm never gonna claim it's the year of the Linux desktop for probably another decade, and only would encourage curious tinkery friends to actually try Linux as a daily driver if they do more than just browse the web, and then probably never use anything besides KDE or Gnome 3 at least for a start.

A fast CPU and plentiful RAM isn't a license to not optimize your code. A fast internet connection isn't a license to not optimize your binary size.

Personally, I disagree that parsing was hard before and made easy with PEG parsing.

For decades it has been easy and common to implement parsers by hand.

From what I can tell, universities and textbooks just overcomplicated the process by teaching parser generators.

I have done a few studies of various open source ecosystems now and (edited: other than CPython) I haven't seen PEG parsers really used in anything but toy implementations of things.

I really like that XKCD comic about identifying birds in a photo, so it's unfortunate that it didn't age that well. How could we rewrite that comic to today's tech? I was thinking something like:

A: I want to create an app that scans good feedback of our brand online...

B: there's a li rary for that, consider it done

A: ... and understand if they are actually being sarcastic.

B: I'm gonna need 5 years and a lab of experts.

Even in the sort of modern systems available to wealthy developers try to run more than two Electron apps at a time and tell me if you don't feel the slugginess