... What I want is to run modern applications on older hardware. If modern applications aren't architected to support this, then that is the problem. ...
It is not uncommon for programmers to write applications that are sluggish on today's hardware while banking on Moore's Law. So the statement: "What I want is to run modern applications on older hardware." produced a chuckle.
While I see what you're saying, especially with reference to the commercial software world, there must be a huge market full of "now - 1" hardware. A I don't want to run Linux on a 286 - the machine was a Celeron 500, machines of which era are probably the bottom end of the machines I would now consider useful. Why aren't people writing software to capture this market? Especially in the open source area, where people go on about how they associate free software with free hardware and speculate that people who can afford high end machines can afford software to run on them. Games can offer a contrived example - while everyone loves Quake and its bretheren, the best selling game of all time is The Sims, which is hardly driving forth the 3D graphics industry!
Your XP example doesn't surprise me at all though. What iteration of x86 was your Linux software compiled for? I mean X, your WM, your apps and the kernel?
I can only assume that it's an i686 kernel and i386 apps. Fairly standard. Perry asked me a similar question last night: "have you tried running a distribution that came out at the same time as Windows XP?" Windows XP Pro was released on 25-Oct-2001. It seems that the release of Linux that was 'new' at the time will have been Red Hat 7.2 on 22 October 2001. I had previously thought it to be RH8, which actually came out a year later on 30 Sep 2002. (See http://www.theosfiles.com). I'm told that kernel 2.6 is better, more responsive, etc, than 2.4 for desktop use, even (especially!) on older hardware. Support for RH7.2 was available until this week on Fedora Legacy, however it's being dropped, along with support for RH8, with the expectation that people can easily migrate to the final release in each tree (7.3/9) or backport the 7.3/9 packages themselves. I actually believe, perhaps somewhat incorrectly, that running the latest versions of software is a good thing, and that FC2 with all the extraneous services disabled could be faster than RH8. RH7.x wouldn't meet the requirements of running modern software (predating GTK2 for a start). Perry also asked "why do I expect a 2 week old OS to be better than (however old Windows XP is)". That's because given a new machine I'd install a 2 week old Linux distribution and a 2.5 year old Windows distribution - they are both "the most up to date".
I ran a quick, responsive, usable desktop environment on a 286 at 10Mhz (uphill both ways)
What environment was that?
As Aristotle cleverly picked, GeoWorks Ensemble (however version 2 - http://www.aci.com.pl/mwichary/guidebook/interfaces/geos/geoworks/gwe2). Let I not be compared to DrWho in his saying "I did it all 20 years ago on my 286", you can still get GeoWorks, which was called NewDeal Office at one point and is now the very ugly looking "BreadBox Ensemble". But I'm not using a 286 any more. Craig