Comment by fzeindl
1 month ago
That is incidentally one of the many papercuts that are widely accepted in Windows, but never were a problem on a mac.
Don’t try to interact with a windows desktop while it is still booting up. Better to wait for everything to settle down, otherwise apps will constantly snatch away focus and your typing will go into random applications.
This is a constant irritation for me on Windows.
I work on a desktop Windows/Mac application that takes forever and a day to launch (CAD package), and pops up a million pop-ups during the process. I try to get minor admin tasks done while it is compiling/launching, but it steals focus every 10 seconds!
Still beats using XCode, though
Windows 11 also broke the active window from focusing when waking from sleep. Whenever I wake my PC, no window is active. I'll still have a fullscreen Chrome or whatever, but if I try to do Ctrl+T to open a tab nothing happens because nothing is in focus. I have to Alt+Tab once to bring it into focus.
Change the ForegroundLockTimeout registry setting to increase the timeout, or you can set it to the max integer value to never let the app steal the focus.
by default if you haven't typed anything for a little bit Windows allows an application to steal focus. If you change that value you can prevent windows from ever stealing focus or change how long they have to wait before they're allowed to.
I recently built a windows PC again for gaming. Haven't used one for years. Everything's fresh, loads of room on hard drives etc and still sometimes it'll just be weird and needs a reset. But it doesn't surprise me, it's sad we've come to tolerate that from the world's most popular OS.
As an aside, unless you are playing games that need NT kernel anticheat or are using a store other than steam, odds are the overall experience and performance is better on linux at this point.
Depends on your hardware. On my machine cyberpunk runs at 40fps on Linux but around 60fps on windows. Which is annoying as I’d rather it be better
And even Mac is doing well with games, most of my library runs natively. Baldurs Gate 3 runs better on the newer Apple chips than my somewhat aging gaming PC.
Yeah it's just the kernel anti-cheat now which is keeping me on windows. I'm fully ready to swap to linux but unfortunately I do like to play games that need it.
I have a Windows 11, macOS and Ubuntu Desktop VM that I alternate across throughout the week, I find I need to reset all three periodically to sort out random weirdness. It has more to do with which machine I've used most in the last few weeks not which OS is in-use in my experience.
I have the same setup, just Arch instead of ubuntu on my laptop and I very rarely have any issues (like maybe once per month) that require me to reboot.
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I agree.
Mac OS used to be rock solid. We had machines at work that had uptime measured in years. My own machine would go months.
It doesn’t anymore. Restarted twice today.
Familiarity might be the biggest differentiator. I switch between windows on my work computer and fedora gnome on my personal computer (and only interact with Debian server over ssh) so I am more at ease on Windows than I am with something like cachy OS and KDE.
I have Win10, mac and Ubuntu, in 3 different machines I'm using constantly. None of them is perfect, but windows is just infuriating, macos in the middle, and I can more or less live with ubuntu...
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> the world's most popular OS
Wikipedia claims that Android "has the largest installed base of any operating system in the world", if you're going to measure popularity that way.
(Of course it's hard to know how to define an OS. Is Android a kind of Linux? Are the various things called "Windows" or "MacOS" to be regarded as different versions of the same OS just because marketing people decided to use the same name? If not, how much similarity in code or design is required?)
Can you even consider Android a singular OS? I personally don't in the same way I don't consider Fedora and Ubuntu the same OS, and there's far more differences between something like HyperOS and AOSP/PixelUI as there is between Ubuntu and Fedora.
Android is an app platform.
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I assumed he was talking about desktop OS
Did the same just end of last year, NVME drive, gobs of RAM, and yet... sometimes the whole UI freezes solid for multiple seconds at a time when I close one out of my 30-40 Chrome tabs. I know it's not a cheap app to run, but this doesn't happen on MacOS.
Didn’t someone recently uncover that this was usually do to ram losing bits over time? ECC would fix it? Maybe I’m misremembering
> the world's most popular OS.
No.
Most common? Loathed? Used? Most tolerated?
It’s not liked, and ‘popular’ implies that.
I'd say that most PC users have vague knowledge that linux or MacOS exists.
Popular as in populous as in numerical
> That is incidentally one of the many papercuts that are widely accepted in Windows
A flashing cursor in an inactive text box. Possibly the most annoying of bugs.
Looking at you Windows, COMRAD and every login I ever do.
Check/change your ForegroundLockTimeout registry value.
by default if you haven't typed anything for a little bit Windows allows an application to steal focus. If you change that value you can prevent windows from ever stealing focus or change how long they have to wait before they're allowed to.
I've been beefing about this for decades; X Window didn't do this by default and you could adjust window manager behavior however you liked to prevent windows stealing focus in X, even for newly realized windows. Microsoft Windows decided for some reason the newest window gets focus, which is annoying as heck. I really don't want my attention involuntarily switched because my window manager things it knows better than I do where I should be looking.
You want to change the ForegroundLockTimeout registry key or set it via power shell.
by default if you haven't typed anything for a little bit Windows allows an application to steal focus. If you change that value you can prevent windows from ever stealing focus or change how long they have to wait before they're allowed to.
Windows has a ton of little settings you can tweak like this if it's not working quite how you like it.
I personally tweak it the other way to allow a window to pop up and still focus sooner .
If you set up via PowerShell you can do it more dynamically and if you're doing it via the API there's behavior in there too force a lock
> Don’t try to interact with a windows desktop while it is still booting up
I experience the same with macOS. For example Discord steals focus.
I remember using the NT5 betas (that became Win2k) and being so pleased that the focus (not) stealing was working much better. They "fixed" that for the final release
They have changed the default focus lock timeout behavior over the years, but you can still very easily tweak it to whatever you want
Macs have largely been the same. It is just a matter of buzy compute and letting all the accumulated tasks complete.
When you buy powerfull computers, this problem basically doesn't exist, both on Windows or macOS. Since Macs have historically been more expensive and premium, even the cheaper model was powerfull enough to finish the boot sequence fast enough that the desktop would feel snappy almost instantly. On the other hand, cheap PCs struggle to accomplish every task in a timely manner.
I am amazed about how stupid and ignorant is the average Mac fanboy. I have been a Mac user first and foremost, but you guys are just full of shit.