I liked the path windows was going in late 2010s. WSL, power toys, many great utils, great performance.
But it has since then stalled and got increasingly worse. Especially with this AI shoving everywhere, not even mentioning getting ads at some point in notifications and start menu.
I'm not particularly in love with MacOS either (but have no realistic alternative on my MacBooks).
I'm more and more inclined of switching my desktop (my main working machine) to Omarchy, two coworkers in my team use it and love it and seems the sweet spot for what I need as a dev without the annoyance of Windows or the god awful macos.
If you want an OS to simply do stuff Linux is now clearly superior.
However, I found Omarchy to be whatever the opposite of a sweet spot is. It brings all the complications of a tiling WM, so you still have to learn a complicated new way of using your system, but at the same time it is extremely opinionated so instead of ending with a tailored custom tiling WM that suits your needs at the end of the learning curve, you end up with a tiling WM that is suited for someone else’s needs.
On the flip side, the simplifications it does add, such as a supposedly easier way to add packages, does no such thing. It doesn’t simplify the process at all and in fact makes it harder to understand how to actually remove stuff.
I love Linux. I've been using it for about 25 years now. I try to be a realist, and historically, it has always been my opinion that it is a less polished experience, suitable mainly for power users. But my opinion now is that many flavors actually do offer a superior desktop user experience for most use cases.
I do not know anything about this team, but I worked with a team before that migrated from a native app to an Electron-based version. It was worse in literally every way except one: the developers on that team preferred developing that way. Nothing else mattered.
The kind of developers who are willing to work with native GUI APIs (even though a framework) simply don't exist in enough quantity anymore.
What does notepad have to do with web based apps? case in what point?
New Notepad in 11, with tabs and autosave (and dark mode), is so much better and more practical to use over old one, it just stays open all the time and become my main notetaking pick. It may take a beat to open a big file (1+ mb) with line wrapping, but it's pretty much just as fast as anything (and may be even faster than some other editors). It's just very easy to reach for and quite snappy.
There are some apps on Windows with actual gripes, but Notepad, Paint, Snipping tool, they're quite solid and have become everyday tools that eliminated the need to reach for some other third party apps.
The reason for this is that it's hard to hire native UI developers, but easy to hire web devs.
Something like 90% of all new devs today learn only cloud-native backend dev or web frontend dev. The only exceptions tends to be mobile and game developers. Collectively cloud+web, mobile, and games account for like 98% of all new devs it seems. Nobody learns anything else.
The web is going to become the desktop UI in the future for this reason alone. It's going to be slower and much more bloated than almost any other alternative, but it's got the critical mass of adoption behind it and that's what determines core technologies in the industry. Technical merit is a distant second or third.
This is frustrating but it's not surprising to one who has studied biology and evolution. In evolution this is called "path dependence," and it's why we have weird things like a man's testicles hanging in a bag below his body. A previous evolutionary path optimized the sperm production process to run at a lower temperature than the rest of the body, so then evolution's hack for this is to put them in a bag outside the body. Ticket closed with "resolved." The pathways taken through a complex solution space determine the outcome and the outcome is often bizarre and "hacky" for this reason. The key is that it's very hard to back-track. Once a path has been taken, it's very hard to un-take it.
Large industries and markets are essentially "biological," not rationally designed, so you get the same kinds of phenomena.
It could be much worse. If Linux+HTML+JS had not taken over, we might have the Microsoft Enterprise Web(tm) where Visual Basic (not VB.NET, OG Visual Basic) is the main language and each service or site would require an NT license for every node and an IIS license for every web hostname. UIs might be written in ActiveX or desktop ones in Microsoft C/C++ with OLE and similar horrors. It might be just as slow and infinitely uglier and more expensive and less open. Apple would be dead and open source would much more marginalized than it is today. The net would basically be a total MS monopoly. If you didn't live through the 90s: this nearly happened.
This. It was infuriating to find Notepad got updated to a bloated app with rich text and Copilot. It's so different, it just should have been another program. The whole reason I use Notepad is because it's a simple, dumb, fast, predictable program. If I wanted the rich text, I would use any of the numerous other options!
And for the kicker, the update made it forget my font settings.
I've been daily driving it for months now and really like it. It's a nice introduction to tiling window managers, has a well thought out key mapping and generally looks reasonably nice while getting out of my way as an embedded dev.
There's always been Arch linux based distros that come with more things set up and better (or just more specific) defaults. To my understanding Omarchy is just one of those, like Manjaro or etc in the past?
Or: Steve Ballmer oversaw the decline of Mircosoft's flagship product, but left before he could be blamed for it.
A lot of Windows' current problems can be traced back to the Ballmer era, including the framework schizophrenia, as Microsoft shifted between Win32, UWP, WPF, and god knows what else. This has lead to the current chaotic and disjointed UI experience, and served to confuse and drive away developers. Repeatedly sacrificing reliable and consistent UX while chasing shiny and new technologies is no way to run an OS.
July 2014: Microsoft lays off 14k people, a large portion of which are SDET (Software Development Engineer in Test)/QA/test people.
The idea was that regular developers themselves would be writing and owning tests rather than relying on separate testers.
I'm sure there were multiple instances of insane empire building and lots of unproductivity, but it's also hard to not think this was where the downfall began.
You may also want to consider Cosmic. PopOS has consistently been the distro that "just works" for me, though I don't use it much as I prefer to tinker more. That said, they're doing a lot of good work making Cosmic as a better replacement for the ton of gnome 3 hacks they had to do before.
Why would you go for a random Linux distribution backed by DHH (a Ruby developer) instead of a established upstream distribution such as Debian or Fedora?
I’m a user of omarchy and I like it a lot. I wanted a Linux experience that I didn’t have to set up myself, and this one was designed specifically for devs who are used to a macOS environment. It took about 6 minutes to set up and everything just works. I don’t really know that much about dhh or his politics, like some sibling comment mentioned. I just think it matches my sweet spot of ease to set up and provided good UX
As stated before, because my colleagues which whom I share the same projects and test cases made the jump from MacOS and are all liking it so far, I also like what I saw till now.
Utilities to circunvent the stupid original design. Even Microsoft is forced to use this pattern to correct itself.
But hey, you know what they say: "Selling the disease and the cure is the best bizness plan ever".
macOS is in the worst state I’ve ever experienced since I started using it, but I’d go back to a shitty performing x86 laptop with Linux before living on windows again. Just using it on my gaming pc makes my skin crawl
The fact that, on expensive hardware, I can hit windows+r and start typing before the run box renders/loads is staggering, it beggars belief.
Im generally a microsoft shill, but theyre really on the down hill slope. windows 11 is truly a masterpiece of changes no one asked for or wants, Teams is the least reliable piece of business software I've ever seen. New outlook does not have feature parity with old outlook and has the same bargain bin apple ux stylings as w11.
Maybe ive finally crested the age gap and im officially a dinosaur, but God damn every microsoft product is worse than it used to be.
At work employees generally use okay machines, not great but still at least 3GHz i5 processor with 16GB of ram etc. and they only run an ERP client and a browser with a few tabs.
Sometimes, I click on the windows button and it legit takes 3-4 seconds for windows to render the start menu that only has the program list, nothing else, just the list of programs.
These machines with their 6/8 or so cores can do tasks at the scale of nanoseconds and it takes, 3 whole seconds to render a single window with a list of program names, that’s simply stupid.
Anyone who has ever touched a windows xp machine knows that the start menu can complete drawing before my brain can register that my fingers in fact touched the keys, which takes roughly 20ms or so if I remember correctly. What the hell is this system doing?
I dug out my dad's Windows 98 era PC that he was running Windows 2000 on that we hadn't turned on since 2011, and it felt lightning-fast compared to W10 and W11. Double-click to open apps and they appear, ready to type in. It felt like I was on some kind of futuristic prototype.
- dell p2 300 win95
- early core duo era with linux 2.4 (some kali linux image)
in both cases there was something very odd, the crude os design (no parallel systemd etc), gui toolkit and desktop environment (no compositor, glitchy) wasn't an issue and the low amount of lag felt very good. it's the same feeling when driving 90s cars, the drive feels directly connected to the whole, it's cruder but it feels better
and saying this as a fan of recent linux kernel and systemd parallelism with the crazy cpu over ssd speed.. i was utterly surprised
On a more serious note, I really only use Windows for games & I'm still always frustrated with how many updates (& restarts during updates) Windows needs. My fans are always constantly spinning on Windows too (laptop or desktop) whereas my Mac & Linux machines are generally silent outside of heavy load.
This is common for any self-updating software that you use infrequently.
A friend of mine complained that he hated how Firefox "always" wants to restart with an update. I couldn't understand what he was on about. Turned out I use Firefox daily and he uses it like once every 2 months to test something and yeah, Firefox has an update out every 2 months or so, so that fits.
It's the same with Windows (and, I assume, macOS). Use Windows more and the updater will disappear out of sight.
I update Linux maybe once a year. Sure, there are security vulnerabilities. But I'm behind a firewall. And meanwhile, I don't have to spend any time dealing with update issues.
My Mac doesn’t randomly reboot, doesn’t force updates on shutdown, doesn’t have weekly updates that require updates. IMO Apple handles updates much better than Windows.
Windows still reboots instead of shut down when you do update and shut down.
> My fans are always constantly spinning on Windows too (laptop or desktop) whereas my Mac & Linux machines are generally silent outside of heavy load.
defender seemingly needs to check every 10ms that you still don't have a virus
I'm always amused by these occasional "you still don't have any viruses" popup notifications from Defender. Well, good to know, thank you very much, I guess.
I feel like I've been monkeys-pawed with the downfall of Windows for gaming. I.e. rather than being at the point where everything just works best/easiest in my Bazzite install it's a game of DRM, modding tool support, feature support, and random "this game runs better on Windows, this game runs better on Bazzite" discovery. Also Windows/Steam OS clone/"normal Linux" setups all have their own very awkward corners around the non-gaming portions. I've not found one that does not require substantial tweaking to get a usable all around experience unless you buy a device to use as more a dedicated gaming console (Xbox/Steam Deck type device).
I miss the ~mid Windows 7 era. Not that everything ran perfectly without issues on Windows 7 at the time, particularly old games, but at least there was an option good enough to assume to always go with first instead of "see if the games you play work best here".
If I could still be running Windows 2000, I would --- it simply flew on a Fujitsu Stylistic ST2300, and I was able to hack the Compaq TC1000 Finepoint digitizer driver for Windows NT to run on it --- w/ a CF--IDE adapter, no spinning rust to worry about, and I even had room for a full install of Encarta, my only worry until it died was buying AAAA batteries for the stylus, and the only thing I missed was pressure sensitivity (but my work computer had a Wacom Intuos, so the delicate stuff was done on that).
That said, my favourite Windows computer ever was the Fujitsu Stylistic ST4110 w/ transflective display and Wacom EMR digitizer --- put an SSD in it, carried a couple of spare batteries, added a USB GPS, and kept a pair of docking stations w/ power supplies at my desks at work and the office and a third power supply in my laptop bag and it just worked --- despair of really replacing it, the Samsung Galaxy Book 12 was close, but then Fall Creators Update came out and crippled styluses down to an 11th touch input so that they would scroll rather than select text... getting by w/ a Book 3 Pro 360, but Windows 11 has me looking at a Raspberry Pi paired w/ a Wacom One or Movink display....
It's not shocking they added even more bloatware to every microsoft program so even with the same OS kernel it would probably take longer. At this point it also got out of hand for Microsoft themselves if you have heard how they are going to speed up the explorer. Not by making it faster but by preloading it on startup so it feels snappier, there are 20 years of technical debt in I think you cannot save this anymore (but I am to inexperienced to know that for sure)
The last time this subject came up someone in the thread jumped up to explain to me how Windows 11 has all these great new features that make it worth being many times less performant.
Every feature they listed was some anti-consumer thing that only a corporate customer would ever care about or want. Every single one.
What I learned is that Windows 11 is great for the customer, I'm just not the customer. I'm just the dummy who paid for it.
One random little thing to add on to the list of shitty things about Windows 11: the new default image-viewing program (Photos), is incapable of rendering multi-page TIFF files. No error message or anything, just displays the first page and acts like everything’s fine. The OLD image viewing program (Windows Photo Viewer), displays them no problem though…
These kinds of issues can be incredibly disruptive and distressing for non tech-savy users. You update your OS and suddenly it looks like a lot of your data are corrupted, with no explanation of how to get it back.
Forcing saving to OneDrive causes this issue a lot too. I was stunned to find that saving changes to an existing document will often try to save a new file in OneDrive instead. So if you don't notice this and go back to your original file, it will look like your changes weren't saved.
The only part of windows that really matters in the long run is win32 which has been extremely stable. You could go back to XP and not lose that many features. The fact that modern windows runs like ass has very little to do with backwards compatibility.
I don't necessarily disagree, but I do think there's an important distinction between technical debt and backwards compatibility. Yes The former can be caused by the latter, but I've worked in enough projects that didn't have to worry about backwards compatibility but were still riddled with technical debt to know that backwards compatibility is only one source of many.
I switched to Linux after Windows started showing me propaganda on the screen where you enter your password. To me, that's diabolical and forced me to make the switch. Sorry, I don't wish to "Learn more about Black-Owned Businesses" just to access my computer.
We updated my MIL's computer to Windows 11 and now it's giving her ads about Xbox something or other on the login screen. She is in her 80s and has no idea what an Xbox even is.
This is awful in many ways. Among other things what really gets my goat is that Xbox something or other ads can have cartoony sexuality, violence, and so on. Those things don’t bother me, but there are plenty of elderly, conservative, religious, etc. people who would be taken aback by it.
There’s plenty of that content in our media, but those people don’t consume that media. A computer is a critical general purpose tool. Everyone needs it. This is like putting scantily clad elves on every refrigerator.
Ads on the login screen, ads on my fucking start menu. No intuitive way to access all programs. . . Sorry. Apps from the start menu. Suggested apps instead of that. Hold screens to set a backup using one drive and to link my phone and set telemetry and whatever other bullshit once a week.
It's not great. Linux mint is what I install for older relatives now. It's close enough to windows feeling that they never even question it.
Regrettably, I have to use a windows machine for work. The other day I got one where the "fact" was an offer to help me pic out the right laptop or tablet to get the most out of copilot.
To stoke my rage into an incandescent fury, if you go to settings -> Lock Screen, there's no obvious way to disable it at first. You have to change the background image from "Microsoft Spotlight", the one where the image changes to a static background image, and THEN you get a checkbox. The checkbox you uncheck is "get tips, fun facts, and more". I guess trying to sell me shit is under "more".
It sucks because i agree that having the picture change is a nice feature. Microsoft has decided to hold that nice feature hostage to ads.
I just reinstalled Windows, so I've had the joy of a bunch of stupid MS stuff (why did you make my /~ homedir the first five letters of my email? WHY?) but I have to admit, this, I have not encountered.
Those landscape photos are a crappy hypnotic effort meant to try and dissociate Microsoft from the feeling most people have when they have to login on a Monday Morning.
What got me to angrily turn it off was a gigantic closeup of a moose face. It’s kind of funny now that I think about it but I have two 32” monitors and I really did not need 64” of moose lips and wet nostrils.
Reading HN threads about Windows makes me wonder some times if I’m using a completely different version of Windows on my workstation. I guess I also haven’t seen any “propaganda” among my rotating selection of landscape scenery.
Slowest is unfortunately not even the worst problem of Win11.
I just want an OS that helps me control my computers and be productive, not one that "mines" me to sell me to be exploited.
While I have been using various Linux flavors for my servers, my desktop has been Windows for decades. Microsoft's charade with Win11 has me committed to moving to desktop Linux in 2026. There will be pain, but they crossed a line.
May not have been a fair test. Windows is running the kernel in a kinda VM which older computers have not been optimized for -- newer generations of CPU can smooth out the overhead.
For a fair test against Windows 10 and below, you'll have at least to do this:
"Temporarily turn off your Memory Integrity and VMP" -- https://support.microsoft.com/en-US
Also, it's important to have all bits and pieces of Hyper-V/Windows Virtual Platform off (which the Menory Integrity relies on), thus cutting off WSL functionality.
We don't need flawed tests to tell us Windows 11 sucks -- yesterday my explorer bar didn't respond to clicks nor Windows key. In the past killing explorer.exe and restarting it, or logging off and back on, worked. Yesterday I had to reboot the machine to fix it.
Why is it, when ever someone points out that Microsoft shits the bed on something someone will come out with ludicrous ideas about changing the default environment.
The default environment is what you get, all this handwringing about whats potentially possible misses the point entirely; for decades we have, as a community, scoffed at linux for requiring you to understand deeply how your OS works in order for it to function. Now we’re in the situation where the out-of-the-box experience for gaming requires less esoteric knowledge on Linux than Windows, yet people defend Windows still.
Do you seriously think the exec running emails even knows what Hyper-V is? Do you think any IT department is going to disable memory integrity?
Would any Dev disable WSL? Do the vast majority of gamers want to do this? Should they have to?
You’re now arguing that overhead is ok because its mitigated by newer hardware, I don’t believe that to be true as I run W11 on A Threadripper 3970x and an i9-14900k and the fuckers feel leagues slower than my M1 Macbook, its a joke! Like 10x the power/thermal envelope- and sure, some of that is down to the M1 being great, but there’s no benchmark putting it above those CPUs.
Stop pretending that this is ok, and stop trying to spread uncertainty about a valid test.
I’d prefer newer hardware too, but this is the compromise if we want older OS’s to be included.
Regarding the video benchmark on the page: what would be fair is testing against the hardware that was available when the operating system was released. Windows 11 is absolutely not meant to run against hard drives, and current notebook and desktop offerings for home and enterprise users reflect that: you can get a 256gb SSD for a pretty decent price nowadays, to the point there's absolutely no reason to put in an HDD. When Windows Vista was released, your computer would absolutely have an HDD, so that would be a fair comparison.
That said, I was restoring a notebook owned by my aunt recently and I decided to run Ubuntu on it so I could mess with gparted a little bit. I'm already a full-time Linux user (have been for about five years now, I guess), but I was still surprised to see that one of the most bloated Linux distributions ran lightning fast on my aunt's Pentium Gold + 4gb RAM + HDD while Windows took over four minutes to boot.
It's absolutely time to abandon Windows if you're still dependent on it. There are alternatives. Heck, I'm not a fan of Apple either but at this point I'd recommend a MacBook for anyone wanting to get away from Windows and not comfortable with Linux or a Chromebook.
As a software engineer who has developed on Macs (and Linux) for most of my career and has recently started a job that requires me to use Windows again, I can tell you from experience that Office on the Mac is far, far more stable, easy to use, and considerably faster than on Win11. Microsoft’s macOS team are really good at their jobs.
But then I don’t find macOS to be slow or a buggy mess, so mileage may vary.
One would think multi-monitor support is the hardest thing in the universe to solve. My Linux desktop has very bad multi-monitor support, but hey, it's Linux. My $2K Macbook Pro has, somehow, even worse multi-monitor support, so bad that sometimes the productivity of an external display feels not worth the hassle of plugging it in and wrestling with it.
Besides that no problems with MacOS, it feels snappy to me and Office apps work mostly fine (except for all the missing features Microsoft refuses to add to Outlook).
Windows 11 makes me hate everyday computing. From the adverts in the start menu, to the sluggish performance on a computer orders of magnitude more powerful than any XP machine I used. It's just not fun anymore.
Been using KDE on a secondary machine for 15 years now. However they were always lacking in hardware compared to my main desktop.
I recently installed CachyOS on a USB NVMe drive, so I can dual boot without the dual boot pain. And wow, that thing flies.
I've been a Windows user since 3.0, but Windows 11 is probably getting replaced soon. I've stopped competitive gaming so anti-cheats ain't an issue, and Linux gaming is good enough.
There are some things I'll miss, but the bloat and lack of care from MS I'll be glad to leave behind.
Just an anecdote from yesterday. I got an old Pentium 4 1,5Ghz from a friend, put a Terratec EWX 24/96 soundcard in, installed WinXP, turned automatic updates off and installed a software synth, Native Instruments FM7, connected a midi keyboard via the gameport. Literally 2ms latency and no midi jitter! With an 25 years old setup! And it just works, without any distractions. Really, I almost cried as I saw that. I feel somehow violated by today's Windows11/10/8.
I had a similar experience when helping a friend's parent with an absolutely ancient laptop from like 2007, which which had a crappy Celeron, 256 MB of RAM, and Widnoes Vista.
The damn thing was shockingly performant. We have been played for absolute fools.
Windows 11 is fast enough if you... disable a million things on it that >99% of users wouldn't know when/how to, or wouldn't want to. Definitely depressing.
Can you expand on this? For example details on any tools to do this. I've been trying to disable features I know use resources and aren't needed but the native UIs to do it are hella confusing and feel purposely useless.
But seriously though, learn to fish. The answers aren't hard to find if you look, know what to search for, and are at least somewhat discriminating in your investigation.
Also friendlies for the record the person I was responding to mentioned millions of settings, which while hyperbolic, you and I know means just hard to find so please share all fishing tips and other notes.
For the record I am also with you that using WinDebloat is not the best way for the simplest reason that it all seems arbitrary.
I mean, the point is to make it usable. You can set up scheduled tasks where needed. I haven't had to re-disable stuff after that, but I've jumped through a lot more initial hoops than most people are willing to.
From the article: "The benchmarks were run on a Lenovo ThinkPad X220 — a model not officially compatible with Windows 11 — which could have affected some results."
MacOS seems to be going the way of Windows, with unnecessary and distracting notifications for things users don't care about. Then on top of that, the whole liquid glass redesign that hurts usability and information density.
Definitely moving in the direction of "what is good for a particular PM" and not "what is good for the user." I would have switched to linux years ago if it were not for the great hardware and I like having access to iMessages from the desktop.
Yeah and I think Apple know from their telemetry that too many users (including me) are sticking with macOS 15 Sequoia, which they need to address with macOS 27 this year (but given how they are, it'll just be Apple Intelligence)
I see no reason to migrate to Win11 when Win10 hits hard EOL. I'm lucky, of course: I only have one game-oriented machine with Windows, and Steam / Proton is going to suffice.
Those beholden to MSO and the One True Excel, which of course is not guaranteed to work well (or at all) under Wine / Proton, are less lucky.
Out of the loop: Why is Windows 11 discussion trending over the past few months? It was released 4 years ago, and the most notable changes from the previous edition are a tabbed file browser, and the taskbar icons are now in the middle.
As the other commenter said win10 went out of support and only recently ~2 months ago the company I work for migrated to win11, I think now all the people that do not want to use win11 are forced to use it and complain
You can still get security updated by enrolling in the Extended Support branch. Did it in a relative's computer and it seems it will get security updates for at least an extra year, with the advantage it won't get any feature updates too (a really nice bonus IMO).
Taskbar icons in the middle are a symbol of general direction Windows is going towards. It's the tipping point where we say enough is enough. We're tired of anti-consumer changes. It's different from Vista or 8 which failed despite MS believing in it. This time MS gives us shit and they know it and they don't care. Microsoft doesn't hold the entire PC OS market hostage like it was the case only ten years ago, and if your use case is development + video games + porn, then Linux is a viable option, which definitely wasn't the case ten years ago.
Not surprising given the amount of Webview2 and WinUI/WinRT that Windows 11 happens to contain.
Note that even though WinRT is largely written in C++, and the team brags about performance, due to the amount of COM/WinRT reference counting and the sandboxing model of application identity, it actually runs slower than .NET applications.
Quite ironic, given the Windows team sabotaged on Longhorn.
I recently had to pay the "Microsoft tax" to Lenovo. Which felt more like an unfair punishment rather than a tax since your taxes are meant to fund public services. I kept on thinking that this feels like it should be illegal. I don't use Windows for my work. My servers all run Linux, my clients servers all run Linux and I have no need for it so why am I being forced to pay?
I keep a Windows virtual machine for software that doesn't run on Linux but my use of that over the years has declined dramatically.
To me, the earlier versions of Windows 10 were somewhat OK when they're stripped down. But Windows 11 is bloated beyond belief. And shoving AI functionality in it is going to make things worse.
I was surprised the other day when I used a W11 machine that the new context menu took a perceptible second to appear and it still didn't have everything the old had so you still have to call the old one, very dismaying.
JavaScript has taken over UI. Why operating systems do not embrace it and make it a first class citizen? Aka explicitly design the os to run and render fast and efficiently js code
Maybe some Microsoft Devs can publish a book about all the secret regedit hacks they use to make it function for themselves. I think Dave Plummer or another Msft vet mentioned you can remove hibernate & get 25GB back on your hard drive.
I'm pretty sure hibernate has defaulted to off for quite a while and has to be turned on if desired (at least, the last several machines I've bought new that was the case.)
The UI switch is not particularly obvious, at Control Panel → Hardware and Sound → Power Options → System Settings
Well yeah it's basically Windows' version of a swap partition where they can dump the OS state when hibernating.
You can get even more of your hard drive back by limiting the size of Windows' page file.
I'm actually a big fan of hibernation on laptops and have mine set to suspend for 5 minutes then hibernate. My real life usage battery life has been noticeably longer with this setup.
With so many good OSes nowadays, why is anyone still on Windows? Seriously. Unless you need custom hardware or software worth thousands of dollars, I bet it's easier to switch to one of the 4+ other major platforms.
While not being a fan of Windows 11, I had the opposite experience for application launch times. They became shorter after the upgrade for some reason.
Windows is slower objectively if you use the same hardware.
Now you might say modern software needs modern hardware, but Windows as it is is stagnant in terms of functionality and features, so what justifies the requirement of newer hardware?
to be fair windows 11 is the most secure windows ever created, the amount of random checks it has is astonishing. Unfortunately it gets undermined by poor driver code from third-parties, much less of a problem with hyper-v based security, but still a huge problem.
Obviously all these security features cost performance and something that linux and macos can live without since they generally do not have closed source drivers that can't be fixed (except nvidia, but it seems to be changing as nvidia is giving up and starting to open up due to AI). Windows has to be proactive and that is one of the biggest performance hurdles it faces. It's actually incredible how comparatively safe windows is if you have all the security features enabled, there are obviously still one-offs due to having to maintain compatibility and what was effectively usermode code ported to kernelmode ruining it, thankfully that also seems to be changing since they're slowly rewriting it to be secure by design with Unstrusted<> guards making these issues significantly less common.
as for apple doesn't have third party code in the kernel at all so they can also fix it themselves.
side note, the restrictive linux license might seem like it is preventing adoption since for example the whole HDMI 2.1 spec is centered around proprietary code, but in reality they have this illusion that their 'proprietary' code can be protected and somehow linux undermines it when in reality people can reverse everything to sourcecode if they spend enough time on it - if anyone is curious you can just take one of the firmware dumps from any hdmi 2.1 capable TV dongle, extract the kernel module responsible handling the authentication for hdmi 2.1, extract the code, put it in your amdgpu opensource driver, now you have hdmi 2.1 on linux.
I call bullshit on these tests. The baseline doesn't make sense. Software defaults are never minimal (aka bloating) and are designed to scale with hardware. So as faster hardware reaches systems, the core OS still becomes faster but you will never see it when choosing defaults. You still receive baseline OS functioning in faster increments over time. If you tuned these OS installs for performance (no bloating, only core GUI and speed enhancing services) you would reach the opposite conclusion.
Ah, an opportunity to call upon Hacker News, tech support of last resort…
Someone please tell me if there’s a trick to making the Windows snipping tool faster. I press Win+Shift+S to activate the tool for capturing a region. It takes about 2 seconds to load. I draw the rectangle. Then it takes about 2 seconds to finish capturing.
That is 4 infuriating seconds for something that should be (and I’m sure used to be!) virtually instant.
Now that text is easily recognized in images, screenshots are an important interoperability tool for garbage apps like Teams.
I am not associated with this software, just a very happy user. You get a lifetime license for $20, it's constantly updated with new features, and is a joy to use.
Don't software products tend to get slower, not faster, with each release? I think Windows 7 vs Vista was the only time I remember things getting better.
IOS 26 is also terrible (on battery especially). New OS releases always have a ton of new services in them that bog them down.
They do, but that's really not necessary. In the linked video you can see Windows 8.1 is pretty well optimized compared to the other Windows versions.
A lot of this slowdown is just developers getting complacent and getting used to the new hardware capabilities. Windows has a lot of low hanging optimization fruit laying around. It's just Microsoft doesn't really care about that: it doesn't fit the business model at all.
Vista changed the Windows security upside down. It brought all the modern kernel features Windows embraced upon. But they went overboard with graphics that average consumer hardware was not ready for. Despite that I don't remember it came with any bloatware like Windows 10 and 11.
Vista was not bad, it's just that you tried running it on a 128MB computer from 2002. Vista was fantastic on so many levels but people were just not ready for it. People mocked Vista's permission prompts, something that every OS has now. That alone should tell you how misplaced your hate is.
c'mon folks, stop being naive - this is bullshit test :D
"Windows 11 is running on unsupported hardware"
I've been using W10 and W11 Pro versions daily and I don't feel any difference except task bar search menu performance (especially this on corpo laptop, on PC this is fine)
Everyone has forgotten how unstable and insecure Windows was back then when it was “fast”. It was also fast to blue screen, freeze, and spread malware. IMO it’s much better now. If you don’t like it, then there are good viable alternatives today especially since everything is web based.
The other day I got tired of using mRemoteNG for RDP it takes ages to start up.
So I went back to Microsoft's own RDP client - they deprecated it and now only support the new Windows App but you need to login with your corporate email and it does not even support RDP but Azure !!!!.
You need to go to the stone age and use the RDP client they shipped with Windows NT 4.0.
Say what you want about Balmer but Satya is now worse - he needs to go.
I liked the path windows was going in late 2010s. WSL, power toys, many great utils, great performance.
But it has since then stalled and got increasingly worse. Especially with this AI shoving everywhere, not even mentioning getting ads at some point in notifications and start menu.
I'm not particularly in love with MacOS either (but have no realistic alternative on my MacBooks).
I'm more and more inclined of switching my desktop (my main working machine) to Omarchy, two coworkers in my team use it and love it and seems the sweet spot for what I need as a dev without the annoyance of Windows or the god awful macos.
If you want an OS to simply do stuff Linux is now clearly superior.
However, I found Omarchy to be whatever the opposite of a sweet spot is. It brings all the complications of a tiling WM, so you still have to learn a complicated new way of using your system, but at the same time it is extremely opinionated so instead of ending with a tailored custom tiling WM that suits your needs at the end of the learning curve, you end up with a tiling WM that is suited for someone else’s needs.
On the flip side, the simplifications it does add, such as a supposedly easier way to add packages, does no such thing. It doesn’t simplify the process at all and in fact makes it harder to understand how to actually remove stuff.
I love Linux. I've been using it for about 25 years now. I try to be a realist, and historically, it has always been my opinion that it is a less polished experience, suitable mainly for power users. But my opinion now is that many flavors actually do offer a superior desktop user experience for most use cases.
To each their own.
I find Omarchy to simply "make sense" out of the box for me. And, I've never used a tiling WM before it (and feel crazy for not having done so)
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Even without the AI, it's replacing native apps with web based ones. Case in point: Notepad. It's slower than WordPad on Win 10... and crashes!
And Calc! It takes about 5 seconds to load. And search is so unreliable mixing web and local results.
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I do not know anything about this team, but I worked with a team before that migrated from a native app to an Electron-based version. It was worse in literally every way except one: the developers on that team preferred developing that way. Nothing else mattered.
The kind of developers who are willing to work with native GUI APIs (even though a framework) simply don't exist in enough quantity anymore.
What does notepad have to do with web based apps? case in what point?
New Notepad in 11, with tabs and autosave (and dark mode), is so much better and more practical to use over old one, it just stays open all the time and become my main notetaking pick. It may take a beat to open a big file (1+ mb) with line wrapping, but it's pretty much just as fast as anything (and may be even faster than some other editors). It's just very easy to reach for and quite snappy.
There are some apps on Windows with actual gripes, but Notepad, Paint, Snipping tool, they're quite solid and have become everyday tools that eliminated the need to reach for some other third party apps.
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I remember reading that even the Start menu is now a React app.
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The reason for this is that it's hard to hire native UI developers, but easy to hire web devs.
Something like 90% of all new devs today learn only cloud-native backend dev or web frontend dev. The only exceptions tends to be mobile and game developers. Collectively cloud+web, mobile, and games account for like 98% of all new devs it seems. Nobody learns anything else.
The web is going to become the desktop UI in the future for this reason alone. It's going to be slower and much more bloated than almost any other alternative, but it's got the critical mass of adoption behind it and that's what determines core technologies in the industry. Technical merit is a distant second or third.
This is frustrating but it's not surprising to one who has studied biology and evolution. In evolution this is called "path dependence," and it's why we have weird things like a man's testicles hanging in a bag below his body. A previous evolutionary path optimized the sperm production process to run at a lower temperature than the rest of the body, so then evolution's hack for this is to put them in a bag outside the body. Ticket closed with "resolved." The pathways taken through a complex solution space determine the outcome and the outcome is often bizarre and "hacky" for this reason. The key is that it's very hard to back-track. Once a path has been taken, it's very hard to un-take it.
Large industries and markets are essentially "biological," not rationally designed, so you get the same kinds of phenomena.
It could be much worse. If Linux+HTML+JS had not taken over, we might have the Microsoft Enterprise Web(tm) where Visual Basic (not VB.NET, OG Visual Basic) is the main language and each service or site would require an NT license for every node and an IIS license for every web hostname. UIs might be written in ActiveX or desktop ones in Microsoft C/C++ with OLE and similar horrors. It might be just as slow and infinitely uglier and more expensive and less open. Apple would be dead and open source would much more marginalized than it is today. The net would basically be a total MS monopoly. If you didn't live through the 90s: this nearly happened.
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But Notepad is not web based? It's still a native app but now uses UWP instead.
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This. It was infuriating to find Notepad got updated to a bloated app with rich text and Copilot. It's so different, it just should have been another program. The whole reason I use Notepad is because it's a simple, dumb, fast, predictable program. If I wanted the rich text, I would use any of the numerous other options!
And for the kicker, the update made it forget my font settings.
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> I'm more and more inclined of switching my desktop (my main working machine) to Omarchy
Never heard of it and the website and GitHub repo sure aren't doing a great job of describing it's benefits.
"Beautiful, Modern & Opinionated" are vague and really aren't adjectives I'd be looking for in an OS.
When anything is described as "opinionated" I just read it as "wilfully inflexible".
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I would instead recommend going for Fedora KDE Edition which will give you state of the art Linux desktop experience.
I've been daily driving it for months now and really like it. It's a nice introduction to tiling window managers, has a well thought out key mapping and generally looks reasonably nice while getting out of my way as an embedded dev.
There's always been Arch linux based distros that come with more things set up and better (or just more specific) defaults. To my understanding Omarchy is just one of those, like Manjaro or etc in the past?
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It sounds weird to say, but Steve Ballmer was probably the best CEO of Microsoft.
Or: Steve Ballmer oversaw the decline of Mircosoft's flagship product, but left before he could be blamed for it.
A lot of Windows' current problems can be traced back to the Ballmer era, including the framework schizophrenia, as Microsoft shifted between Win32, UWP, WPF, and god knows what else. This has lead to the current chaotic and disjointed UI experience, and served to confuse and drive away developers. Repeatedly sacrificing reliable and consistent UX while chasing shiny and new technologies is no way to run an OS.
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Yeah, it sounds weird because the person you’re replying to is using examples of things that came in under Nadella, not Ballmer.
Feb 2014: Satya Nadella becomes CEO.
July 2014: Microsoft lays off 14k people, a large portion of which are SDET (Software Development Engineer in Test)/QA/test people.
The idea was that regular developers themselves would be writing and owning tests rather than relying on separate testers.
I'm sure there were multiple instances of insane empire building and lots of unproductivity, but it's also hard to not think this was where the downfall began.
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Danluu has a great piece on why Ballmer was better than people gave him credit for: https://danluu.com/ballmer/
You may also want to consider Cosmic. PopOS has consistently been the distro that "just works" for me, though I don't use it much as I prefer to tinker more. That said, they're doing a lot of good work making Cosmic as a better replacement for the ton of gnome 3 hacks they had to do before.
Why would you go for a random Linux distribution backed by DHH (a Ruby developer) instead of a established upstream distribution such as Debian or Fedora?
I’m a user of omarchy and I like it a lot. I wanted a Linux experience that I didn’t have to set up myself, and this one was designed specifically for devs who are used to a macOS environment. It took about 6 minutes to set up and everything just works. I don’t really know that much about dhh or his politics, like some sibling comment mentioned. I just think it matches my sweet spot of ease to set up and provided good UX
As stated before, because my colleagues which whom I share the same projects and test cases made the jump from MacOS and are all liking it so far, I also like what I saw till now.
Because of hyprland. There aren't many alternatives with hyprland (or niri) preconfigured for you
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It's just Arch Linux with hyprland pre-configured and bunch of pre-installed software.
People have been flocking to it for reasons like
1. They don't want to configure hyprland themselves.
2. They want to say they are running an "elite" distro like Arch.
3. They're part of DHH's weird following that is a mix of insufferable smugness and right-wing politics.
Utilities to circunvent the stupid original design. Even Microsoft is forced to use this pattern to correct itself. But hey, you know what they say: "Selling the disease and the cure is the best bizness plan ever".
Try EndeavourOS
> I liked the path windows was going in late 2010s.
Surely there's a typo there, and you meant late 2000s, e.g. 2009?
Late 2010s Windows was W10 with constant system-breaking bugs, mobile-first interface, more and more data mining and adware my MS, etc.
macOS is in the worst state I’ve ever experienced since I started using it, but I’d go back to a shitty performing x86 laptop with Linux before living on windows again. Just using it on my gaming pc makes my skin crawl
The fact that, on expensive hardware, I can hit windows+r and start typing before the run box renders/loads is staggering, it beggars belief.
Im generally a microsoft shill, but theyre really on the down hill slope. windows 11 is truly a masterpiece of changes no one asked for or wants, Teams is the least reliable piece of business software I've ever seen. New outlook does not have feature parity with old outlook and has the same bargain bin apple ux stylings as w11.
Maybe ive finally crested the age gap and im officially a dinosaur, but God damn every microsoft product is worse than it used to be.
At work employees generally use okay machines, not great but still at least 3GHz i5 processor with 16GB of ram etc. and they only run an ERP client and a browser with a few tabs.
Sometimes, I click on the windows button and it legit takes 3-4 seconds for windows to render the start menu that only has the program list, nothing else, just the list of programs.
These machines with their 6/8 or so cores can do tasks at the scale of nanoseconds and it takes, 3 whole seconds to render a single window with a list of program names, that’s simply stupid.
Anyone who has ever touched a windows xp machine knows that the start menu can complete drawing before my brain can register that my fingers in fact touched the keys, which takes roughly 20ms or so if I remember correctly. What the hell is this system doing?
I dug out my dad's Windows 98 era PC that he was running Windows 2000 on that we hadn't turned on since 2011, and it felt lightning-fast compared to W10 and W11. Double-click to open apps and they appear, ready to type in. It felt like I was on some kind of futuristic prototype.
Some of that is all the security apparatus in W10/11 which 2000 doesn't have. So many CVEs since 2000.
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I had similar impressions with multiple setup:
in both cases there was something very odd, the crude os design (no parallel systemd etc), gui toolkit and desktop environment (no compositor, glitchy) wasn't an issue and the low amount of lag felt very good. it's the same feeling when driving 90s cars, the drive feels directly connected to the whole, it's cruder but it feels better
and saying this as a fan of recent linux kernel and systemd parallelism with the crazy cpu over ssd speed.. i was utterly surprised
The ads in the start menu and the notifications were the last straw for me.
I have yet to this day and Windows 10 or 11 ever to see an advertisement like people talk about.
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As a dinosaur, it might finally be time for the Linux desktop
Ironically MSFT is surviving off of dinosaurs. Legacy companies pumping it with Office 365 suite and Copilot subscriptions.
They’re toast without them.
"What Andy giveth, Bill taketh away" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_and_Bill%27s_law
On a more serious note, I really only use Windows for games & I'm still always frustrated with how many updates (& restarts during updates) Windows needs. My fans are always constantly spinning on Windows too (laptop or desktop) whereas my Mac & Linux machines are generally silent outside of heavy load.
This is common for any self-updating software that you use infrequently.
A friend of mine complained that he hated how Firefox "always" wants to restart with an update. I couldn't understand what he was on about. Turned out I use Firefox daily and he uses it like once every 2 months to test something and yeah, Firefox has an update out every 2 months or so, so that fits.
It's the same with Windows (and, I assume, macOS). Use Windows more and the updater will disappear out of sight.
I update Linux maybe once a year. Sure, there are security vulnerabilities. But I'm behind a firewall. And meanwhile, I don't have to spend any time dealing with update issues.
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My Mac doesn’t randomly reboot, doesn’t force updates on shutdown, doesn’t have weekly updates that require updates. IMO Apple handles updates much better than Windows.
Windows still reboots instead of shut down when you do update and shut down.
> My fans are always constantly spinning on Windows too (laptop or desktop) whereas my Mac & Linux machines are generally silent outside of heavy load.
defender seemingly needs to check every 10ms that you still don't have a virus
I'm always amused by these occasional "you still don't have any viruses" popup notifications from Defender. Well, good to know, thank you very much, I guess.
Cannot even reliably permanently disable real time scanning...
I'm now even using wine & proton for it. Thanks to Valve only very few games don't work.
And it's not that i don't like windows, it is just too damn slow for me.
And no. I do not want to upgrade my gear every 2 years or so
I feel like I've been monkeys-pawed with the downfall of Windows for gaming. I.e. rather than being at the point where everything just works best/easiest in my Bazzite install it's a game of DRM, modding tool support, feature support, and random "this game runs better on Windows, this game runs better on Bazzite" discovery. Also Windows/Steam OS clone/"normal Linux" setups all have their own very awkward corners around the non-gaming portions. I've not found one that does not require substantial tweaking to get a usable all around experience unless you buy a device to use as more a dedicated gaming console (Xbox/Steam Deck type device).
I miss the ~mid Windows 7 era. Not that everything ran perfectly without issues on Windows 7 at the time, particularly old games, but at least there was an option good enough to assume to always go with first instead of "see if the games you play work best here".
All the games that "don't work" are the games that PEOPLE ACTUALLY PLAY!
It's always hardcore multiplayer games with the actual crowd. Using linux for gaming is a great way to continue down the path to becoming a recluse.
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And yet the battery in your Linux laptop dies 2x faster...
If I could still be running Windows 2000, I would --- it simply flew on a Fujitsu Stylistic ST2300, and I was able to hack the Compaq TC1000 Finepoint digitizer driver for Windows NT to run on it --- w/ a CF--IDE adapter, no spinning rust to worry about, and I even had room for a full install of Encarta, my only worry until it died was buying AAAA batteries for the stylus, and the only thing I missed was pressure sensitivity (but my work computer had a Wacom Intuos, so the delicate stuff was done on that).
That said, my favourite Windows computer ever was the Fujitsu Stylistic ST4110 w/ transflective display and Wacom EMR digitizer --- put an SSD in it, carried a couple of spare batteries, added a USB GPS, and kept a pair of docking stations w/ power supplies at my desks at work and the office and a third power supply in my laptop bag and it just worked --- despair of really replacing it, the Samsung Galaxy Book 12 was close, but then Fall Creators Update came out and crippled styluses down to an 11th touch input so that they would scroll rather than select text... getting by w/ a Book 3 Pro 360, but Windows 11 has me looking at a Raspberry Pi paired w/ a Wacom One or Movink display....
It's not shocking they added even more bloatware to every microsoft program so even with the same OS kernel it would probably take longer. At this point it also got out of hand for Microsoft themselves if you have heard how they are going to speed up the explorer. Not by making it faster but by preloading it on startup so it feels snappier, there are 20 years of technical debt in I think you cannot save this anymore (but I am to inexperienced to know that for sure)
The last time this subject came up someone in the thread jumped up to explain to me how Windows 11 has all these great new features that make it worth being many times less performant.
Every feature they listed was some anti-consumer thing that only a corporate customer would ever care about or want. Every single one.
What I learned is that Windows 11 is great for the customer, I'm just not the customer. I'm just the dummy who paid for it.
Hm, I asked Copilot and it told me everything you said was a nasty, nasty lie.
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- TPM 2.0 requirement
- Secure Boot enforcement
- Microsoft account requirement
- BitLocker device encryption tied to MS account
- Hardware attestation
- Telemetry/Data Collection
- Extensive diagnostic data collection
- Advertising ID tracking
- Activity history syncing
- Bing integration everywhere
- Edge as persistent default (difficult to change) - OneDrive integration/nagging
- Microsoft 365 upselling
- Copilot integration
- Widgets panel with MSN content
- Start menu web search forcing Bing
- Centered taskbar (not moveable)
- Simplified right-click menu (hiding options)
- Removed taskbar features (no drag-to-taskbar, no ungrouping)
- Start menu ads/recommendations Update Control
- Forced automatic updates
- Limited update deferral for Home users
- Feature updates bundled with security updates
- Device Management (Enterprise)
- Intune/MDM integration
- Windows Autopilot
- Azure AD requirements
- Remote wipe capabilities
- Monetization
- Ads in Start menu
- Ads in File Explorer
- Suggested apps
- Pre-installed third-party apps (Candy Crush, etc.)
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One random little thing to add on to the list of shitty things about Windows 11: the new default image-viewing program (Photos), is incapable of rendering multi-page TIFF files. No error message or anything, just displays the first page and acts like everything’s fine. The OLD image viewing program (Windows Photo Viewer), displays them no problem though…
These kinds of issues can be incredibly disruptive and distressing for non tech-savy users. You update your OS and suddenly it looks like a lot of your data are corrupted, with no explanation of how to get it back.
Forcing saving to OneDrive causes this issue a lot too. I was stunned to find that saving changes to an existing document will often try to save a new file in OneDrive instead. So if you don't notice this and go back to your original file, it will look like your changes weren't saved.
> there are 20 years of technical debt
The only part of windows that really matters in the long run is win32 which has been extremely stable. You could go back to XP and not lose that many features. The fact that modern windows runs like ass has very little to do with backwards compatibility.
Windows 2000 or Windows XP - with security updates and modern hardware support - is exactly what I want.
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I don't necessarily disagree, but I do think there's an important distinction between technical debt and backwards compatibility. Yes The former can be caused by the latter, but I've worked in enough projects that didn't have to worry about backwards compatibility but were still riddled with technical debt to know that backwards compatibility is only one source of many.
>Not by making it faster but by preloading it on startup so it feels snappier,
The oldest, worst, and most over-used trick in the (windows) book.
Sluggishness is the price we pay for freedom*.
*Corporate surveillance.
I switched to Linux after Windows started showing me propaganda on the screen where you enter your password. To me, that's diabolical and forced me to make the switch. Sorry, I don't wish to "Learn more about Black-Owned Businesses" just to access my computer.
We updated my MIL's computer to Windows 11 and now it's giving her ads about Xbox something or other on the login screen. She is in her 80s and has no idea what an Xbox even is.
This is awful in many ways. Among other things what really gets my goat is that Xbox something or other ads can have cartoony sexuality, violence, and so on. Those things don’t bother me, but there are plenty of elderly, conservative, religious, etc. people who would be taken aback by it.
There’s plenty of that content in our media, but those people don’t consume that media. A computer is a critical general purpose tool. Everyone needs it. This is like putting scantily clad elves on every refrigerator.
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Ads on the login screen, ads on my fucking start menu. No intuitive way to access all programs. . . Sorry. Apps from the start menu. Suggested apps instead of that. Hold screens to set a backup using one drive and to link my phone and set telemetry and whatever other bullshit once a week.
It's not great. Linux mint is what I install for older relatives now. It's close enough to windows feeling that they never even question it.
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What propaganda? I only get a new background with some info related to it (like what's the place of the picture).
Regrettably, I have to use a windows machine for work. The other day I got one where the "fact" was an offer to help me pic out the right laptop or tablet to get the most out of copilot.
To stoke my rage into an incandescent fury, if you go to settings -> Lock Screen, there's no obvious way to disable it at first. You have to change the background image from "Microsoft Spotlight", the one where the image changes to a static background image, and THEN you get a checkbox. The checkbox you uncheck is "get tips, fun facts, and more". I guess trying to sell me shit is under "more".
It sucks because i agree that having the picture change is a nice feature. Microsoft has decided to hold that nice feature hostage to ads.
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I just reinstalled Windows, so I've had the joy of a bunch of stupid MS stuff (why did you make my /~ homedir the first five letters of my email? WHY?) but I have to admit, this, I have not encountered.
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A few days ago I got the nature scapes but with a, "This would make an awesome prompt huh?" as the tagline and a link to more AI shoe-horned in.
I, too, am irrationally furious at microsoft for forcing me to look at nature scapes and offering a link to learn more if I wanted.
Those landscape photos are a crappy hypnotic effort meant to try and dissociate Microsoft from the feeling most people have when they have to login on a Monday Morning.
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What got me to angrily turn it off was a gigantic closeup of a moose face. It’s kind of funny now that I think about it but I have two 32” monitors and I really did not need 64” of moose lips and wet nostrils.
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Reading HN threads about Windows makes me wonder some times if I’m using a completely different version of Windows on my workstation. I guess I also haven’t seen any “propaganda” among my rotating selection of landscape scenery.
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Slowest is unfortunately not even the worst problem of Win11.
I just want an OS that helps me control my computers and be productive, not one that "mines" me to sell me to be exploited.
While I have been using various Linux flavors for my servers, my desktop has been Windows for decades. Microsoft's charade with Win11 has me committed to moving to desktop Linux in 2026. There will be pain, but they crossed a line.
And every update makes it more difficult to disable web search on the start menu and using local only accounts.
May not have been a fair test. Windows is running the kernel in a kinda VM which older computers have not been optimized for -- newer generations of CPU can smooth out the overhead.
For a fair test against Windows 10 and below, you'll have at least to do this: "Temporarily turn off your Memory Integrity and VMP" -- https://support.microsoft.com/en-US
Also, it's important to have all bits and pieces of Hyper-V/Windows Virtual Platform off (which the Menory Integrity relies on), thus cutting off WSL functionality.
We don't need flawed tests to tell us Windows 11 sucks -- yesterday my explorer bar didn't respond to clicks nor Windows key. In the past killing explorer.exe and restarting it, or logging off and back on, worked. Yesterday I had to reboot the machine to fix it.
You’re advocating for a flawed test.
Why is it, when ever someone points out that Microsoft shits the bed on something someone will come out with ludicrous ideas about changing the default environment.
The default environment is what you get, all this handwringing about whats potentially possible misses the point entirely; for decades we have, as a community, scoffed at linux for requiring you to understand deeply how your OS works in order for it to function. Now we’re in the situation where the out-of-the-box experience for gaming requires less esoteric knowledge on Linux than Windows, yet people defend Windows still.
Do you seriously think the exec running emails even knows what Hyper-V is? Do you think any IT department is going to disable memory integrity?
Would any Dev disable WSL? Do the vast majority of gamers want to do this? Should they have to?
You’re now arguing that overhead is ok because its mitigated by newer hardware, I don’t believe that to be true as I run W11 on A Threadripper 3970x and an i9-14900k and the fuckers feel leagues slower than my M1 Macbook, its a joke! Like 10x the power/thermal envelope- and sure, some of that is down to the M1 being great, but there’s no benchmark putting it above those CPUs.
Stop pretending that this is ok, and stop trying to spread uncertainty about a valid test.
I’d prefer newer hardware too, but this is the compromise if we want older OS’s to be included.
Regarding the video benchmark on the page: what would be fair is testing against the hardware that was available when the operating system was released. Windows 11 is absolutely not meant to run against hard drives, and current notebook and desktop offerings for home and enterprise users reflect that: you can get a 256gb SSD for a pretty decent price nowadays, to the point there's absolutely no reason to put in an HDD. When Windows Vista was released, your computer would absolutely have an HDD, so that would be a fair comparison.
That said, I was restoring a notebook owned by my aunt recently and I decided to run Ubuntu on it so I could mess with gparted a little bit. I'm already a full-time Linux user (have been for about five years now, I guess), but I was still surprised to see that one of the most bloated Linux distributions ran lightning fast on my aunt's Pentium Gold + 4gb RAM + HDD while Windows took over four minutes to boot.
It's absolutely time to abandon Windows if you're still dependent on it. There are alternatives. Heck, I'm not a fan of Apple either but at this point I'd recommend a MacBook for anyone wanting to get away from Windows and not comfortable with Linux or a Chromebook.
MacOS is a buggy mess, and it's also pretty slow lately. If you need full Office for work, your best bet is probably still Windows.
As a software engineer who has developed on Macs (and Linux) for most of my career and has recently started a job that requires me to use Windows again, I can tell you from experience that Office on the Mac is far, far more stable, easy to use, and considerably faster than on Win11. Microsoft’s macOS team are really good at their jobs.
But then I don’t find macOS to be slow or a buggy mess, so mileage may vary.
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One would think multi-monitor support is the hardest thing in the universe to solve. My Linux desktop has very bad multi-monitor support, but hey, it's Linux. My $2K Macbook Pro has, somehow, even worse multi-monitor support, so bad that sometimes the productivity of an external display feels not worth the hassle of plugging it in and wrestling with it.
Besides that no problems with MacOS, it feels snappy to me and Office apps work mostly fine (except for all the missing features Microsoft refuses to add to Outlook).
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Windows 11 makes me hate everyday computing. From the adverts in the start menu, to the sluggish performance on a computer orders of magnitude more powerful than any XP machine I used. It's just not fun anymore.
More evidence that Windows 11 is a hate crime.
Been using KDE on a secondary machine for 15 years now. However they were always lacking in hardware compared to my main desktop.
I recently installed CachyOS on a USB NVMe drive, so I can dual boot without the dual boot pain. And wow, that thing flies.
I've been a Windows user since 3.0, but Windows 11 is probably getting replaced soon. I've stopped competitive gaming so anti-cheats ain't an issue, and Linux gaming is good enough.
There are some things I'll miss, but the bloat and lack of care from MS I'll be glad to leave behind.
Just an anecdote from yesterday. I got an old Pentium 4 1,5Ghz from a friend, put a Terratec EWX 24/96 soundcard in, installed WinXP, turned automatic updates off and installed a software synth, Native Instruments FM7, connected a midi keyboard via the gameport. Literally 2ms latency and no midi jitter! With an 25 years old setup! And it just works, without any distractions. Really, I almost cried as I saw that. I feel somehow violated by today's Windows11/10/8.
I had a similar experience when helping a friend's parent with an absolutely ancient laptop from like 2007, which which had a crappy Celeron, 256 MB of RAM, and Widnoes Vista.
The damn thing was shockingly performant. We have been played for absolute fools.
I don't believe that. Can Vista even run with just 256MB of RAM?
Windows 11 is fast enough if you... disable a million things on it that >99% of users wouldn't know when/how to, or wouldn't want to. Definitely depressing.
Can you expand on this? For example details on any tools to do this. I've been trying to disable features I know use resources and aren't needed but the native UIs to do it are hella confusing and feel purposely useless.
Google "windows 11 debloat reddit". There are several tools:
- https://github.com/Raphire/Win11Debloat (recommended elsewhere in this thread)
- https://christitus.com/windows-tool/ (I used this one a couple weeks ago, seems to work well)
But seriously though, learn to fish. The answers aren't hard to find if you look, know what to search for, and are at least somewhat discriminating in your investigation.
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Also friendlies for the record the person I was responding to mentioned millions of settings, which while hyperbolic, you and I know means just hard to find so please share all fishing tips and other notes.
For the record I am also with you that using WinDebloat is not the best way for the simplest reason that it all seems arbitrary.
> disable a million things on it
I simply stayed on Windows 10 and I don’t seem to miss any feature thus far lol
What's the point when they will be all silently re-enabled by the update application?
I mean, the point is to make it usable. You can set up scheduled tasks where needed. I haven't had to re-disable stuff after that, but I've jumped through a lot more initial hoops than most people are willing to.
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From the article: "The benchmarks were run on a Lenovo ThinkPad X220 — a model not officially compatible with Windows 11 — which could have affected some results."
Curious how MacOSX stacks up over the past 25 years. Tahoe feels like a massive regression on all fronts, from GUI to I/O.
MacOS seems to be going the way of Windows, with unnecessary and distracting notifications for things users don't care about. Then on top of that, the whole liquid glass redesign that hurts usability and information density.
Definitely moving in the direction of "what is good for a particular PM" and not "what is good for the user." I would have switched to linux years ago if it were not for the great hardware and I like having access to iMessages from the desktop.
Yeah and I think Apple know from their telemetry that too many users (including me) are sticking with macOS 15 Sequoia, which they need to address with macOS 27 this year (but given how they are, it'll just be Apple Intelligence)
I see no reason to migrate to Win11 when Win10 hits hard EOL. I'm lucky, of course: I only have one game-oriented machine with Windows, and Steam / Proton is going to suffice.
Those beholden to MSO and the One True Excel, which of course is not guaranteed to work well (or at all) under Wine / Proton, are less lucky.
Out of the loop: Why is Windows 11 discussion trending over the past few months? It was released 4 years ago, and the most notable changes from the previous edition are a tabbed file browser, and the taskbar icons are now in the middle.
Probably because people are being forced out of their Windows 10 systems, and onto an unwanted Windows 11.
Also, you seem to skip other notable changes like enforced spam and enforced Copilot and enforced online registration.
I see a Copilot icon in the sys try I didn't put there and is unwelcome, but haven't clicked it. Worrying.
As the other commenter said win10 went out of support and only recently ~2 months ago the company I work for migrated to win11, I think now all the people that do not want to use win11 are forced to use it and complain
Ah thank you! That explains it.
Windows 10 just stopped getting security updates some weeks ago. So people that had been sticking with 10 are now considering 11.
You can still get security updated by enrolling in the Extended Support branch. Did it in a relative's computer and it seems it will get security updates for at least an extra year, with the advantage it won't get any feature updates too (a really nice bonus IMO).
Because Windows 10 is now end-of-life. Previously, everyone who cared simply stayed on Windows 10.
I assumed it was because windows 10 went out of support a few months ago
Windows 11 doesn't support Intel CPUs older than 8th gens. Linux is no longer an alternative, it's a lifeline for many old yet very capable machines.
What is Microsoft trying to do by ending Windows 10 support?
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Multiple reasons : IA pushback, better gaming experience, Linux becoming more and more mainstream with distro like Bazzite and CachyOS.
Taskbar icons in the middle are a symbol of general direction Windows is going towards. It's the tipping point where we say enough is enough. We're tired of anti-consumer changes. It's different from Vista or 8 which failed despite MS believing in it. This time MS gives us shit and they know it and they don't care. Microsoft doesn't hold the entire PC OS market hostage like it was the case only ten years ago, and if your use case is development + video games + porn, then Linux is a viable option, which definitely wasn't the case ten years ago.
Not surprising given the amount of Webview2 and WinUI/WinRT that Windows 11 happens to contain.
Note that even though WinRT is largely written in C++, and the team brags about performance, due to the amount of COM/WinRT reference counting and the sandboxing model of application identity, it actually runs slower than .NET applications.
Quite ironic, given the Windows team sabotaged on Longhorn.
I recently had to pay the "Microsoft tax" to Lenovo. Which felt more like an unfair punishment rather than a tax since your taxes are meant to fund public services. I kept on thinking that this feels like it should be illegal. I don't use Windows for my work. My servers all run Linux, my clients servers all run Linux and I have no need for it so why am I being forced to pay?
I keep a Windows virtual machine for software that doesn't run on Linux but my use of that over the years has declined dramatically.
To me, the earlier versions of Windows 10 were somewhat OK when they're stripped down. But Windows 11 is bloated beyond belief. And shoving AI functionality in it is going to make things worse.
Running W11 on unsupported hardware aside.
I was surprised the other day when I used a W11 machine that the new context menu took a perceptible second to appear and it still didn't have everything the old had so you still have to call the old one, very dismaying.
JavaScript has taken over UI. Why operating systems do not embrace it and make it a first class citizen? Aka explicitly design the os to run and render fast and efficiently js code
This isn't true in the slightest.
Maybe some Microsoft Devs can publish a book about all the secret regedit hacks they use to make it function for themselves. I think Dave Plummer or another Msft vet mentioned you can remove hibernate & get 25GB back on your hard drive.
Isn't disabling hibernate "powercfg /hibernate off"? I'm not aware of a simple and obvious UI switch to do the same
I'm pretty sure hibernate has defaulted to off for quite a while and has to be turned on if desired (at least, the last several machines I've bought new that was the case.)
The UI switch is not particularly obvious, at Control Panel → Hardware and Sound → Power Options → System Settings
Well yeah it's basically Windows' version of a swap partition where they can dump the OS state when hibernating.
You can get even more of your hard drive back by limiting the size of Windows' page file.
I'm actually a big fan of hibernation on laptops and have mine set to suspend for 5 minutes then hibernate. My real life usage battery life has been noticeably longer with this setup.
With so many good OSes nowadays, why is anyone still on Windows? Seriously. Unless you need custom hardware or software worth thousands of dollars, I bet it's easier to switch to one of the 4+ other major platforms.
Counting Windows, macOS, and Linux, I reach up to 3. Which are the other two major desktop-ready OSs you have in mind?
Switched to Ubuntu almost a year ago and I am much happier now.
While not being a fan of Windows 11, I had the opposite experience for application launch times. They became shorter after the upgrade for some reason.
The changes to rework windows explorer in Windows 11, have IMO mostly resulted in a net poorer UX, and a net loss of performance.
Has anyone considered that maybe Microsoft is trying to help the Linux desktop adoption grow at a faster rate?
I don't see the same things as the commenters or the article.
I love Windows 11, and have zero complaints.
Win+R is instant.
Notepad is the best version so far, I use it as a todo list and it saves and loads in the same place on my third screen every reboot - fantastic.
I have no use for the AI being shoehorned into everything, but I use it every day via chatgpt in the browser, and genie and cp in vsc.
Windows is slower objectively if you use the same hardware.
Now you might say modern software needs modern hardware, but Windows as it is is stagnant in terms of functionality and features, so what justifies the requirement of newer hardware?
to be fair windows 11 is the most secure windows ever created, the amount of random checks it has is astonishing. Unfortunately it gets undermined by poor driver code from third-parties, much less of a problem with hyper-v based security, but still a huge problem.
Obviously all these security features cost performance and something that linux and macos can live without since they generally do not have closed source drivers that can't be fixed (except nvidia, but it seems to be changing as nvidia is giving up and starting to open up due to AI). Windows has to be proactive and that is one of the biggest performance hurdles it faces. It's actually incredible how comparatively safe windows is if you have all the security features enabled, there are obviously still one-offs due to having to maintain compatibility and what was effectively usermode code ported to kernelmode ruining it, thankfully that also seems to be changing since they're slowly rewriting it to be secure by design with Unstrusted<> guards making these issues significantly less common.
as for apple doesn't have third party code in the kernel at all so they can also fix it themselves.
side note, the restrictive linux license might seem like it is preventing adoption since for example the whole HDMI 2.1 spec is centered around proprietary code, but in reality they have this illusion that their 'proprietary' code can be protected and somehow linux undermines it when in reality people can reverse everything to sourcecode if they spend enough time on it - if anyone is curious you can just take one of the firmware dumps from any hdmi 2.1 capable TV dongle, extract the kernel module responsible handling the authentication for hdmi 2.1, extract the code, put it in your amdgpu opensource driver, now you have hdmi 2.1 on linux.
Random checks?
patchguard, hyperguard, CET, retpoline, shadowing checks, you name it, look at any memory function and see if (rdtsc() % xxx) check_something.
For the random battery fires and explosions.
It is a lot slower than vista was back in the day, so yes, it is garbage.
Yes, but it will be the fastest version from now on.
I call bullshit on these tests. The baseline doesn't make sense. Software defaults are never minimal (aka bloating) and are designed to scale with hardware. So as faster hardware reaches systems, the core OS still becomes faster but you will never see it when choosing defaults. You still receive baseline OS functioning in faster increments over time. If you tuned these OS installs for performance (no bloating, only core GUI and speed enhancing services) you would reach the opposite conclusion.
With which version did they enable/implement the CPU mitigations (Spectre etc.)?
Windows 7 SP2; Windows 8; Windows 10 and W11.
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/update-to-disable-...
I was actually OK with Win 8, I just only used it in traditional desktop mode
I’m curious is the windows org considered a dead end at Microsoft making it hard to recruit top engineering talent?
The people working on the windows kernel must be gutted to see their hard work destroyed by sub-standard devs elsewhere in MS.
Windows will continue to get slower and slower because being fast is not a priority for them.
The only care about AI so that’s what we’re gonna get.
I once had to remote into a Windows XP machine somehow running on an older Intel i5 (first or 2nd gen). Still overkill for XP.
It was CRAZY fast, over Teamviewer it felt better and faster than my local machine... Sad times.
Windows XP is the only one that could consistently go faster than me. Explorer.exe used to be a wonder of productivity.
It is crazy bad on low powered hardware like my work laptop. It has an Intel Ultra 7 Processor 155U. Wow! An i7!
Not so fast, the u there means ultrabook. Crammed into a too small chassis, this thing chokes even when using Edge or Chrome to work on Jira.
Windows 11 JS Web Start menu does not help...
Windows 11 is "fine" on my powerful desktop gaming CPU, but that is just brute-forcing it.
Ah, an opportunity to call upon Hacker News, tech support of last resort…
Someone please tell me if there’s a trick to making the Windows snipping tool faster. I press Win+Shift+S to activate the tool for capturing a region. It takes about 2 seconds to load. I draw the rectangle. Then it takes about 2 seconds to finish capturing.
That is 4 infuriating seconds for something that should be (and I’m sure used to be!) virtually instant.
Now that text is easily recognized in images, screenshots are an important interoperability tool for garbage apps like Teams.
Ditch the snipping tool, and try my favorite screen capture tool, FastStone Capture: https://www.faststone.org/FSCaptureDetail.htm
I am not associated with this software, just a very happy user. You get a lifetime license for $20, it's constantly updated with new features, and is a joy to use.
Win+PrtScr takes an instant screenshot. Win+Shift+PrtScr selects an area first.
Try flameshot
And yet: https://www.phoronix.com/review/windows-beats-linux-arl-h
Complexity is to software what cancer is to living organisms.
Don't software products tend to get slower, not faster, with each release? I think Windows 7 vs Vista was the only time I remember things getting better.
IOS 26 is also terrible (on battery especially). New OS releases always have a ton of new services in them that bog them down.
They do, but that's really not necessary. In the linked video you can see Windows 8.1 is pretty well optimized compared to the other Windows versions.
A lot of this slowdown is just developers getting complacent and getting used to the new hardware capabilities. Windows has a lot of low hanging optimization fruit laying around. It's just Microsoft doesn't really care about that: it doesn't fit the business model at all.
Vista was bad enough.
Vista changed the Windows security upside down. It brought all the modern kernel features Windows embraced upon. But they went overboard with graphics that average consumer hardware was not ready for. Despite that I don't remember it came with any bloatware like Windows 10 and 11.
Vista was not bad, it's just that you tried running it on a 128MB computer from 2002. Vista was fantastic on so many levels but people were just not ready for it. People mocked Vista's permission prompts, something that every OS has now. That alone should tell you how misplaced your hate is.
Yeah, I needed >2gb of RAM at the time and ran Windows XP x64... 64-bit Vista was a significant improvement over the x64 version of XP.
I ran it on an 2005 computer in 2005. And I remember it was very slow. Win7 was good then, 3 years later.
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Mine was a bit later than 2002, but it was dreadful. I practically moved over straight away to the new iteration.
c'mon folks, stop being naive - this is bullshit test :D
"Windows 11 is running on unsupported hardware"
I've been using W10 and W11 Pro versions daily and I don't feel any difference except task bar search menu performance (especially this on corpo laptop, on PC this is fine)
Can we go back to Windows 7 yet?
If you have to use windows, 10 LTSC IOT version has support until 2032, and you can remove most of the bloat.
Iirc only businesses can buy that and you cannot upgrade hardware.
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When half the OS is dedicated to data and revenue collection along with protecting it, it should be unsurprising to see it slow.
Everyone has forgotten how unstable and insecure Windows was back then when it was “fast”. It was also fast to blue screen, freeze, and spread malware. IMO it’s much better now. If you don’t like it, then there are good viable alternatives today especially since everything is web based.
It spends so much CPU cycles collecting your data being an OS is just a side quest
The other day I got tired of using mRemoteNG for RDP it takes ages to start up.
So I went back to Microsoft's own RDP client - they deprecated it and now only support the new Windows App but you need to login with your corporate email and it does not even support RDP but Azure !!!!.
You need to go to the stone age and use the RDP client they shipped with Windows NT 4.0.
Say what you want about Balmer but Satya is now worse - he needs to go.
RDCMan works pretty well.
Try 1remote
we need to rewind to a timeline with 64-bit Windows 2000.
I would pray a premium for this.
ClearType is a winXP only feature, so let's say XP with the classic 2000 look and feel. hot damn.
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