zlacker

> From where I'm sitting software is millions of times better today than it was in the 90s when I first started hearing people saying this.

Define better. I enjoyed computers more in the 80s. There was less bureaucracy. Cubase on the Atari ST never crashed. The modern C++ one does crash, often.

>>grumpy+(OP)
Better features, better functionality.

Much like with old IDEs old DAWs did a lot less. If you truely prefer it why aren't you still running Cubase on an old Atari or emulator?

Besides that there is the whole rose tinted glasses thing. My early experiences getting FreeBSD and Slackware running on my computers, and setting up X for example were something I'd never trade and taught me a lot about debugging systems, configs, etc. But that whole process was objectively worse than today.

>>sanswo+v5
both can be true. software has become objectively more abominable each passing year. spyware is being normalized, locking down and taking away control from users is being spoonfed to hipster users as "opinionated" and "curated". Have you taken a look at the chromium codebase lately? 1.5GB of compressed (lzma) "code". W T F. Just look 10-15 years ago and look at khtml, look at webkit a few years after the fork, then look at this shit? we still ordered crap from amazon back then. We still had forms to submit to HN or similar. Sure, we didnt have thin webgl wrappers, webusb, webmidi, web-wipe-my-ass updates to our japanese toilets. The amount of direct crap being put into almost everything is beyond measure

>>redeem+C8
All those things you're complaining about existed in the past in the form of applets, flash scripts, and activex. They were way worse than a bunch of web* standards.

As for curated/opinionated, most people don't want to be power users. Most people never did it was just in the 90s you had little choice. If you want to be a power user today the options are still there.

>>sanswo+wa
applets were largely unused and flash was mostly used for ads, neither of which were even remotely as huge and gross as the chromium codebase.

nowadays you have many "desktop" applications bundling their own special build of chrome just because developers are so lazy(and I'd say many severely lacking critical judgement) they feel like taking their webapp and deploying as a "desktop" application.

The situation is infinitely much worse than it was in 1995.