HN Explorer

Ask HN: The PC: What sucks most about it

4 points by khitchdee ↗ HN
PCs have been around for over two decades. Their producers have had the chance to refine them over several generations both in terms of hardware and software. Yet they still suck in many ways. Tell us what you think sucks about them the most.

7 comments

[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 25.7 ms ] thread
read
What I hate most about PCs is that there's so much hardware that needs drivers. At a minimum, you need a driver for each type of network card there is. If all PCs disappeared and were replaced by something like the Raspberry Pi, then writing an OS would suddenly become a more reachable goal. It would make it easier for different kinds of OSs to be developed.

There's a specific kind of OS I'd like to have. But I'm erasing my description about it from this comment, because announcing your goals makes it less likely you'll achieve them[1].

In the end I want less software complexity. Having less hardware can lead to having less software.

[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7496923

khitchdee
I guess what you're saying is instead of a one size fits all solution where you have one huge OS that supports a variety of different hardware configurations, if you broke down your software-hardware space into some standardized hardware configurations (like the Rasberry Pi) then it would be easier to build a much simpler OS for each such configuration.
eswat
I don’t have the following experience since switching to a MacBook, and it’s not something that would suck the most for me (can’t think of any others right now). But I dislike how the bootup sequences of most PCs looks like you’re startup up some PoS system for a fast food restaurant. It doesn’t look sexy at all and doesn’t fit in most of the environments a PC would be in.
samelawrence
As someone who works on PoS software, I get to watch this ugly bootup process twice. Once for Windows, and once for our software.
khitchdee
The very fact that users see a boot up sequence goes against the idea that the PC should be as transparent as possible to its user. I guess since they know its going to take them so long before its ready to go, they show you something instead of a blank screen while its getting ready. Tablets and smartphones have shortened this preparation time enough that you're good to go almost instantly.
Patrick_Devine
I'm going to be contrarian and take the other side of the argument. I love PCs.

I love that you can buy a bunch of parts and cobble something together which has a ridiculous amount of processing power. I love that you can buy a GPU which can render a mind numbing amount of quadrilaterals on the screen simultaneously. I love that there is a plethora of tools which you can quickly write programs which can do interesting and useful things.

I actually think we take PCs too much for granted. They're absolutely amazing devices.

EDIT: spelling

khitchdee
Decades of concerted optimization by a highly distributed industry driven by the goal of adding value for the end user through economies of scale. The focus on scale has resulted in a system with amazing complexity available for peanuts (if you look at its engineering complexity).