But it was the IBM Aptiva K23 (basically this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sEhYumJiEbY ) with 12MB onboard. Later upgraded to the K6-2 (500?) with a real speed bump.

The whole industry was had more attention to performance and resources consumption.

The more things change....

OK they don't complain as much about 500kb attachments, but a lot of corporate direction for 20 years is about stopping that behaviour

Either way, I played mp3s in winamp while on IRC and sometimes even running netscape. Took at least an hour to get a mp3 though, and I had to throw them all out when I got decent speakers and could hear how terrible they sounded.

That was often due to driver support, some hardware not performing as quickly (or sometimes not being as stable) under generic OSS drivers compared to their behaviour with the manufacturer's proprietary binaries (which were quite likely not available for Linux at all). It could be very hit-and-miss, with two otherwise very similar machines performing quite differently due to one controller on the motherboard. Sometimes it was due to the generic driver not knowing for sure that a given device supported faster modes well so erring on the side of caution, a not uncommon example being a drive/controller combination ending up running in PIO mode or an old DMA mode despite supporting something much faster, in which case you could get the performance back with a little “magic” configuration manually telling it to use that better mode.

Generic drives in Windows often had the same problems, but manufacturers tended to make device-specific drivers readily available (usually in the box) for those OSs.

Other times it came down to differing defaults for things like cache modes (write-through or write back, etc), power-saving options, and so forth, which again could be tweaked with config (though the discoverability of these config options was typically not very high).