Should just use Linux, tbh.
Yawn.
I had my first UNIX class in about 1990. I wrote my first Fortran program on a Sperry Rand Univac (punched cards) in about 1985. Cobol was immediately after Fortran (wish I’d stuck with Cobol).
I run a Mint laptop. Power management is a joke. Configured it as best as possible, walked in the other day and it was dead. Windows would never do this, unless you went out of your way to config power management to kill the battery.
There no way even possible via the GUI to config power management for things like low/critical battery conditions /actions.
There are many reasons why Linux doesn’t compete with Windows on the desktop - this is just one glaring one.
Now let’s look at Office. Open an Excel spreadsheet with tables in any app other than excel. Tables are something that’s just a given in excel, takes 10 seconds to setup, and you get automatic sorting and filtering, with near-zero effort. No, I’m not setting up a DB in an open-source competitor to Access. That’s just too much effort for simple sorting and filtering tasks, and isn’t realistically shareable with other people.
Now there’s that print monitor that’s on by default, and can only be shut up by using a command line. Wtf? In the 21st century?
Networking… Yea, samba works, but how do you clear creds you used one time to connect to a share, even though you didn’t say “save creds”? Oh, yea, command line again or go download an app to clear them for for you. Smh.
Someone else said it better than me:
Every time I’ve installed Linux as my main OS (many, many times since I was younger), it gets to an eventual point where every single thing I want to do requires googling around to figure out problems. While it’s gotten much better, I always ended up reinstalling Windows or using my work Mac. Like one day I turn it on and the monitor doesn’t look right. So I installed twenty things, run some arbitrary collection of commands, and it works… only it doesn’t save my preferences.
So then I need to dig into .bashrc or .bash_profile (is bashrc even running? Hey let me investigate that first for 45 minutes) and get the command to run automatically… but that doesn’t work, so now I can’t boot… so I have to research (on my phone now, since the machine deathscreens me once the OS tries to load) how to fix that… then I am writing config lines for my specific monitor so it can access the native resolution… wait, does the config delimit by spaces, or by tabs?? anyway, it’s been four hours, it’s 3:00am and I’m like Bryan Cranston in that clip from Malcolm in the Middle where he has a car engine up in the air all because he tried to change a lightbulb.
And then I get a new monitor, and it happens all damn over again. Oh shit, I got a new mouse too, and the drivers aren’t supported - great! I finally made it to Friday night and now that I have 12 minutes away from my insane 16 month old, I can’t wait to search for some drivers so I can get the cursor acceleration disabled. Or enabled. Or configured? What was I even trying to do again? What led me to this?
I just can’t do it anymore. People who understand it more than I will downvote and call me an idiot, but you can all kiss my ass because I refuse to do the computing equivalent of building a radio out of coconuts on a deserted island of ancient Linux forum posts because I want to have Spotify open on startup EVERY time and not just one time. I have tried to get into Linux as a main dev environment since 1997 and I’ve loved/liked/loathed it, in that order, every single time.
I respect the shit out of the many people who are far, far smarter than me who a) built this stuff, and 2) spend their free time making Windows/Mac stuff work on a Linux environment, but the part of me who liked to experiment with Linux has been shot and killed and left to rot in a ditch along the interstate.
Now I love Linux for my services: Proxmox, UnRAID, TrueNAS, containers for Syncthing, PiHole, Owncloud/NextCloud, CasaOS/Yuno, etc, etc. I even run a few Windows VM’s on Linux (Proxmox) because that’s better than running Linux VM’s of a Windows server.
Linux is brilliant for this stuff. Just not brilliant for a desktop, let alone in a business environment (or really for the average user).
If it were 40 years ago, maybe Linux would’ve had a chance to beat MS, even then it would’ve required settling on a single GUI (which is arguably half of why Windows became a standard, the other half being a common API), a common build (so the same tools/utilities are always available), and a commitment to put usability for the inexperienced user first.
These are what MS did in the 1980’s to make Windows attractive to the 3 groups who contend with desktops: developers, business management, end users.
I run a Mint laptop. Power management is a joke. Configured it as best as possible, walked in the other day and it was dead. Windows would never do this, unless you went out of your way to config power management to kill the battery.
Great bait, mate.
Windows literally configures itself to drain your battery while your laptop is closed by default. It’s called hibernation/fast boot.
You need to go out of your way to configure power manager to not kill the battery.
My battery drains by a negligible amount while my Windows laptop is hibernating. The same laptop battery drains by 2% per hour while on sleep mode running Linux.
Hibernation is suspend to disk. It’s exactly the same power state as being shut down. The only difference is that on boot, it loads state from disk.
Hibernate is S4 which is very low power but not zero. Some devices like LAN, keyboard, and USB can remain powered so your battery will eventually drain.
I’ve been running linux on the desktop since the late '90s (back when I was writing Fortran on Tandem systems) and have no idea what the hell you’re going on about.
Idk. I have a windows pc my work gave me, and the battery shits the bed constantly. I don’t even know were to begin troubleshooting the issue. I put in an ubuntu partition as an experiment, and the battery suddenly had a decent lifespan. I have my own linux laptop, so the partition was redundant and I ended up wiping it.
My partner also has a windows laptop and it has it’s own weird issues. The start menu search frequently can’t find programs she has installed, or takes up to 10 seconds to even show a result. This isn’t an old laptop, nor a particularly underpowered one. She also has issue with certain browsers on her work’s vpn, and troubleshooting via remote desktop has caused her issues as well. In both those situations she borrowed a linux laptop from me and her work’s IT department was able to figure it out pretty quickly. Some of it has since been solved but once in a while it still comes up. (they had no RDP solution for linux but the VPN info she was given worked, which got her up and running)
I’m sure someone more experienced with windows would just be able to fix these issues with a registry edit or something, but I have no idea where to begin. I have lots of respect for windows admins because it all feels like black magic to me. At least on linux you can google for solutions.
I also find the gui(s) on linux to be less buggy, more performant, more logical, and more consistent that the windows UI. I’m sure if I were more experience I could make some tweaks and get Linux-quality performance, but the bugs and inconsistency are still rough when you are used to Linux’s simplicity.
That’s my take anyway. I think the biggest thing is that knowledge and confidence smooths over a lot of issues, and that applies both ways. It seems like you have a lot of Windows experience that you can lean on and that’s great.
Who runs windows with only 128 GB of memory?
Like RAM? That’s more than usual, even the most powerful computers usually have 64GB RAM.
I think this is a /c/whoosh moment
The utter lack of awareness of most readers on lemmy is a source of wonder and amusement to me ;)
The CPU speed and ram size is irrelevant in this case, it’s slow because it needs to load ads and sponsored results from internet first
Windows 11 ams for the Dutch.
It’s true. My new windows laptop crashes, lags, and constantly blasts the fan. My older Linux laptop does none of those things even under greater workloads.
That sounds like some other sort of issue going on, not Win11.
Possibly bloatware related, unless it’s a clean install of Windows.
It was clean and I Uninstaller a ton of stuff, made the ui minimalist as possible. It’s usable and powerful, but it’s laggy and thr Microsoft apps like to crash.
One hardware difference is that Windows is on a Ryzen 7 plus discrete graphics vs the Linux (endeavourOS) one has a slightly older i7 (12th gen) and integrated graphics. They both have 32GB of RAM.
The plan for me is to go full-time Linux once I’m forced to move off Win10. I already use it a lot but I’m waiting on a few holdouts.
Is it still stupidly difficult to change default browser in win11?
I read somewhere around the time of w11 release that you have to tweak registry keys or something like that?
No, and it never has been. I use Firefox as my default and it has never changed.
Oh, I see. Must’ve misremembered that, then…
You did not misremembered it. They tried to make it difficult, got backlashed, then took a step back. All of it before Win11 was widely distributed, so some people never had to deal with it.
With that said. MS still looking ways to try forcing you to use Edge. Recently, all of your Chrome tabs just got reopen into Edge, “due to a bug”.
It’s really not… I use Windows 11 for work (dev) and gaming and it’s fine.
My midrange gaming laptop which I bought a year and a half ago came with it preinstalled and it’s nowhere near this guy’s specs but I honestly have not had any problems either, and the whole rig cost me slightly more than his CPU alone.
Maybe he’s just aware and has points of comparison, knows how much better it could be.
Have you compared it to any other OS though? My 2013 MacBook Air is faster (as in in daily usability, opening windows, closing apps, etc) than my 2023 Thinkpad running Win11. That’s not good performance.
I do also have a 2019 MacBook Pro running Ventura (for when I want to get some work done) and I don’t really notice much of a difference TBH.
That said, I haven’t really benchmarked it in any meaningful or reproducible way and I mainly use the Windows laptop for gaming, so I rarely have more than a few apps open at any given time (basically browser, chat, Steam + whatever other game launcher <publisher X> is forcing me to use to run their shit). Meanwhile, on my MacBook, I tend to have a lot more apps running simultaneously and it still works smoothly despite only having 16 gigs of RAM so I guess MacOS still wins?
Honestly I don’t really care, as long as Windows runs my games and MacOS runs my other stuff, I’m good.
It’s not that great.
in the time it takes my work windows laptop to get from a login screen to a usable desktop, with the cpu idle, I rebooted and signed in to my linux desktop, and performed a restart. Several times.
I have that behavior as well, but it’s not a Windows issue, it’s all the bloat software that IT installed on it. It’s wild how much it kills this laptop compared to any other PC, not just in login times.
Take a windows computer and don’t have it managed by a company. Manage it yourself. It will slow down over time as the registry and other shit get gunked up over time. I run freebsd, Linux, windows, and mac here and I can tell you for sure after a length of time there’s no speeding up windows. You just need to reinstall it.
That hasn’t really been my experience. The computers I own have had windows for multiple years. I tend to install it when first setting up and never again.
The work laptop has good specs but trash performance from day one that I got it. I had a laptop that I gave away that was much lower spec than the work laptop and it ran better in every way, probably because it had none of the bloat.
Windows in my opinion has huge issues in other areas but performance hasn’t been one of them in the last 15 years for me, probably in part because I avoid running any heavy services in the background.
I guess we need to define performance. The OS operates slowly over time. Likely you’ll notice no difference playing your games or something.
If I can’t notice a difference while playing games, web browsing, video and photo editing, and working in blender and cad software, what is left to define slow operation? It operating slow should be something noticeable for it to be an issue.
It used to be a problem in windows 98 days, I remember as much. And it is a problem on my work computer but that is day one config from the company, not over time degradation.
Like I said, I dislike windows and it’s dark pattern bullshit as much as the next guy, but performance has not been one of my issues with it on my personal devices.
That doesn’t happen since Windows 98 days, lol.
No, it still happens. Unless you don’t do anything on your computer. If you boot it up and read a spreadsheet and shut it down and do this for 10 years, sure.
Except that it doesn’t.
My win11 laptop is practically instant to boot up
Ironically, it takes my work Thinkpad 3x as long to come out of hibernation than to boot. Thanks corporate policy!
How much ram does it have? 8gb? Genuinely curious. I have a work laptop with 8gb and one with 32…
both have 16 gb ram. Older desktop, newer laptop, so cpu performance is roughly equal. Both use an ssd
My 32gb machine is still running windows 10 and I have been dreading having to switch. I figured that the 8gb was the reason why the other was sluggish now I’m not so sure. I haven’t upgraded my personal devices yet either. I hate that they keep trying to reinvent the wheel with the “metro” backend that they built with windows 8. I saw that even the devices and printers control panel was fully moved into the settings app… Thanks for the reply, I will probably try to hold out a little longer …
Well, I don’t use a laptop, but my desktop boots into usable state in a few seconds. Not sure what your problem is, but it’s most likely between a keyboard and a chair.
Lightning fast for me but I’ll shut up about it .
Well, your anecdote is certainly more influential to me than listening to a core developer. Plus I want to believe you are right because it feels bad to believe otherwise, so you are obviously correct.
Hmm, guess it sounds silly when I say it that way. I’ll work on it.
Joking, I don’t use Windows, but I hope you are right.
Yes Windows 11 is small enough that this one dude knows all there is to know about it. It is impossible this (former) core developer is wrong, lying or has an axe to grind.
Haha, can we even imagine how big the codebase is? Must be nutty. That’s a cool thought.
Andy Young was never a core Windows developer. He worked for Microsoft, yes, but his experience is in JavaScript, C# and other web technologies, not C/C++ and system level development.
Well, I have the same experience as tills13.
I’m glad to hear it, i think I may try it out on my spare laptop and see for myself too.
My Windows 11 install is also fine, but bloat will always be bloat, and the last thing I want is performance compromised by something I don’t want.
The real dog in my house out of Windows, Fedora, and Mac is my Mac. I can boot Windows and Linux several times before my MVP decides to log me in. Perhaps it’s a sign that end-users don’t really care too much about performance? After all, if boot-up time mattered we’d probably all be on Chromebooks…
I use it for work and I’d say it’s terrible. Although the work in do is a bit demanding for the hardware I’m given.
I absolutely love Windows with the Linux subsystem. Coming from Mac it’s genuinely terrific to not have to mess around with homebrew. Incredible to see how Windows came from being comically inferior to surpassing Apple as there has been absolutely no progression there in the last decade.
I use Windows 11 for work (dev) and gaming and it’s fine
Not to pile-on, but my work laptop runs Win11 and it randomly hangs for ~5 seconds a few times each day. I’m sure not all of the blame should be put on the OS: the 365 office suite is probably coded for shit as well.
Ugh, office 365 for all its fantastic collab features is such a resource hog it’s pathetic. It’s also sad that half the time a file won’t open on first double click. It just … does nothing.
You can’t even put a toolbar on the taskbar. Wtf
Not really a performance thing, but still.
What sort of toolbar do you mean? Actually curious because I just use my taskbar for shortcuts and the number that minimize to the system tray. I’ve been wondering about other uses it could have. I will Google it too but always nice to have random people’s uses as well. Have a Linux vm setup through hyper v and been trying to learn more.
You have been able to add a toolbar to the taskbar in many previous versions of Windows. I believe it used to be even more robust back in XP, and maybe earlier. In Windows 10 that I am using, you can right click the taskbar and there is a toolbars option at the top of the list. I created one that points to a folder of folders, that all contain numerous shortcuts, many of which I’ve been able to bring across multiple computers and versions of Windows rather easily. So far, in Windows 11, it looks to me like pins and simply loading up the taskbar with shortcuts is inefficient as well as very messy. Maybe I need more time with Windows 11. I hope they change some things back or add the capability.
Windows 11 exists for the sole purpose of requiring tpm 2.0 in order to boost new PC sales. 10+ year old hardware worked perfectly fine running win 10 and PC manufacturers were steadily losing sales as there was little or no need for organizations to replace what they had. The decision to make that requirement will result in millions of PCs going in the trash.
windows 11: doesn’t work without tpm 2.0
(some) linux distro: doesn’t work if tpm 2.0 enabled
You can get windows 11 working on non tpm 2.0 systems. It’s a soft requirement that Microsoft enforces with the stock installer but can be bypasses.
You can, but MS disables automatic updates without telling you. I have TPM but my CPU is one generation too old apparently, so they silently disabled updates on my machine and I didn’t realise I was still on 21H2 until a couple of weeks ago and had to manually update it.
The manual update worked and it didn’t warn me about anything or encounter any issues, but that was a massive pain.
No automatic updates? That sounds like a complete win
Which distro? Now I’m curious.
This is probably hardware-specific, but I installed void linux on my thinkpad x1 last week, and it can’t shutdown or wake up from sleep until I disabled tpm 2.0 from bios. Very weird. Other distros I tried so far didn’t have this problem.
First time I’ve heard about it. Anything similar with different hardware?
Windows 11 does, just not by default. My HP elitedesk 800 G3 server doesn’t have TPM 2.0 and it’s running 11 fine and without a MS account.
Yeah, fuck this planet, let’s fill it the land fills with perfectly usable computers because profits!
-Microsoft, probably
A fresh install has made windows 11 fine on my midrange PC.
The start menu drops my frame rate down to under 60hz which is weird.
I believe it to be a sort of indexer that has to scan the content of the PC each time it’s opened in order to pull something in front fast. So the more there is, the longer it takes.
I’m impressed at the balanced conversations in this submission. People who are both for and against Windows and Linux. As I remember, it felt like everyone was heavily biased towards Linux and hated everything about Windows 6 months ago.
Funny enough I bounce between both sides. I mostly work in Linux, and up until Steam Deck, I only gamed on Windows.
So you’ll absolutely see my comments bashing Microsoft and championing the superiority of open-source Linux. Then the next day mock the Linux needs about how “easy” Linux is when Windows just works for the average user.
I’m complicated.
Or just fickle!
I remember when windows worked; that was nice.
I liked some of the underlying stuff in windows fifteen years ago. Now I’m just done, theres no excuse for the shit they’re pulling.
Clearly the only option is templeOS
It’s still true, we’re just pretending for the sake of discussion.
It is still true. I have to manage windows PCs for my business so naturally I have one. Windows 11 really is a heap of trash. I have Microsoft’s own surface. When I switch virtual desktops the task bar briefly grows then shrinks. Randomly task bar icons will disappear and just be blank. They are still there, they just have no icon. To fix that I have to restart explorer.exe. Not impressed. It’s a downgrade over 10 and 10 was an upgrade over 8.1, but a downgrade over 7.
Windows 10 does the exact same thing these days. I have no idea of the frequency on Windows 10 but I’ve seen it.
My desktop still has 10 but it has other issues lol. I haven’t seen these specific ones yet.
None of you read the article. His complaint pertains to the Start Menu, which I agree is atrocious. Mine never indexes Steam. If you wanted to compare this to alternatives you’d have to look at Mac’s Spotlight, or the Linux tools dmenu or rofi. Dmenu and rofi kick the shit out of Window’s Start Menu for my use cases. I want you to find my applications, that’s it. The Start Menu consistently jumbles settings, web searches, and shit I don’t want (why does searching User Accounts not bring up User Accounts to the fucken top?) It is comically bad, but its not talking about fucken gaming performance.
Seriously, searching for anything on your PC is completely useless.
I went back to windows for a few months after running linux as my daily driver for years. It was a jarring experience just how bad the basic user experience was. Everything seemed like an attempt at shoving some kind of advert-ainment down my throw when I was just looking for a basic program or file.
I don’t understand how an advertising system like this is acceptable for buisnesses? Like if I’m a business and providing work machines to my employees, you sure af aren’t going to be making money off my employees, with the machines and electricity I paid for.
It still seems like the “killer app” keeping everyone one Microsoft is Office, and maybe a handful of other proprietary pieces of software.
Enterprise versions can be customised without any of this bullshit.
An FYI for Windows users, check out Everything for searching your harddrive. It is insanely fast. Like, search your entire harddrive in real time as you press the letters fast. Compared to the crap Windows has built in, it feels like magic, until you realize that searching a database at fast speeds has been a solved problem for decades and yet Microsoft still continues to struggle because they want to throw in every possible piece of metadata and contents every time you search when most people just want to type a name in.
+1 for everything: literally saves my sanity
WizFile does a good job at it too. It works differently though; WizFile just looks at your partition table of the selected drive/directory. It’s super fast in all aspects but it’s only a single drive/directory at a time. I think Everything is slow to index everything but is super fast when searching and works across multiple drives/directories
WizFile is made by the same people who make WizTree and is essentially the same program, but instead of visually showing you the disk, it allows you to search.
Yeah…First thing I do in setting up a new Windows PC is install Everything to get instant indexed search.
KFind works great for me. /shrug
Pretty much everything related to the
explorer.exeprocess is needlessly slow on Windows 11. On my work machine, the file explorer will take 2-3 seconds to load after I open it, and that’s with only a C:/ drive (i.e. no network shares to slow it down or anything else).Start menu was separated from explorer.exe since 8 or 10, it’s called StartMenuExperienceHost.exe nowadays. Taskbar is also a separate process since 11. It also means that they can freeze separately
It also means that they can freeze separately
Pretty good summary of Microsoft’s “innovations” the last decade or so
It isn’t start. It’s Window’s search. It’s been shit forever. I can search for the exact file name and still not get it as a result. In the meantime iOS (or Android) can find it before I’ve typed the entire file name in. It’s embarrassing.
Its start, the article is 100% about the design of the new start menu and how it is now designed to distract you.
The whole ecosystem sucks power and time close to abusive levels though, so adding this…
Fairly often when I right click on an item I get the spinning blue wheel for 20-40 seconds. Open the shell (installed with git) always 40 seconds spinning wheel. I’m using another soft to get around it.
Yeah I fucking timed it and it is most often 40 (!) seconds. Work PC so I havent installed cryptohacker.exe on it or something. Launch any soft and it crawls from the SSD to main memory.
Just saying many problems stem from the inbuilt unsecurity and hence the crazy checks to “protect you”.
Pfff.
Can’t confirm the waiting time.
My Ryzen 7800X3D and nvidia 3070 based PC is snappy and quick to respond (if I am not running anything intensive in the background.
My (i believe) i5 8600 in my work laptop (HP Elitebook 850 G5) is not as fast but once everything is up is usually quite responsive (1-2 chrome windows with multiple tabs, Teams, Outlook, OneNote, 2 different Remote Tools and some other programs I happen to run).I believe you have a slow af or broken SSD that’s slowing you down. Better check with something like CrystalDisk.
Same here, went through multiple upgrades but even when I had a 3700X and a Vega 64 with 32 GB of RAM and a SN550, it was really snappy.
I have same CPU and GPU, with C: on an M.2 (Read 7200 MB/s - Write 5700 MB/s) and 32GB DDR5. When I right-click my desktop/wallpaper, I have the blue spinning wheel for 3 or 4 seconds before the menu opens 😬
980 Pro 500GB about 25-30% filled.
All programs are outsourced to my secondary drive.
All games are outsourced to my tertiary driveI run Wallpaper Engine in the back. Even with my backup software running it doesnt load longer than maybe 1sec at best.
Now compressing a 7zip archive will make the CPU sweat and let my system think for maybe a bit more.I’d reformat if I were you. And perhaps you’d enjoy running ReviOS playbook too 😈
fucken
Ah. Short for “fuckeng”, but I think they renamed it Balljang a few decades ago.
I thought that was short for “fucking”, but “en” isn’t how we do that.
The worst part is that it worked fine on Windows 7. You could hit start > type the first 3-4 letters > enter and be able to open any program or OS setting in under a second. They somehow fucked it up with 8 and still haven’t fixed it over a decade later.
Base windows 8 still had a very performant search, though a bit worse than 7. 8.1 is where it got truly fucked up.
Indexer was a pain point if Windows since forever. Although there are so much open source tools around doing it better…
I found out that if you download PowerToys one of the toys is a better start menu that runs 4x faster and without the web crap. I use it more than the actual start menu now.
Allegedly, the windows kernel scheduler was superior to Linux’s CFS scheduler in certain select metrics.
Except it didn’t matter anyway because all of the UWP apps were so crappily made and Microsoft forgot to hire actual devs for their UI so everything lagged and loaded slow.
Oh and it turns out the windows scheduler also handled multi core pretty poorly so people with new hardware suffered performance losses.
And Linux upgraded to the EEVDF scheduler which AFAIK makes it even better than before.
EEVDF?
Earliest eligible virtual deadline first scheduling
Earliest eligible virtual deadline first (EEVDF) is a dynamic priority proportional share scheduling algorithm for soft real-time systems.
In 2023, Peter Zijlstra proposed replacing the Completely Fair Scheduler (CFS) in the Linux kernel with an EEVDF process scheduler. The aim was to remove the need for CFS “latency nice” patches. The EEVDF scheduler replaced CFS in version 6.6 of the Linux kernel.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earliest_eligible_virtual_deadline_first_scheduling?wprov=sfti1#
Jesus that website needs to die, it’s such a rude and petty way to respond to someone. As if asking what some obscure acronym means on a discussion forum is such an outlandish thing.
Yeah god forbid people have to have conversations with one another to learn thing and maybe get a bit of a friendly opinion
Do you prefer this:
https://www.google.com/search?q=thats+just+like+your+opinion+man
This 16-bit looking shit ad that I didn’t ask for and can’t remove unless I choose yes or no was the last straw for me. Baking Language Model AI (Copilot) is nothing I want, just like I didn’t want Cortana, or Edge. Or the dark pattern requests to consider edge. Nor the new Windows setup screen that sometimes occurs after an update which is just a sly way of shoving another option to make Edge my default browser again.
I’ve moved my laptop to Linux around December. Now I’m going to move my gaming PC over to Linux. I’m just done.
Oh ffs, Windows heard me
Grossssss every single thing listed is a hard no
Stop using Chrome while you’re at it
Firefox baby.
I’ve haven’t had chrome installed in years.
using linux is such a breath of fresh air anytime I had to use windows on my work laptop
