>> it will be consumers demanding

But how do I get to express that demand? Asking as a frustrated regular user of excel - excel is amazing software but if your laptop is not in airplane mode, the number of little delays that creep in is wild. It's all seemingly network delays, connecting to onedrive servers when i'm editing a field (why?!), 10s of connections to random microsoft domains as i flick between tabs in the UI (why?!) - each flick incurring a subtle but observable delay.

>> Dreaming is free... All Electron devs

I like your sentiment for sure but i reckon you might be barking up the wrong tree. I'll give the clearest counter example i know of:

When i scroll a buffer in Zed (it's a 120fps editor written in rust that i really want to like) i perceive micro stutters.

When i scroll a buffer in VSCode (an electron app) it's buttery smooth.

I've tried this many times over 1.5+ years of releases. It's a reliable finding on an m1 macbook pro and an m1 imac.

If the slow stack can be fast and the fast stack can be slow, then there's more to this than just tech stack.

▲ Ferret7446 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Most people can't perceive "micro stutters" and many who can don't care. It's a fairly niche feature requirement.

▲ NetMageSCW 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Excel doesn’t have microstutters it has full blown stutters. It is ridiculous that it takes 3 seconds to open Save As on my Dell Workstation let alone yesterday when it took 30 seconds for a local server.

▲ dijit 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I really utterly despise this kind of exceptionalism.

You know, you probably don’t feel that your car has air in the fuel line or that your transmission is holding on to old oil.

What you will “feel” is that your car feels “worse” and you won’t be able to put words on why.

Just because non-technical people lack the understanding to put into words the things they feel: does not mean they don’t feel them.

Give them Office 2008 on a 10 year old PC and ask them how it feels, I guarantee they’ll say “better” without knowing why.

▲ echoangle 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Probably true, but maybe you should also ask them how much they would be willing to pay to fix that. I guess it would be less than $100 for the lifetime of their device.

▲ Dylan16807 an hour ago | parent | next [-]

That would pay for so many millions of dollars of dev time. It would be a big win-win if you could organize that deal. In the tradeoff between more dev time and better hardware, typical consumer software is way too tilted toward the latter and wasting lots of money.

If you don't think people are willing to pay, phrase it as $100 more for software and $200 less for hardware with better overall performance.

The problem is that hardware performance is easy to upgrade and software performance isn't.

▲ cwel 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

This implies that a better version is on offer. It is not. You get the telemetry stuffed, stuttery garbage, and your company pays for it.

▲ echoangle an hour ago | parent [-]

That wasn’t what I meant. I am saying that the reason nobody offers better software is that people don’t want it enough. The average user is a little bit annoyed from time to time but not enough to actually care, so there’s no pressure to change.

	▲	cwel an hour ago \| parent [-]
		I understand what you meant. `> the reason nobody offers better software is that people don’t want it enough` I wouldn't say that's THE reason, or even a contender. The average user has little agency over what the established tools are. There is no pressure to change the tools because there is no competition. You use what your employer dictates. office and/or gsuite. Whether or not people 'want it enough' has very little to do with whether something actually occurs. `> average user is a little bit annoyed from time to time but not enough to actually care` this part is still true.

▲ citizenpaul 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

That's because VS Code is hiding everything behind a bunch of non-real-time tricks of perception. Zed is giving you actual real-time feedback.

"Whom the gods wish to destroy, they give real-time data."

The overwhelming majority of the population cannot perceive anything over 90 Hz. Those that can are overwhelmingly skewed towards under 30 years old. Fighter pilots have a floor of something like 200hz for an idea of how rare it is. Just fun info.

	▲	mh- 28 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I have 3 different displays on my desk, and they are 60hz 120hz and 240hz. The difference between them when scrolling is.. obvious. I'm in my 40s. I'd love to see a study demonstrating that my ability to perceive this is some rare capability - that's very hard for me to believe.
	▲	StilesCrisis 5 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		As I've aged, my ability to see tiny text has diminished, but I can still see 60Hz vs 120Hz perfectly well.
	▲	movups 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		I spent an admittedly tiny amount of time looking into the Zed scrolling stutters after experiencing them myself and I think it's just a matter of their line layout caching not being as good (perhaps unsurprisingly) as the Chromium/WebKit layout engine. It's especially noticeable if you have word wrapped files with lines >10kb in length (yeah, don't ask).
	▲	girvo 3 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		> The overwhelming majority of the population cannot perceive anything over 90 Hz This isn’t true. Unless you’re saying I’m some kind of fighter pilot at 35!
	▲	arjonagelhout 5 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I personally avoid Visual Studio Code as much as possible due to the scroll latency, so I think it is noticeable as long as you know what to look for.