> no measurable amount of CPU (even to blink the cursor!)

Is it really possible? What kind of alien technology is it?

I should say "measurable in task manager" - which reports in increments of 0.1%.

Realistically I would imagine that a native Win32 app (Notepad++) that's totally idle except for message loop and cursor blink requires less than a microsecond of CPU time per wall clock second.

It gets better: the caret in "real" Win32 is not rendered to the framebuffer or any memory-backed surfaces, but is "inlined" in the video output the same way the (hardware) cursor is - it's effectively an old-school console sprite.

But it does mean you're limited in the things you can do with it - when Office 2013 gained that fancy animated caret they had to do it themselves, similarly the caret in Atom and VSCode are both software-based.

But - can I get a copy of Notepad++ on my Linux box? No?

Now - I know there are a ton of other options for Linux, but the thing is, I can't jump from system to system and have the same app with the same experience - even if the app was developed as a native app for all of the platforms, because each has a slightly different native GUI implementation and usage which doesn't translate fully between each.

So now I have to learn and use potentially three or more different programs/apps/whatever to do the same task. Or, I have to remember the quirks for each native implementation.

...and let's be honest: Not many companies out there are going to develop a native version of the same app for all the platforms, because most platforms have a lower number of users than others (in many cases, much lower - depending on the genre of the app in question - like games).

It's an economic tradeoff: We either get a balkanized system where for certain kinds or types of apps we need a particular machine for the native implementation, or we have the case of these larger cross-platform apps that anyone can use on any system, in the same manner everywhere.

Here's another thing - most of these complaints seem to have to do with laptop users. I don't really worry about these issues on a desktop, because there I can have a ton of memory and way more CPU than what I can get in most laptops, and I don't have to worry about battery power.

But for those who are stuck with laptops - maybe they need to bother manufacturers to increase the amount of RAM and CPU available, to handle these larger apps.

It's also funny that I hear people complain how these apps are too big, and use too many resources for editing text or whatnot; you make the case that vim and notebook++ use only a few meg of memory, and no CPU.

I tend to wonder how well they'd fair on my old TRS-80 at home - you know, I had a full-screen text editor on it that didn't use much CPU (sub-1 MHz) nor memory (less than 64K) - so why can't we return to that?

Honestly - I don't want to; but we can take this argument down the rabbit hole, because the argument that today's stuff is bloated compared to another case, can easily be made about today's stuff vs older stuff. Most of that bloat of your "smaller" example comes from abstraction; the same as the "new bloat" - not many years ago a program taking of 10 MB of RAM would have been insane. Today, it's normal and expected.

I daresay that in the very near future, programs taking up several hundred meg to a gig or so will also seem normal, because by then we'll have even better CPUs (with maybe hundreds or thousands of cores) and way more RAM (terabytes).

Some might argue that this is the case today, in the form of cloud computing and SaaS - browser-base stuff, in other words.

> But - can I get a copy of Notepad++ on my Linux box?

Yes.

Without wine, you can't.

Good thing wine is widely and easily available.

touché