Comment by m_mueller
7 years ago
I've switched from macOS to Win10+WSL as my main dev machine this summer, mainly because I like Thinkpad hardware much more (and wanted to give the standard OS there a try), but I'm close to giving up on it and switching to Linux. It's crazy how much crap it throws at you at a daily basis.
* explorer, and even in general file operations are dead slow for some reason. an expand of a zip from explorer with a couple of 10s of thousands of files can take an hour, while in WSL takes maybe a minute. explorer also takes its sweet time to load, including in open dialogs. This being on a near top-of-the-line 480s with 24GB Ram and 1TB SSD.
* windows don't remember their previous position on multi-screens.
* copying in terminal sometimes seems to work, sometimes not.
* terminal beeps at you on every tab with more than one option, always have to keep sound muted.
* bluetooth menu is glitchy and there's no standard quick way to connect to a previous device.
* no idea whether that's win10, spotify or thinkpad software, but hitting a media key produces a NON DISMISSIBLE big overlay for spotify that just hangs there for a good 10 seconds and blocks the stuff I want to click.
* solution for a full taskbar? just make it scroll with very small scroll buttons...
* some older Logitech mouse I connect has buggy assignment of forward/back keys - does a completely random operation instead. Windows doesn't seem to have a GUI-way to set this stuff up
* terminal has no tabs and crappy colors and I don't wanna go down the rabbit hole of trying to integrate WSL with a non-default terminal emulator. I've installed the spring update, won't touch october one for a while at least.
* there's no integration of WSL & windows GUI layer. Have to start an X-Server separately and have Linux GUI-tools instead. If I seriously need that I will simply switch to a Linux distro instead (which given the above I start to suspect I should have done from the beginning).
You think that's bad? I'm using Linux at work on a laptop specifically designed for Linux and it's been a nightmare to get even basic functions to work right. The computer immediately resumes after going to sleep, it took several days to get hibernation working, the nvidia driver keeps locking up the system, external monitors aren't automatically detected, after an apt upgrade, hibernation stops working because my EFI loader file gets overwritten and I can't figure out from where, I managed to completely break X after trying to get Optimus (GPU switching) to work, applications written in different GUI frameworks (QT, GTK) use different themes and even different mouse cursors, applets don't always show up, bluetooth crashes randomly, and the list goes on.
Windows has annoyances, but Linux is like building a car in a garage full of car parts. Yes, you can build a working car, but you better be a mechanic.
Don’t use Linux with a laptop which has discrete graphics. I use Thinkpads with integrated graphics, and haven’t had a problem with drivers for a decade. I don’t use hibernation though, I just use standby.
Agreed. So many things breaking are to do with the binary dgpu drivers, that issue goes away with intel.
I've been running ubuntuMATE for years on my t450s. It is remarkably boring. The only things that don't work for me is the fingerprint reader and docking/undocking can be funny if done hot.
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This is a System76 laptop which only puts Linux on their laptops, so it's specifically designed for it. The two mDP connectors are only connected to the Nvidia chip, so maybe the Intel IGP isn't powerful enough to drive 3 4k monitors at a time (4k internal, 2x 4k external).
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But.. if you want to game and/or do stuff like games programming, video rendering etc you kind of want discrete graphics.
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Or use one that are supported by the open-source amdgpu drivers. Those have been pretty good.
that's the reason why I went with Win+WSL in the first place, I feared all the driver crap.
So... our choice now is between a great OS on laptops with next to no I/O and totally unacceptable keyboard, OR great hardware running on an OS that's put together with duct-tape and strings?
Yes unfortunately that's about it.
At this point, for me the best option is charge more and put up with windows being a dick periodically.
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I’d like to highlight a few points that are mostly not about Windows.
> * windows don't remember their previous position on multi-screens.
Not an OS concern. Most applications do remember, by the way.
> * terminal beeps at you on every tab with more than one option, always have to keep sound muted.
Windows terminal doesn’t have a bell. WSL does, as does macOS or anything Linux/UNIX really. You can disable it of course. Google "wsl disable bell".
Either way, nothing new or objectively bad.
> * no idea whether that's win10, spotify or thinkpad software, but hitting a media key produces a NON DISMISSIBLE big overlay for spotify that just hangs there for a good 10 seconds and blocks the stuff I want to click.
That’s mostly Spotify. It can be disabled in settings. Windows only shows the volume "slider", which is gone after 5 seconds
* some older Logitech mouse I connect has buggy assignment of forward/back keys - does a completely random operation instead. Windows doesn't seem to have a GUI-way to set this stuff up
Nothing is "random". Except perhaps when the device is broken. Mouse buttons 1-5 have been well-defined for 10+ years now.
> * terminal has no tabs and crappy colors and I don't wanna go down the rabbit hole of trying to integrate WSL with a non-default terminal emulator. I've installed the spring update, won't touch october one for a while at least.
Yes, it sucks. You can either enable SSH and SSH into WSL or just use wsltty (which offers bell options!).
> * there's no integration of WSL & windows GUI layer.
That’s a given. WSL is only for developers.
> That’s mostly Spotify. It can be disabled in settings. Windows only shows the volume "slider", which is gone after 5 seconds
Actually that's a UWP / Windows Feature that music apps such as Spotify can hook into to display Now Playing info and media controls
>no idea whether that's win10, spotify or thinkpad software, but hitting a media key produces a NON DISMISSIBLE big overlay for spotify that just hangs there for a good 10 seconds and blocks the stuff I want to click.
Is Spotify, go to settings, display options and deselect "Show desktop overlay when using media keys". For some time I had to do that after every Spotify update, but seems to stick now
thanks! at least something...
Your explorer issue is Windows Defender's realtime protection. If you toggle it off you'll see the operation you're trying to run complete almost instantly.
I like Windows 10 and generally have been happy with it -- but that particular behavior has been driving me nuts for a while. They really need to fix it.
"AV makes any computer slow" is still true. Scanning every file every time it's accessed simply can't take zero time.
"But think of the security!" they'll say... of course, it's always a tradeoff. I've experienced a similar problem with a large growing logfile --- appending becomes essentially quadratic, every time the process closes the log the AV opens and scans all of it.
Exactly.
I first noticed it when I would open my downloads folder (because I'm a heathen and never clean it out), and it would sit there and "process" for fifteen minutes. Just clicking realtime protection off fixed it instantly -- but it would seem there's no need to re-scan every file every time a folder is opened, scan them when I click on them, or scan them when I try to open them, or scan them in the background while I still can interact with the folder. Being unresponsive is a cardinal sin for any UX, and that's where Apple shines and MS still continues to drop the ball.
Like I said, I really like Windows 10 -- but it really falls short here.
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I've been using FreeBSD, then Linux since 2002 and I'm seriously considering moving to Windows, which I haven't ran on any of my machines since back when Windows XP was fresh. If you think all the stuff you listed is bad, wait 'til you run into Gnome, GTK and KDE, where not only do windows not remember their previous position on multi-screens, but desktop icons don't remember their position on a single one :-).
(Or you can't have them at all without an extension, yeah, that too...)
Windows has progressed by leaps and bounds since 2003. Linux, not so much. We have this fixation on building something, then deciding it's full of legacy code that doesn't allow us to build what we really want, so we throw it out and do it all over again.
The good news is that we've been on the "building" side of this pattern for a while. The bad news is that we've been on the "building" side of this pattern for a while so I expect there's not much time left until the next "revolution"...
> wait 'till you run into Gnome, GTK and KDE, where not only do windows not remember their previous position on multi-screens, but desktop icons don't remember their position on a single one :-).
KDE has explicit settings to remember window position which works well. As for icons, I haven't had icons on my desktop besides a dock for years, so can't tell you.
What surprises me is that around 2010 Ubuntu seemed perfectly fine, and then they started to throw everything that worked away.
I think that happened to all platforms then.
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Yeah, that was weird. I remember that as the only time I actually felt that Linux had a decent shot at the Desktop. New money had rolled on to the scene with a coherent vision, started fixing a lot of the suck, and quickly became the predominant distribution.
Then something happened and Canonical went crazy with NIH and mobile obsession. Then they tried to monetize in a stupid way.
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So don't use GNOME? I like XFCE, but there are other desktop environments around that don't try to destroy ("modernize") themselves every few years.
Yeah, after sixteen years of this stuff, I definitely needed someone to tell me that there are other DEs than Gnome :-).
How are things in XFCE land, do you have a sane "Open file" dialog, or do its (so, so few...) applications use the new and improved GTK 3 version? Speaking of which, has it moved to GTK 3 completely, or do only some of its tools work on hi-DPI screens, and only with a few themes?
I am content with the cinnamon, the default in linux mint. It looks great imo, configuration is easy. The Mint developers are listening to their users.
Most of your terminal issues can be resolved by using http://cmder.net
Don't underestimate Microsoft's willingness to keep their system as a minimum that gets enhanced by third parties.
I honestly don't get why people recommend cmder. It's really slow, even compared to the slower terminals on Linux. Also, and more importantly, xterm emulation seems to be utterly broken. I get weird incorrect lines shown all the time.
I found the WSL console to be a at least a bit more reliable.
Also don't underestimate our willingness to try and make our inbox stuff better - it just takes a lot of time to add new features without breaking some back-compat. We're hard at work improving conhost every day :)
I actually just installed that before you mentioned it, and disabled its sound in the volume mixer. Finally something I can live with in terms of terminal.
> I don't wanna go down the rabbit hole of trying to integrate WSL with a non-default terminal emulator.
You open whatever terminal you want and run the WSL command, by the way. So just 'wsl' or 'bash' or 'ubuntu', etc.
There's not actually a rabbit hole. You don't need to change the default launcher.
I c, thx. Will definitely try that.
Also note that there actually is a team hard at work improving the console, so fixes will probably come. See the last two entries in this blog: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/commandline/tag/console/
> terminal has no tabs and crappy colors
Okay, the tabs thing we haven't been able to fix yet, but if you want to change the console colors real quick, you can use ColorTool:
https://github.com/Microsoft/console/tree/master/tools/Color...
Also, it you want a tab-like experience, you could always try tmux. It's a linux commandline tool that gives you tabs, panes, and all sorts of other goodies, and as of 1809 you can even use cmd.exe within it.
When I first tried W10, I noticed a distinct lag before the start menu opens. Often, menus would pop under the taskbar, instead of over, being unreadable and unclickable.
I assumed they pushed it to market before it was ready, allowing users to find the bugs to save on testing costs (helping justify why it was free). Only, now, years later, the start menu still lags, and things still open behind other things.
Combined with all the mysterious data it sends to various IP's, I think that when you press Start, those first 300 ms are spent as part of some sort of distributed computing effort.
Oh users do find these things. Every time they release a new "Feature Update" full of problems (which is to say, every time they release a new Feature Update), it turns out those problems had all been well reported by people on Insider Builds. Nearest I can figure, in MS's continuing effort to Embrace OSS software, they have contracted the disease that prevents them from paying attention to what users are complaining about.
The slow start menu is awful. I want to press start then type what I want to open but it is so slow you have to wait nearly 2s to type or it will lose the first few characters. Add to that the search result quality is dire.
I disable web search and Cortana, and it makes all the difference in the world for Win key + type the first few characters of an app:
https://pastebin.com/ApnfB7wC
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Just press Windows+Q, and start typing. Much faster.
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For me start menu is instant (well, animation takes few milliseconds, but it starts instantly) and I can start to type anything immediately, like <Win>cmd.
Have to agree on all points.
You’ll find the slow file operations are entirely down to NTFS. Regardless of how you play around in fsutil it’s hopeless on lots of small files. This incidentally makes WSL unbearably slow. Hence why I still use VirtualBox and putty.
I was suspecting as much. I wonder why NTFS gets so much praise, especially compared to HFS+. Yes, HFS has less features, but at least it lets me get my work done.
NTFS deserves no praise. None at all. Not sure I've ever heard any to be honest.
edit: fine example as I got a downvote.
SVN checkout on windows NTFS 8 minutes 30 seconds
SVN checkout on same kit on ext4 48 seconds.
This problem scales to git as well, so is not SVN related. Anything that does lots of small writes, so basically anything unixy, suffers like this.
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It's definitely not 'entirely'. I have a folder with a bunch of small files where explorer and other programs sometimes hitch for tens of minutes, and WSL can reliably process in seconds. It's too many seconds compared to native linux, but it's still seconds.
It's not NTFS -- it's Windows Defender's Realtime protection.
If you turn it off it still runs like ass. I have spent hours on this one even down to fsutil tuning and I can't get more than about a 10% improvement.
This is because the small files are stored on the MFT which is global read/write locked.