User AC (@saveusculture) on X shared his experience of booting an old Windows 3.1 installation with Office 4.3. 23 seconds, from "power on" to "typing away in Word".

Windows today takes longer than that just to show the login screen. And then it's not done. Updates. Telemetry. A task tray full of things you didn't ask for. The machine is running but you're not working yet.

This is what feature creep does to speed. Microsoft didn't decide to ship a slow OS. They made a thousand small decisions that individually seemed fine and ended up with software that fights you every time you open the lid.

Your app can do the same. Feature by feature. Background job by background job. Users don't measure milliseconds. They feel them. They know when something drags even when they can't say why.

Speed is UX. Treat it as a design constraint from the start. Not something to optimize in a sprint later.

Unrelated: does anyone have a suggestion for a decent Linux distro?