A modern OS is a OS that requires 1000 times the resources of an old OS to accomplish the same basic tasks.
Thats exactly it.
I totally think the os should give most of the horsepower of the hardware to
the user. Linux, windows and osx fail at this on older hardware badly.
If you tweak the hell out of linux with a lightweight window manager, its not
so bad I suppose.
I just think a brand new os should not require brand new hardware to run
decently.