Comment by fzeindl
18 hours 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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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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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?)
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.
> 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.
> 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